Henry Jenkins Media Studies

Henry Jenkins
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/ [2007-06-28 02:09:07]
Henry Jenkins
MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY A traditional account of democracy might focus on institutions, policies, laws, and systems. I am interested, however, in the ways that everyday citizens live in relation to the principles and ideals of a democratic society. Early in my career, I majored in political science, but found the field too abstracted from the everyday details of political culture. I have found that studying popular culture gives me an alternative way of addressing the issues that initially attracted me to political science. For me, the study of media and the study of politics are inextricably linked. My approach, however, contrasts sharply with writers like Noam Chomsky or Robert McChesney who understand popular culture primarily as a distraction from political participation. I see our relationships to popular culture as shaping our political identities in profound ways and am interested in the ways that people mobilize the contents of popular culture to understand the stakes in political struggles. Popular culture often expresses ideas or perspectives that are outside the consensus framed by the news media and are allowed to be expressed here precisely because popular culture is not taken seriously. Many subcultural communities draw on those resources to inspire their own acts of political resistance or to shape their own understanding of citizenship. This approach represents a movement away from a traditional notion of public sector politics and towards an engagement with the more domesticated conceptions of citizenship that emerged through feminism, queer activism, and other identity politics movements. I believe firmly that one reason why fewer and fewer people are voting is that the realm of governance and elections has remained too abstract and removed from the realm of their everyday lives. Increasingly, we are getting our knowledge about the world around us from nontraditional sources and we are expressing our political concerns outside the realm of government. THE INFORMED CITIZEN The informed citizen is a central ideal underlying any democratic society and that means the study of information technologies and practices are strongly linked to the study of political life. To be able to fully participate in the decision-making process, one has to have access to core information, one has to be able to process that information, and one has to have the right to share your insights with others.
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Henry Jenkins
"Media in Transition: An Introduction," which I co-authored with David Thorburn, deals with many issues surrounding media change, but an important aspect of the essay is an overview of a diverse range of theories and approaches to the issue of how digital media is impacting democracy, approaches which range from top-down approaches to governance, campaigning, and public opinion formation to bottom-up approaches to the notion of informed and participatory citizenship. The Boston Review recently asked me to respond to an essay written by political theorist Cass Sunstein, titled The Daily We, which makes the case that net communities may ultimately be less democratic than people have imagined because of the tendency of discussion groups to become isolating and to filter out opposing ideas. In my response, I offer my fullest discussion to date of how I think democratic principles operate in the new media environment, making the case that traditional intermediaries were far less neutral than Sunstein implies and that the new political culture will be shaped through the interactions between old and new media. I also include in the work an account of the circulation and political impact of my essay, "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington," to illustrate the ways that the act of crossposting may embody the kinds of temporary tactical alliances between groups and individuals which theorists of radical democracy discuss. Some of the ideas in this essay first took shape in "Contact[ing] the Past," which I initially wrote for an MIT student publication, but has enjoyed a much broader circulation on the web. This essay used the opening of the film, Contact, to explore the ways that the history of the participatory uses of early radio have been erased from our popular memory of broadcast history and how these developments paralleled the participatory spirit of the early internet. "Information Cosmos," one of my Technology Review columns, deals with information and citizenship from a different comparison -- seeking to understand what lessons the modern world might learn from the history of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and framed as advice to the librarians in Egypt who have just opened a new library on that old location. Although the column is more evocative than definitive, a key subtext is how structures of information reflect and in turn shape political cultures. Another Technology Review column, "Good News, Bad News" extends this exploration of the information structures in place within contemporary media culture to consider the future of the local newspaper in a world where consumers can choose between hundreds of news sources on-line. I argue that the United States is evolving away from a culture centered on strong identifications with geographically localized communities and towards a national information culture, more like those found in Europe. The article also considers the issue of diversification of information sources in an age of media concentration, making the case that a locally focused journalism may
Henry Jenkins
not, in the end, be any more diverse in the perspectives it offers than a rigorous national news culture. "Reading Popular History: The Atlanta Child Murders," which appeared in the Journal of Communication in 1987, explored the issue of the relationship of documentary and docudrama as vehicles for reporting on recent historical events -- in this case, on the Atlanta child murders. At the same time, I depict the struggle between local and national framings of the case, as I see how the Atlanta media responded to a disturbing network representation of the city's handling of this case. One of the writers who has most influenced my own thinking about media and democracy is the Australian cultural critic and journalism historian John Hartley. I have twice been asked to review Hartley's books and have used the occasion to delve deeper into his ideas about democratic citizenship (not to mention to pastiche his distinctive authorial voice.) My review of his book, "Popular Reality," for Continuum, enabled me to develop some of my own ideas about the different ways that news and entertainment television refract contemporary social and political developments and to speculate about the Monica Lewinsky scandel.
ACCESS The question of who has access to information technologies and who has the power to express their ideas through these channels remains one of the most worrisome aspects of the digital revolution. I was one of the co-organizers behind a joint MIT-USC conference on Race in Digital Space, which sought to shift this discussion away from the largely negative focus of the debates about the "digital divide" and focus attention on successful efforts within minority communities to exploit the political and community building potentials of these new technologies. Conference participants argued that the digital divide rhetoric can disempower minority activists by denying a history of innovative minority use of communications technologies. Rather than seeing cyberspace as "race blind" or exclusionary, the speakers focused on how minorities had pioneered alternative uses of the media more appropriate to the interests of their communities. The conference, held at MIT, was the first of two such events. The second one next year will enlarge the conversation about race to include a more global perspective. The conference organizers, Anna Everett, Tara McPherson, Erika Muhammed, and myself, are currently in the process of editing a book based on the conference and the related art exhibition for the University of California Press. One of my Technology Review columns, "Digital Land Grab" examines the erosion of fair use in the current moment of media in transition, suggesting the ways that the
Henry Jenkins
expansion of corporate control over media content through copyright and trademark law had the potential to disenfranchise the general public's efforts to mobilize popular myths for their own expressive and ideological purposes. THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY How are democratic principles embedded in the practices of everyday life? How do democratic cultures produce democratic citizens? Can we understand democracy more in cultural than institutional terms? How can we examine democracy as a "structure of feeling" or a way of interrelating to people around us? These questions have been a recurrent concern in my research, primarily refracted through a focus on the political issues impacting children and youth. Running through this research have been three major concerns: how do people use popular culture to explore and express cultural and political identities; how has a discourse of culture war and moral panic sought to silence critical voices in our society by regulating their access to popular culture and communication technologies; and how might we develop a progressive discourse about childhood and "family values" which sees the home as the birthplace of our political identities. POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL IDENTITY "Fandom, the New Identity Politics," originally posted to a fan discussion list and later reprinted in Harpers, represents perhaps my most explicit discussion of the links between popular culture and identity politics. I argue here that the category of cultural preference may be increasingly important to the articulation of political beliefs and commitments in contemporary society, discussing parallels between discomfort within fandom about overt displays of identification and debates within queer politics about whether gays, lesbians and bisexuals might gain "a seat at the table" if they tempered the more flamboyant aspects of their identities. COMBATING THE CULTURE WAR These same assumptions about the links between cultural identity and politics run through a succession of essays written in response to the Columbine massacres and their aftermath. Some weeks after the shootings, I was called to Washington to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee investigations of the potential links between popular culture and youth violence. In my testimony, I sought to explain why popular culture was increasingly the site of generational conflict and to point towards the limitations of media effects as a language for explaining that conflict. I wrote about my experiences in testifying before Congress in "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington," an essay widely circulated through the internet and posted on the web and ultimately reprinted in Harpers. I discuss the circulation of this e-mail message in my response to Cass Sunstein, seeing it as an example of the kind of short-term alliances and coalitions that can emerge in the digital environment.
Henry Jenkins
I delved deeper into the politics of moral panic across a series of essays designed to help educators better understand the place of popular culture in the lives of their students. "The Uses and Abuses of Popular Culture" and "Lessons From Littleton" grow directly from my Senate testimony itself. "The Kids Are Alright Online" reflected an attempt to examine the ways teens were building a culture for themselves in cyberspace which contrasted sharply with the problems they confronted at home and at school. A fuller version of that talk can be found on the website for our MIT conference, "We've Wired the Classroom -- Now What?" Many people -- parents, teachers, religious leaders -- urged me to develop some models and guidelines for how parents might talk with their children about popular culture. I chose a somewhat novel way to approach this task, developing a dialogic essay with my son, using episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explore the power relations between parents and teens. Jon Katz emerged as an important ally as I sought to break down the atmosphere of moral panic that surrounded popular culture in the post-Columbine period. Katz, a journalist for slashdot, offered up his column to high school students around the country to report on the backlash against student rights and subcultural identities they encountered in their schools. Katz came to MIT to participate in a public conversation with me about the politics of adolescence, which was transcribed for the Media in Transition website. Katz also asked me to write the introduction to a book based on his "Voices From the Hellmouth" columns. What I produced is perhaps my most openly autobiographical work to date, explaining how my own troubling high school experiences shaped my political identity and led me to play such an active role in responding to Columbine. Unfortunately, the book has never appeared, so this may be the only place you will see this particular essay. RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF CHILDHOOD In "The Innocent Child and Other Modern Myths," the introduction to my book, The Children's Culture Reader, I make the case that every major political battle in the 20th century was fought through the trope of childhood innocence. In any given debate, whichever side is the first to play the child card gains an enormous degree of moral authority. The essay explores radically different accounts of the politics of childhood as articulated at the 1996 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. For the most part, the right has been far more effective at exploiting the concept of "family values" than the left. In my essay, "No Matter How Small," which will appear in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture (which I co-edited with Tara Mcpherson and Jane Shattuc) I describe a very different formulation of the family which emerged at the end of World War II as parents sought to develop more democratic forms of childrearing which would prepare their young for future
Henry Jenkins
citizenship. In this essay, I explore how the writings of Doctor Seuss emerged from this post-war discourse about the micropolitics of family life as well as from his own public role as an editorial cartoonist for PM during the Popular Front period and as a writer for the Frank Capra "Why We Fight" Propaganda films. How did Seuss transform the categories of adult politics into simple fables intended to be read to children in the context of the "permissive" home? What lessons might contemporary progressives learn from examining this explicitly leftist discourse about parenting and family life? How might it have foreshadowed the countercultural politics of the 1960s as the children raised in these "democratic" homes reached maturity?
Henry Jenkins
GENRES OF ENTERTAINMENT Genre is one of the essential categories for the analysis of popular culture. A genre is a "kind" of work, suggesting an exercise in classification, but genres are also formulas that artists draw upon for the production of artworks and conventions that enable consumers to make sense of new works based on their knowledge of previous works in the same category. Genres should not be understood as rules or restrictions so much as enabling mechanisms that allow popular culture to be easily consumed and broadly appreciated. All works are born from a mixture of invention and convention. A work that is pure invention is unlikely to be fully understood or appreciated; a work that is pure convention is likely to be boring and uninteresting. Popular aesthetics centers around this effort then to reach the right balance between invention and convention. HYBRID GENRES My own work has explored a broad range of genres -- comedy, science fiction, melodrama, horror, exploitation films, erotica, children's films, and many others. In this work, I have tended to emphasize the complexity of genre categories, looking at works that straddle genre traditions and focusing on the ways that audiences negotiate between competing genre framings of the same work. For example, my essay, "The Amazing Push-Me/Pull-You Text: Cognitive Processing, Narrational Play and the Comic Film", first published in Wide Angle, drew on cognitive theory to explain how readers made use of genres in making sense of works of popular fiction and then suggested some of the complexities of applying this approach to answer the question of how we know that a film is intended to be taken as a comedy. "It's Not a Fairy Tale Any More!': Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast", which first appeared in the Journal of the University Film and Video Association and was later expanded for publication in my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, dealt with conflicting understanding of genre between the producers and viewers of the television series, Beauty and the Beast, using genre theory to better understand how fans fall in and out of harmony with commercial media texts. "Do You Enjoy Making The Rest of Us Feel Stupid: alt.tv.twinpeaks, The Trickster Author and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery (Ed.) Full of Secrets:
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Henry Jenkins
Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, deals with Twin Peaks as a work which sparked a high degree of audience speculation in part because it combined mystery and soap opera, both genres which, in their own way, encourage readers to search for secrets hidden within the narrative. In "Monsters Next Door," written as a dialogue with my son, we draw tools from the study of horror, melodrama, and youth media to explore what Buffy the Vampire Slayer might tell us about how teens negotiate tensions with their parents and other adult authorities as they seek to find their own place in the world. "Shall We Make It for New York or For Distribution?: Eddie Cantor, Whoopee and Regional Resistance to the Talkies", which was first published in Cinema Journal and later in What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, I look at the commercial basis for genre mixing, suggesting that Eddie Cantor's films were understood as musicals in New York and other major cities where Broadway entertainment was popular and as comedian comedies in the hinterlands where musicals were facing resistance from audience members and exhibitors. "Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination Through Hollywood Film", which will appear in a collection on Imaging the City, edited by Lawrence Vale for MIT Press, deals with an unusual genre -- films which attempt to tell the story of Manhattan. Here, I draw on the ideas of Kevin Lynch, a theorist of urban spaces, to examine the ways that these works struggle to give coherent shape and narrative structure to the complex experience of living in cities. The works discussed here cut across different genres, traditionally understood, but they may ultimately have more in common with each other than with other works in the same genre. "Never Trust a Snake!': WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama", which appeared in Adam Barker and Todd Boyd's Out of Bounds: Sports, Media and the Politics of Identity, draws on the theory and criticism of melodrama to better understand the particular appeal of wrestling as "sports entertainment." I argue that wrestling constitutes a form of serial fiction for men, one which can trace its performance and narrative practices back to roots in 19th century popular theater. I have written two case studies of the ways that artists work with and against the conventions of popular genres: one centering on the exploitation film director Stephanie Rothman who struggles to insert her feminist politics into films intended for a drive-in audience; the other centering on the ways that avant garde artist Matthew Barney appropriates and reworks material from popular entertainment -- especially horror. FILM COMEDY
Henry Jenkins
My dissertation dealt with the impact of vaudeville on the development of the comedian comedy genre during the early sound period and was later converted into the book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. Here, my focus was on the relationship between genre and performance, a topic I have returned to a number of times in subsequent writings. For example, "That Keaton Fellow Seems to Be the Whole Show': The Interrupted Performance in Buster Keaton's Films", which appeared in Andrew Horton's Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior, expanded my ideas about comedy and performance to examine the silent screen comedian, Buster Keaton, while "You Don't Say That in English!': The Scandal of Lupe Velez" explores the performance of racial identity within early sound comedy, seeing Velez as a "wild woman" caught somewhere between the scandalous erotic fantasies of the Tijuana bibles and the glamorous ideals of female stardom. Her Mexican identity made it impossible to fully assimilate her into Hollywood standards of beauty and was often used to naturalize the more transgressive aspects of her female comic performance. Classical Hollywood Comedy, co-edited with Kristine Karnack, provided me with an occasion to outline key aspects of the theory of film comedy, including genre history, gag and narrative, performance, and ideology, each of which was the topic of substantive introductory essays. In "Laughing Stock of the City: Male Dread, Performance Anxiety, and Unfaithfully Yours," I used concepts of comic performance to examine the representation of male dread of women in Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours. SCIENCE FICTION Written with John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences: Star Trek, Doctor Who and Their Followers explored why different audience groups were drawn towards science fiction as a genre and how this shaped their rather different experiences of Star Trek and Doctor Who. My interest in science fiction as a genre led me to organize a reading series at MIT that explored how science fiction authors have dealt with issues of media change. Transcripts of these conversations are posted on the Media in Transition website, along with an introductory essay which made the point that science fiction has been one major source of vernacular theory about the cultural and social impact of media change. GENRES OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE Several of my essays examine the emergence of and the long term consequences of gender specific genre categories in children's literature, categories which carry over into more contemporary media works targeting young consumers. In "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Playspace", which appeared in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, I
Henry Jenkins
suggested that the genre of the boy's adventure story and the boy's computer game drew on similar kinds of "blood and thunder" elements and represented attempts by adults to produce works consistent with boy's backyard play culture. I then draw on other works in the girls book tradition to understand some of the directions being taken within the girls game movement. "The All-American Handful: Dennis the Menace, Permissive Childrearing and the Bad Boy Tradition", which appeared in Lynn Spigel and Mike Curtin's The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, I discuss how Dennis the Menace emerged from the bad boy genre in children's literature and contrast bad boys with the sentimental representation of femininity in children's books of the same era. "Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie", which appeared in Marsha Kinder's Children's Media Culture, shows how one could examine animal stories to better understand the sentimental construction of childhood.
Media In Transition Archive
note: the media in transition project ended in the fall, 2000. this site is an archive of those activities. current forums and conferences continue under the auspices of the mit communications forum.
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media in transition book series
media in transition
book series from the mit press
David Thorburn, editor Associate editors: Edward Barrett Henry Jenkins
The Media in Transition series provides a forum for humanists and social scientists who wish to speak not only across academic disciplines but also to policy makers, media and corporate practitioners, and, most of all, their fellow citizens. click on images or titles for tables of content and sample chapters
Rethinking Media Change
Democracy and New Media
New Media 1740-1915
Neo Baroque Aesthetics
Comparative Media Studies

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Communications Forum
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Neo Baroque Aesthetics
media in transition
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NEO BAROQUE AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA

Angela Ndalianis, author
click on highlighted title to see chapter Introduction: The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque (complete) 1. Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque Narrative Formations
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3. Hypertexts, Mappings, and Colonized Spaces 4. Virtuosity, Special-Effects Spectacles, and Architectures of the Senses 5. Special-Effects Magic and the Spiritual Presence of the Technological
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2. Intertextuality, Labyrinths, and the (Neo-) Baroque
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The Baroque and Neo-Baroque
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Introduction to Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004) by Angela Ndalianis The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque Angela Ndalianis Postclassical, Modern Classicism, or Neo-Baroque? Will the Real Contemporary Cinema Please Stand Up? Once upon a time there was a film called Jurassic Park (Spielberg 1992), and on its release, audiences went to cinemas by the millions to be entertained by the magic that had to offer. On the one hand, the film's story enthralled its viewers. Recalling that other monster, King Kong, in Jurassic Park, genetically engineered dinosaurs were brought to life by an entrepreneur who was determined to place them within a theme park habitat so that they could become a source of pleasure and entertainment for millions. On the other hand, the computer effects that so convincingly granted filmic life to these dinosaurs that inhabited the narrative space astounded audiences. Then, once upon another time soon after, the dinosaurs migrated to another entertainment format and roamed the narrative spaces of the Sony PlayStation game The Lost World: Jurassic Park. To engage with this fictional world, audiences inserted a PlayStation disk into their consoles and a different, yet strangely similar, narrative scenario emerged. Dinosaurs were still genetically engineered; however, now the game player became integral to the way the narrative unraveled. Trapped on an island inhabited by various dinosaur species, the player now "performed" by interacting with this digital entertainment format, in the process progressively adopting the roles of dinosaurs and humans alike in a struggle that culminated in the final survival of one dominant species. And yes, once upon yet another time, there was a land called "Jurassic Park," but this was no film or computer space. This was a geographical locale with which the audience physically engaged, one of the many lands in Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida (figure I.1). Here the audience experienced an alternate version of the Jurassic Park story by traversing a land that was littered with animatronic dinosaurs. Literally entering the fictional space of Jurassic Park, the participant
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Figure I.1 The Jurassic Park Ride, Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida. By permission of Universal Studios. now experienced the narrative space in architecturally invasive ways by taking a ride through a technologically produced Jurassic theme park. Traveling along a river in a boat, participants floated through a series of lagoons (including the "Ultrasaurus Lagoon") whose banks were inhabited by animatronic versions of hadrosauruses, dilophosauruses, triceratops, and velocitators. Soon after, however, the wonder of seeing such deceptively real spectacles of extinct beings was destroyed, and the participants of the fiction found their wonder turn to terror when they were stalked by raptors and a mammoth Tyrannosaurus, barely escaping with their lives by plunging to their escape down an eightyfive-foot waterfall.1 Although each of these "tales" can be experienced and interpreted independent of the others, much can be lost in doing so, for these narratives belong to multiple networks of parallel stories that are all intimately interwoven. Each "tale" remains a fragment of a complex and expanding whole. In the last two decades, entertainment media have undergone dramatic transformations. The movement that describes these changes is one concerned with the traversal of boundaries. In the film Jurassic Park (and its sequels The Lost World: Jurassic Park II and Jurassic Park III), film technology combines with computer technology to construct the dinosaur effects that are integral to the films' success. Like the Jurassic Park films, the Terminator films and the Spiderman comic books find new media environments in the theme park attractions Terminator 2: 3D Battle across Time and The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman (both at Universal Studios). Computer games2 like Phantasmagoria I and II and Tomb Raider I, II, and III cross their game borders by incorporating film styles, genres, and actors into their digital spaces. And the narratives of the Alien films extend into and are transformed by a successful comic-book series. All these configurations have formal repercussions. Media merge with media, genres unite to produce new hybrid forms, narratives open up and extend into new spatial and serial configurations, and special effects construct illusions that seek to collapse the frame that separates spectator from spectacle. Entertainment forms have increasingly displayed a concern for engulfing and engaging the spectator actively in sensorial and formal games that are concerned with their own mediaspecific sensory and playful experiences. Indeed, the cinema's convergence with and
extension into multiple media formats is increasingly reliant on an active audience engagement that not only offers multiple and sensorially engaging and invasive experiences but also radically unsettles traditional conceptions of the cinema's "passive spectator." Additionally, many of the aesthetic and formal transformations currently confronting the entertainment industry are played out against and informed by cultural and socioeconomic transformations-specifically, the contexts of globalization and postmodernism. In "Modern Classicism," the first chapter of Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (1999), Kristin Thompson asks the question "Just what, if anything, is new about the New Hollywood in terms of what audiences see in theaters?" (2). For Thompson, it would appear that the answer to this question is "very little." In this book, however; my response to this question is "a great deal." Disputing claims to a "postclassical" or "postmodern" cinema, Thompson argues that, essentially, post-1970s cinema has continued the storytelling practices of the classical Hollywood period. I agree that, fundamentally, Hollywood has retained many of the narrative conventions that dominated its cinema between the 1910s and the 1940s: the cause-and-effect patterns that drive narrative development; the emphasis on goal-oriented characters; the clear three-part structure that follows an Aristotelian pattern of a beginning, middle and end (wherein narrative conflict is finally resolved); and psychologically motivated characters with clearly defined traits.3 Indeed, I would suggest that; with respect to its narrative, a film like Jurassic Park is not only a classical narrative, but a "superclassical" narrative: the goals of the narrative and characters are spelled out explicitly and economically, and the cause-andeffect patterns pound along at a gripping pace until narrative disequilibrium (the threat of the dinosaurs and the planned theme park) is removed. In this respect I agree with Thompson when she suggests that Jurassic Park has as "well-honed [a] narrative as virtually any film in the history of Hollywood" (1999, 9). In Storytelling in the New Hollywood Thompson has contributed a fine body of research that seeks to locate the continuing relevance of the classical narrative tradition; the creature that now is (or, indeed, ever was) "Hollywood" cannot be limited to its narrative practices alone, however, especially when some of these narrative traits are also being transformed.4 The cinema, like culture, is a dynamic being that is not reducible to a state of perpetual stasis. In the words of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, "media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed best in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms" (1999, 9).5 While revealing contemporary cinema's connections with the classical era of storytelling, Jurassic Park also highlights a great many of the radical transformations that have occurred in the film industry in the last three decades. Thompson claims that, although the "basic economic system underlying Hollywood storytelling has changed . . . the differences are essentially superficial and nonsystemic" (1999, 4).6 The fact is, however, that the economic structure of the industry today is fundamentally different from that of the pre-1950s era. Our society, technologies, audiences, and cultural concerns have altered dramatically in the interim. Conglomeration of the film industry since the 1960s has reshaped the industry into one with multiple media interests. One outcome of this conglomeration has been new convergences between diverse entertainment media-comic books, computer games, theme park attractions, and television programs-that have also had formal ramifications.7 The advent of digital technology (and the economic advantages it offers) has altered the film
industry's production practices, with the result that new aesthetics have emerged. The home market saturation of VCRs, cable, and DVD technology has produced not only what Jim Collins calls new forms of "techno-textuality" (1995, 6), but also alternate modes of audience reception and an intensity of media literacy never before witnessed in the history of the cinema. Although she acknowledges the new synergies and emphases on spectacle and action that the contemporary film industry favors, Thompson states that industry features such as tie-in products, publicity, and marketing have been a part of the industry since the 1910s and that currently the industry is involved merely in "intensifications of Hollywood's traditional practices." It is all, says Thompson, a matter of "degree" (1999, 3).8 Yet this matter of degree is surely an important one: "Intensification" can reach a point at which it begins to transform into something else. In the instance of the contemporary entertainment industry, this "something else" has embraced classical storytelling and placed it within new contexts, contexts that incorporate a further economization of classical narrative form, digital technology, cross-media interactions, serial forms, and alternate modes of spectatorship and reception. "Hollywood filmmaking," states Thompson, "contrary to the voices announcing a `post-classical' cinema of rupture, fragmentation, and postmodern incoherence, remains firmly rooted in a tradition which has flourished for eighty years and shown every sign of continuing" (336). I agree. Not only does the classical still persist, but it is also integrated into alternate modes of media discourse. A new order emerges. This book is concerned with this new order, an order that I call the "neo-baroque." As I will stress later, the terms "baroque" and "classical" are not used in this book in any oppositional sense: The baroque embraces the classical, integrating its features into its own complex system. In this book I argue that mainstream cinema and other entertainment media are imbued with a neo-baroque poetics. Points of comparison are identified between seventeenth-century baroque art and entertainment forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to establish continuous and contiguous links between the two eras. In suggesting parallels between the two periods, I do not propose that our current era stands as the mirror double of the seventeenth century. Different historical and social conditions characterize and distinguish the two periods. There are, however, numerous parallels between the two that invite comparison in the treatment and function of formal features, including an emphasis on serial narratives and the spectacular: forms that addressed transformed mass cultures: Throughout this book, therefore, "baroque" will be considered not only as a phenomenon of the seventeenth century (an era traditionally associated with the baroque), but also, more broadly, as a transhistorical state that has had wider historical repercussions. I am especially concerned with evaluating the transformed poetics that have dominated entertainment media of the last three decades. It is suggested here that, as a result of technological, industrial, and economic transformations, contemporary entertainment media reflect a dominant neo-baroque logic. The neo-baroque shares a baroque delight in spectacle and sensory experiences. Neo-baroque entertainments, howeverwhich are the product of conglomerate entertainment industries, multimedia interests, and spectacle that is often reliant upon computer technologypresent contemporary audiences with new baroque forms of expression that are aligned with late-twentieth- and early-twenty-firsthttp://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (4 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]
century concerns. The neo-baroque combines the visual, the auditory, and the textual in ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque form, but that dynamism is expressed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in technologically and culturally different ways. Importantly, underlying the emergence of the neo-baroque are transformed economic and social factors. This book belongs to an expanding set of works that position the cinema and new media in relation to earlier forms of representation and visuality. Because I adopt a baroque model, my ideas are especially indebted to the research of Barbara Maria Stafford, Jay Bolter, and Richard Grusin, who, from alternate perspectives, discuss the inherent "historicity" of media. As Stafford states in Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, "we need to go backward in order to move forward" (1994, 3). By our going backward, various parallels between epochs may emerge, thus allowing us to develop a clearer understanding of the significance of cultural objects and their function during our own times. Stafford establishes these links specifically between the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries. For Stafford, the audiovisuality of the baroque was transformed and given an "instructive" purpose in the eighteenth century to usher in a new era of reason that came to be associated with the Enlightenment. With specific attention given to the dominance of digital media in our own era, Stafford posits that our culture is undergoing similar pivotal transformations. Our optical technologies-home computers, the Internet, cable, and other information technologies-provide a means of using the image in ways that may transport users to a new period of technological reenlightenment (1994, xxiii). In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are more expansive in their historical focus. They argue that all media, no matter how "new," rely on a media past. New media always retain a connection with past forms. Like painting, architecture, and sculpture, which have a longer history of traditions to draw upon, contemporary media such as the cinema, computer games, and the Internet "remediate" or refashion prior media forms, adapting them to their media-specific, formal, and-cultural needs. In short, according to Bolter and Grusin, "No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media" (1999, 15). This interdisciplinary, cross-media, and cross-temporal approach remains integral to the ideas that follow. Although this book focuses on diverse media such as computer games, theme park attractions, and comic books, as well as mainstream cinema, following the works of John Belton (see, in particular, his 1992), Scott Bukatman (1993, 1995, 1998), Jim Collins (1989, 1995), Vivian Sobchack (I987, 1990), Janet Wasko (1994), and Justin Wyatt (1994), this book considers the cinema's continuing relevance in a world that has become infiltrated by new media technologies and new economic structures. In its combination of narrative, image, and sound, the cinema remains paradigmatic and, as is evident in the works of the above-mentioned historians and theorists, much of the best analysis of new media emerges from cinema studies. Likewise, the writings of Sobchack (1987), Bukatman (1993, 1995, 1998) and Brooks Landon (1992) have been especially influential in the priority they give to science fiction and fantasy cinema as fundamental vehicles that offer insight into the impact of new media technologies in the context of postmodernism. The new historical poetics that
this book explores are particularly evident in these genres. As Bukatman (1998) has noted, since the release of Star Wars in 1977, not only has science fiction become paradigmatic of the cross-media and marketing possibilities of conglomeration, but the films narrativize the implications and effects of new technologies as well as implementing new technologies in the construction of the films' special effects. Science fiction and fantasy films, computer games, comic books, and theme park attractions become emblematic of changing conditions-cultural, historical, economic, and aesthetic-as played out across our entertainment media. In my efforts to delineate the transformations that the entertainment industry has undergone in light of economic and technological shifts, I have reconsidered the research of the academics mentioned above from alternate angles, considering and elaborating on their arguments from the perspective of the neo-baroque. Before we travel the path of the neo-baroque, however, a brief overview and clarification of the usages of the term "baroque" is in order. ... Of Things Baroque "The baroque" is a term traditionally associated with the seventeenth century, though it was not a label used by individuals of the period itself to describe the art, economics, or culture of the period. Although when the term "baroque" was originally applied to define the art and music of the seventeenth century is not known, its application in this way-and denigratory associations-gathered force during the eighteenth century. During this time, "baroque" implied an art or music of extravagance, impetuousness, and virtuosity, all of which were concerned with stirring the affections and senses of the individual. The baroque was believed to lack the reason and discipline that came to be associated with neoclassicism and the era of the Enlightenment. The etymological origins of the word "baroque" are debatable. One suggestion is that it comes from the Italian "barocco," which signifies "bizarre," "extravagant"; another is that the term derives from the Spanish "barrueco" or Portuguese "barrocco," meaning an "irregular" or "oddly shaped pearl."9 Whatever the term's origins, it is clear that, for the eighteenth and, in particular, the nineteenth century, the baroque was increasingly understood as possessing traits that were unusual, vulgar, exuberant, and beyond the norm. Indeed, even into the nineteenth century, critics and historians perceived the baroque as a degeneration or decline of the classical and harmonious ideal epitomized by the Renaissance era. As stated, the life span of the historical baroque is generally associated with the seventeenth century, a temporal confine that is more often a matter of convenience (a convenience to which I admittedly succumb in this book), as it is generally agreed that a baroque style in art and music was already evident in the late sixteenth century10 and progressed well into the eighteenth century, especially in the art, architecture, and music of northern Europe and Latin America.11 Until the twentieth century, seventeenth-century baroque art was largely ignored by art historians. The baroque was generally considered a chaotic and exuberant form that lacked the order and reason of neoclassicism, the transcendent wonder of romanticism, or the social awareness of realism. Not until the late nineteenth century did the Swiss art critic and historian Heinrich Wolfflin reconsider the significance of the formal qualities and function of baroque art. Not only were his Renaissance and Baroque (1965; originally published in 1888 and revised in 1907) and
Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1932; originally published in 1915) important in their earnest consideration of the key formal characteristics of seventeenth-century art, but they established the existence of a binary relationship between the classical (as epitomized by Renaissance art) and the baroque12 that has persisted into the twenty-first century.13 Although I draw on the studies of Wolfflin, Walter Benjamin, Remy Sasseilin, and Jose Maravall on the seventeenth-century baroque, one of the most influential works on my own deliberations is Henri Focillon's The Life of Forms in Art, originally published in 1934. Focillon's arguments diverge from those of the above-mentioned authors. Despite his strictly formalist concerns and lack of engagement with cultural issues beyond an abstract framework, Focillon understood form in art as an entity that was not necessarily limited to the constraints of time or specific historical periods. Quoting a political tract from Balzac; Focillon stated that "everything is form and life itself is form" (1992, 33). For Focillon, formal patterns in art are in perpetual states of movement, being specific to time but also spanning across it (32): "Form may, it is true, become formula and canon; in other words, it may be abruptly frozen into a normative type. But form is primarily a mobile life in a changing world. Its metamorphoses endlessly begin anew, and it is by the principle of style that they are above all coordinated and stabilized" (44). Although the historical baroque has traditionally been contained within the rough temporal confines of the seventeenth century, to paraphrase Focillon, I suggest that baroque form still continued to have a life, one that recurred throughout history but existed beyond the limits of a canon. Therefore, whereas the seventeenth century was a period' during which baroque form became a "formula and canon," it does not necessarily follow that the baroque was frozen within the temporal parameters of the seventeenth century. Although the latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed the dominance of a new form of classicism in the neoclassical style, baroque form continued to have a life, albeit one beyond the limits of a canon. For example, later-twentieth-century historians and theorists of the baroque have noted the impact of the baroque on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art movements. Sassone, for example, has explored the presence of a baroque attitude to form in the artistic movements of surrealism, impressionism, and neo-gongorism (Overesch 1981, 70, citing Sassone 1972). Buci-Glucksman (1986, 1994) equated what she labeled a baroque folie du voir with the early-twentieth-century modernist shift toward abstraction. Similarly, Martin Jay (1994) liberated the baroque from its historical confines, stating, like BuciGlucksman, that the inherent "madness of vision" associated with the baroque was present in the nineteenth-century romantic movement and early-twentieth-century surrealist art. In associating it with these instances of early modernist art, the word "baroque" is being adopted by historians and theorists who recognize the modernist and abstract qualities inherent in the baroque; the baroque becomes a tool critical to understanding the nature of these early modernist artistic movements. With respect to the cinema, the baroque is often conjured up to signify or legitimate the presence of an auteurist flair in the films of specific directors. In most cases, the term "baroque" is used rather loosely to describe a formal quality that flows , "freely" and "excessively" through the films of particular directors, the implication being that to be
baroque implies losing control (whereas on the contrary, as will be explained later, seventeenth-century baroque often revealed an obsessive concern with control and rationality). To be baroque is (supposedly) to give voice to artistic freedom and flight from the norm. Classical Hollywood, contemporary Hollywood, and art cinema directors alike have been evaluated from the perspective of the baroque. The films of directors Federico Fellini,14 Tim Burton,15 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Tod Browning, James Whale, Michael Curtiz, 16 Raul Ruiz,17 and Peter Greenaway18 have been discussed as reflecting baroque sensibilities. When the word "baroque" is used to describe particular films, again the term carries with it connotations of something's being beyond the norm or of a quality that is in excess of the norm. Thus the Soviet film Raspoutine, 1'Agonie (Klimov 1975) is analyzed as baroque given its emphasis on themes of aberration, the mystical, and the fantastic (Derobert 1985). The Italian film Maddalena (Genina 1953) is defined as baroque because of its melodramatic style and its focus on the excess spectacle of the Catholic church.19 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Miller 1995) may be understood as baroque because of its "mythic proportions," its grandeur, and its sense of the hyperbolic.20 In interviews, Baz Luhrmann repeatedly refers to the baroque logic-the theatricality, lushness, and spectacle of the mise-en-scene and editing-that inspired his trilogy Strictly Ballroom ( 1997), Romeo + Juliet ( 1999), and Moulin Rouge! (2001 ). And Sally Potter's Orlando (1992) has been described as a postmodern, neo-baroque film that draws upon baroque devices, including intertextuality, parody, and a carnivalesque attitude that transforms Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography (on which the film was based) into a "staged" world of stylistic excess and performativity.21 To return to Focillon's argument regarding the simultaneously fluid and stable properties of art form, in all the instances cited above, baroque traits flow fleetingly through various art movements and films but retain their freedom of motion: the baroque, in this case, is not "frozen" or "canonized" as a style. With the exception of the seventeenth century, it was not until the twentieth century that baroque form underwent a series of metamorphoses that resulted in the stabilization of the baroque as a style. Throughout the twentieth century, baroque form altered its identity as a style in diverse areas of the arts, continuing restlessly to move on to new metamorphic states and cultural contexts.22 The "Baroque Baroque" and the Hollywood Style: The 1920s and 1930s Whereas art-historical and historical research on the seventeenth-century baroque came into its own only in the latter part of the twentieth century, the impact of the baroque on early-twentieth-century culture made itself felt in even more immediate ways within the public sphere. While the Western world was experiencing a modernist revolution in art through postimpressionism, cubism, surrealism, constructivism, and German expressionism, the baroque also experienced a stylistic resurgence. In Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess, Stephen Calloway traces the direct impact of seventeenth-century baroque design, art, and architecture on twentieth-century culture. Labeling the self-conscious fascination with the baroque in the twentieth century the "baroque baroque" (1994, 15), Calloway traces its influences in the worlds of theater,
cinema, architecture, interior design, and haute couture fashion. The 1920s and 1930s in particular can be characterized as stabilizing a new baroque style. In London, an elite and influential group of upper-class connoisseurs in the 1920s formed the Magnasco society (named after a rather obscure seventeenth-century painter Alessandro Magnasco, who was known for his "fantastic" style) with the intention of exhibiting baroque art (48). Soon, what came to be known as a "neo-baroque" style was all the rage. As Calloway states, "magazines of the day decreed that the neo-baroque was in," especially in interior design (50). As early as 1906, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens's Folly Farm residence (West Berkshire, 1906-1912) introduced decorative schemes that included trompe l'oeil illusions influenced by the seventeenth-century baroque. In the 1920s Lord Gerald Wellesley's bedroom in his London townhouse displayed the "Magnasco society taste," and a neobaroque form was evident in his bizarre and spectacular bed, the paintings that hung on the walls, and other baroque-inspired schemes in the room's decoration (48). Likewise, Cecil Beaton's neo-baroque house, Ashcombe-which included baroque furniture, door cases, putti sculptures, trompe l'oeil effects and mirrors, as well as light sconces on the walls that were cast in plaster in the form of human arms (a feature that was to reappear in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete of 1946)-set many trends (86-90).23 A taste for things neo-baroque was also filtering into the exuberant and "dandified fashions" of eccentric characters like Cecil Beaton and Sacheverell Sitwell (whose book on the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque also contributed to an understanding of earlier baroque culture) (Calloway 1994, 32). These more eccentric tastes were soon to enter a more mainstream market when fashion designers like Coco Chanel, Helena Rubenstein, and Elsa Schiaparelli chose to market the "new concept of Chic" by producing stage salon shows and fashions that were marked by a baroque extravagance (79-81).24 This renewed interest in the baroque was also evident in the theater and ballet of the period. For example, the entrepreneur Seregei Diaghilev greatly influenced the look of the Ballets Russes, reigniting a concern for the spectacle of the baroque through the inclusion of exotic costumes of baroque design, baroque settings, and spectacular firework displays traditionally associated with seventeenth-century theater.25 In the United States, the young film industry began a love affair with baroque flair and monumentality. The sets, costumes, themes and designs of grand Hollywood epics like Intolerance (Griffith 1926), Queen Kelly (von Stroheim 1928), The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg 1934), and Don Juan (Crosland 1926) (whose interiors were modeled on those of the Davanzanti palace in Florence) reiterated the spectacular grandeur of baroque style (Calloway 1994, 52-59). According to Calloway, the "visual richness of film culture" and the evident success of the star system by the 1920s shifted the cinema's evocation of fantasy and glamour off the screen and onto the private lives of its stars and the public sphere they inhabited (56). Film culture nurtured an environment that allowed baroque form to infiltrate the space of the city (specifically Hollywood and Beverly Hills). A baroque opulence the likes of which had never been seen since the seventeenth century soon exploded, and what came to be known as the "Hollywood style" emerged. Following the likes of stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, whose palatial abode, Pickfair, was constructed on the outskirts of Hollywood, a spate of movie moguls and film stars commissioned grand mansions that often explicitly imitated the seventeenth-century palazzi of European
aristocrats and monarchs. The designs of Hollywood picture palaces followed suit. An aristocratic style was reborn to herald a new aristocracy, one engendered by the Hollywood film industry. The most famous fantasy mansion of the period was, of course, William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon (figure I.2). Adorned with booty plundered from throughout Europe, this mansion (which approached the size of a city) also included a cinema in the style of Louis XIV (57). The monarchs in this new Hollywood aristocracy were the movie stars and media moguls, and they asserted their power and starlike qualities through a baroque visual splendor. The cultural space of Los Angeles was imbued with a new identity, one that would resurge with a revised fervor at the end of the century, when the neo-baroque was to become canonized within a radically different cultural context.26
The Latin American and Spanish Neo-Baroque Omar Calabrese (1992), Peter Wollen (1993), Mario Perniola (1995), and Christina DegliEsposti (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) have evaluated (from different perspectives) the affinities that exist between the baroque-or, rather, the neo-baroque-and the postmodern. It is as a formal quality of the postmodern that the neo-baroque has gained a stability that emerges from a wider cultural context. Initially, the strongest connection between the postmodern and the baroque emerged in the context of Latin American literature, art,27 and criticism, in particular, in the writings of the Cuban author Severo Sarduy, who consciously embraced the baroque as a revolutionary form, one capable of countering the dominance of capitalism and socialism (Sarduy 1975; Beverley 1988, 29). From the 1950s, in Latin America, the baroque was revisited as the neo-baroque, becoming a significant political form in the process. Particularly in literature, the seventeenth-century baroque's obsessive concerns with illusionism and the questionable nature of reality was adapted to a new cultural context, becoming a formal strategy that could be used to contest the "truth" of dominant ideologies and issues of identity, gender, and "reality" itself. Generally, literary historians have associated the Latin American neo-baroque with the rise of the metafictional new-historicist novel that flourished during the boom period (1960s1970s) and particularly in the postboom period of the 1980s. Although which authors are to be considered part of the boom period and which are part of the postboom is much debated, the tendency to equate both (and in particular the latter)
Figure I.2 William Randolph Hearst's California estate, San Simeon. By permission of The Kodak Collection. with the neo-baroque is a point rarely debated. Novels such as Fernando del Paso's Noticias del Imperio (1987), Roa Bastos's Yo, el Supremo (1975), and Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra ( 1976) are viewed as simultaneously emerging from a postmodern context and as reflecting neo-baroque formal concerns (Thomas 1995, 170). Emphasizing the radical and experimental possibilities inherent in baroque form (as also outlined in the writings of Buci-Glucksman and Jay), Latin American writers such as Luis Borges, Severo
Sarduy, Fernando del Paso, Jose Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Carlos Fuente developed a deconstructive style that owed a great deal to philosophical writings of theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Fredric Jameson. Embracing the postmodern, these novelists also consciously melded theoretical concerns with stylistic strategies adapted from the seventeenth-century baroque tradition: the instability and untrustworthiness of "reality" as a "truth"; the concern with simulacra; motifs like the labyrinth as emblem of multiple voices or layers of meaning; and an inherent self reflexivity and sense for the virtuosic performance. The movement that emerged as a result came to be known as the neo-baroque.28 Additionally, many of the writings of these authors also invested in a Bakhtinian concern with the carnivalesque, intertextuality, dialogic discourse, and "heteroglossic, multiple narrative voices"; as Peter Thomas states, in all, a "neobaroque verbal exuberance . . . [and] . . . delirious" style ensued ( 1995, 171 ). In "The Baroque and the Neobaroque," Severo Sarduy suggests that, whereas the Latin American baroque (of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was simply a colonial extension of the European (and, in particular, the Spanish) baroque, the neobaroque embraces a more critical stance by returning to the European (as opposed to colonial) origins (Thomas 1995, 181; Sarduy 1975, 109-115).29 The aim was to reclaim history by appropriating a period often considered to be the "original" baroque thereby rewriting the codes and "truths" imposed on Latin America by its colonizers. By reclaiming the past through the baroque form, these contemporary Latin American writers could also reclaim their history. 'The new version of history that resulted from this reclamation spoke of the elusive nature of truth, of historical "fact," of "reality," of identity and sexuality. According to the neo-baroque, truth and reality was always beyond the individual's grasp. In Spain, the baroque transformed along similar formal lines, becoming associated in the second half of the twentieth century with the literature of the period and with postmodernism. Freeing themselves from the oppressive censorship of the Franquist regime, in the 1960s and 1970s Spanish writers began to experiment with modernist and antirealist literary styles.30 Critics labeled the emerging Spanish style, which was influenced by the Latin American boom authors who had deliberately embraced the styles and concerns of Golden Age writers such as Miguel de Cervantes and Calderon de la Barca, "baroque" or, more often, "neo-baroque" (Zatlin 1994, 30; Overesch 1981, 19). Following the lead of many Latin American authors, Spanish writers such as Jose Vidal Cadellan, Maria Moix, Jose Maria Castellet, Manuel Ferrand, and Juan Goytisolo adopted stylistic features integral to seventeenth-century Spanish baroque literature.31 Francisco Ayala's El Rapto (1965), for example, retells one of the stories recounted in Cervantes's Don Quixote. Reflecting on the layered nature of the baroque, Ayala travels back in time to the seventeenth century to comment on Spain of the present, particularly on the "disorientation pervading contemporary Spanish society" under the post-Franco regime (Orringer 1994, 47). As with the Latin American neobaroque, particular features of a baroque poetics emerged:32 minimal or lack of concern with plot development and a preference for a multiple and fragmented structure that recalls the form of a labyrinth; open rather than closed form; a complexity and layering evident, for example, in the merging of genres and literary forms such as poetry and the novel; a world in which dream and reality are indistinguishable; a view of the illusory nature of the world-a world as theater; a virtuosity
revealed through stylistic flourish and allusion; and a sell-reflexivity that requires active audience engagement (Overesch 1981, 26-60).33 For these Latin American and Spanish writers, the neo-baroque became a potent weapon that could counteract the mainstream: They embraced the neo-baroque for its inherent avant-garde properties.34 The contemporary neo-baroque, on the other hand, finds its voice within a mainstream market and, like the seventeenth-century baroque, directs its seduction to a mass audience. The Spatial Aspect of the Cultural System In recent decades, the neo-baroque has inserted its identity into diverse areas of the arts, continuing restlessly to move on to new metamorphic states and contexts, nurtured by a culture that is attracted to the visual and sensorial seductiveness integral to baroque form. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we have experienced the reemergence and evolution of the baroque into a more technologically informed method of expression. A baroque mentality has again become crystallized on a grand scale within the context of contemporary culture. The spectacular illusionism and affective charge evident in Pietro da Cortona's ceiling painting of The Glorification of Urban VIII (Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 16331639), the virtuosic spatial illusions painted by Andrea Pozzo in the Church of S. Ignazio (Rome, 1691-1694) (figure I.3),
Figure I.3 Andrea Pozzo, The Glory of S. Ignazio (detail) Chruch of S. Ignazio, Rome, 16911694. Photo Vasari, Rome. the seriality and intertextual playfulness of Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), and the exuberant and fantastic reconstruction of Versailles under Louis XIV have metamorphosed and adjusted to a new historical and cultural context. Specifically, I follow the lead of Omar Calabrese (1992), Peter Wollen (1993), and Mario Perniola (1995), all of whom understand (from different perspectives) the neo-baroque and the postmodern as kindred spirits. Although I recognize the multiple and conflicting theoretical responses to the postmodern condition, however,35 postmodern debates do not constitute the primary concern of this book. A specifically neo-baroque poetics embedded within the postmodern is my primary point of reference. Although some postmodern tropes and theories underpin the analysis to follow, I am not concerned with reiterating the immense body of literature and analysis that has already been articulated so admirably by numerous writers, including pioneers like Fredric Jameson, Jean Lyotard, Robert Venturi,36 Jean Baudrillard, Perry Anderson, and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. It is within the context of the postmodern that the neo-baroque has regained a stability that not only is found in diverse examples of entertainment media cultures but has exploded beyond the elite or marginalized confines of
eccentric European aristocrats, Hollywood film stars, and closed literary circles and into our social spaces. That which distinguishes earlier phases of the twentieth-century baroque from its current guise is the reflexive desire to revisit the visuality associated with the era of the historical baroque. The "baroque baroque" deliberately reintroduced variations of seventeenthcentury fashion, theatrical, and architectural designs, grand-scale spectacle, and baroque historical narratives in the context of the cinema, theater, and ballet. The Latin American and Spanish neo-baroque emerged from a conscious effort on the part of writers to manipulate seventeenth-century baroque techniques for contemporary, avant-garde purposes. The late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century expression of the neo-baroque emerges from radically different conditions. As was the case with the seventeenth-century baroque, the current expression of the neo-baroque has literally emerged as a result of systemic and cultural transformations, which are the result of the rise of conglomeration, multimedia interests, and new digital technology. Cultural transformation has given birth to neo-baroque form. The neo-baroque articulates the spatial, the visual, and the sensorial in ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque form, but that dynamism is expressed in guises that are technologically different from those of the seventeenth-century form. In the last three decades in particular, our culture has been seduced by visual forms that are, reliant on baroque perceptual systems: systems that sensorially engage the spectator in ways that suggest a more complete and complex parallel between our own era and the seventeenth-century baroque. In this respect, my concern is with broader issues and general tendencies that give rise to dominant cultural sensibilities. As history has shown us, human nature being what it is, we cannot resist the drive to locate and label such dominant sensibilities: baroque, Renaissance, medieval, modernist, postmodernist. Underlying all such categories is a desire to reduce and make comprehensible the complex and dynamic patterns and forces that constitute culture. In his study of German baroque tragedy, Benjamin raises a significant query with regard to issues of categorization, in particular, the typing of "historical types and epochs" such as the Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque (1998, 41). The problem for the historian lies in homogenizing the cultural phenomena (and, indeed, the culture) specific to different historical epochs: As ideas, however, such names perform a service they are not able to perform as concepts: they do not make the similar identical, but they effect a synthesis between extremes. Although it should be stated that conceptual analysis, too, does not invariably encounter totally heterogeneous phenomena, and it can occasionally reveal the outlines of a synthesis. (41) Systematization of cultural phenomena need not preclude variety. Likewise, categorization of dominant and recurring patterns need not reflect the revelation of a static cultural zeitgeist. The value of historical labeling and searching for a synthesis of dominant forcesranging from the thematic, to the stylistic, to the social-is that it enables critical reflection. As Benjamin notes, the "world of philosophical thought" may unravel only through the articulation and description of "the world of ideas" (43). Like Benjamin, I do not seek to
defend the methodological foundation that underlies the arguments in this book; I do, however, draw attention to my reservations with "zeitgeisting" and reducing the complex and dynamic processes in operation in cultural formations to simplistic and reductive conceptual observations, and I hope that what follows does not travel that path. In recent years, a number of historians, philosophers, and critical theorists, including Omar Calabrese, Gilles Deleuze, Mario Perniola, Francesco Guardini, Peter Wollen, and Jose Maravall, have explored the formal, social, and historical constituents of the baroque and neo-baroque. Deleuze understood the baroque in its broadest terms "as radiating through histories, cultures and worlds of knowledge" including areas as diverse as art, science, costume design, mathematics, and philosophy (Conley 1993, xi). Likewise, in his historical and cultural study of the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque, Antonio Maravall observed that it is possible to "establish certain relations between external, purely formal elements of the baroque in seventeenth-century Europe and elements present in very different historical epochs in unrelated cultural areas. . . . [Therefore] it is also possible [to] speak of a baroque at any given time, in any field of human endeavour" (1983, 4-5). Maravall, who is concerned with the seventeenth century, is interested in the baroque as a cultural phenomenon that emerges from a specific historical situation. Maravall also, however, privileges a sense of the baroque that encompasses the breadth of cultural diversity across chronological confines. His approach is a productive one. While exploring distinct centuries that have sets of cultural phenomena particular to their specific historical situations, it is nevertheless possible to identify and describe a certain morphology of the baroque that is more fluid and is not confined to one specific point in history. The formal manifestations of the baroque across cultural and chronological confines also concern Omar Calabrese in his Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (1992). Dissatisfied with postmodernism as a consistent, unified framework of analysis that explains aesthetic sensibilities, Calabrese suggests that the neo-baroque offers a productive formal model with which to characterize the transformations of cultural objects of our epoch (1992, 14). Recognizing, like Maravall before him, that the baroque is not merely a specific period in the history of cultures situated within the seventeenth century, (though with greater focus than Maravall on the twentieth century), Calabrese explores the baroque as a general attitude and formal quality that crosses the boundaries of historical periodization. For Calabrese, therefore, "many important cultural phenomena of our time are distinguished by a specific internal `form' that recalls the baroque" in the shape of rhythmic, dynamic structures that have no respect for rigid, closed, or static boundaries (5). The protean forms that he locates in blockbuster films, televisual serial structures, and the hybrid alien or monstrous hero are, in turn, placed (briefly) within a broader cultural sphere in which chaos theory, catastrophe theory, and other such "new sciences" reflect similar fluid transformations that contest prior scientific "norms" (171-172). According to Calabrese, neo-baroque forms "display a loss of entirety, totality, and system in favour of instability, polydimensionality, and change" (1992, xii). Following Yuri Lotman's organization of knowledge according to "the spatial aspect of the cultural system," Calabrese suggests that space must have a border:
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COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES Comparative Media Studies represents a new paradigm in media scholarship, one which merges together the best conceptual models from a range of different disciplines to address issues of media content, context, and change. It is comparative in multiple senses -- comparative across media, across historical periods, across national borders, and across disciplinary perspectives. HISTORICAL POETICS Much of my early work dealt with points of intersection between different media, though I did not yet have a fully developed understanding of what comparative media studies might look like. For example, my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic dealt with the development of a new aesthetics of popular performance in vaudeville which had an enormous impact on film comedy as Broadway performers were recruited by Hollywood in order help make the transition from silent to sound cinema. In this book, I explore what aspects of the vaudeville style could work in the context of classical Hollywood narrative and which were rejected and reworked as cinema restabilized its own norms after the end of that transitional period. In a later essay, "The Fellow Keaton Seems to Be the Whole Show': The Interrupted Performance in Buster Keaton's Films", which appeared in Andrew Horton's Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior, I go back to an earlier period of interaction between popular theater and cinema, exploring the different performance strategies that emerge at different moments in Buster Keaton's career to negotiate between competing aesthetic norms. This research was informed by an approach, known as historical poetics, which seeks to map the aesthetic norms and implicit assumptions that shaped the production of media texts at particular historical junctures. This approach was developed by David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson as they applied and adapted the ideas of the Russian formalists to study cinema. My essay, "Historical Poetics and the Popular Cinema," published in Mark Jancovich's Approaches to the Popular Cinema, I outline and expand upon their framing of historical poetics, suggesting its relevance to a larger understanding of popular aesthetics and the politics of taste cultures.
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Several of my Technology Review columns have dealt with the ways that digital media are altering more traditional forms of communication, dealing with emerging concepts of interactive television in "TV Tomorrow" or shifting conceptions of journalism in "..." "Art Form for the Digital Age" uses Gilbert Seldes's concept of the "lively arts," developed in response to early 20th century media forms such as the comic strip, the Hollywood film, and the Broadway musical, to propose ways of thinking about the aesthetic status of computer games. Another column, "Culture Goes Global" uses the production and circulation of global fusion music to make some predictions about new kinds of culture which are likely to emerge as the net expands points of contact between different national cultures. "Nintendo and New World Narrative," which first appeared in Steve Jones' Communications in Cyberspace, represents a dialogue with Renaissance scholar Mary Fuller which compares new world travel writing and computer games as two different forms of spatial stories. Here, we argue that spatial stories represent an understudied aesthetic tradition that displaces issues of narrative causality and character development in favor of spatial exploration. COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO MEDIA AUDIENCES A different strand of my research dealt with the intersection between media systems from an audience studies perspective. My book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, dealt with the ways television fans utilized media content as a resource for alternative forms of cultural production, including the writing of fan fiction, the performance of filk or fan music, and the editing of fan videos. I have subsequently traced the ways this same community makes use of digital media. "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?: alt.tv.twinpeaks, The Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery's Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, explored the ways that fans of Twin Peaks employed the internet to expand the resources available to them for deciphering the mystery of Who Killed Laura Palmer. I returned to this same issue of on-line communities and fan reception almost a decade later with "Interactive Audiences?" Here, I draw on Pierre Levy's concept of collective intelligence to examine the ways fans use computers in relation to other media to expand opportunities for critical dialogue, audience activism, and cultural production and distribution and in the process, redefine the relations between audience, producers, and texts. Another recent essay, "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? Parody and Appropriation in an Age of Cultural Convergence", which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's
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d-Film anthology, deals with the ways that Star Wars fans have made use of the emerging resources of digital cinema to talk back to the Hollywood blockbuster. Once again, I am dealing with the flow of content -- stories, characters, ideas -- from one media system to another. MIGRATORY CHARACTERS AND NARRATIVE "Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie," which appeared in Marsha Kinder's Kids Media Culture, offers another approach to comparative media studies -- tracing the migration of a popular fictional character across books, television, and film and across different historical periods. I focus on moments when the ownership of the remarkable collie shifts since these moments are often occasions for articulating the value of dogs and the kinds of investments which they owners make in them. Similarly, "The All-American Handful: Dennis the Menace, Permissive Childrearing and the Bad Boy Tradition," which first appeared in Lynn Spigel and Mike Curtin's The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, traced the evolution of a "bad boy" character as he migrates from the comics to television. In "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek Through Digital Media," co-authored with Janet Murray and first appearing in Greg Smith's On A Silver Platter: CD-Roms and the Promises of a New Technology, I examine what gets embraced and what gets left behind when television content is transformed into the basis for interactive entertainment. Murray approaches this question from an aesthetic perspective, expressing pleasure in the more immersive opportunities for play with Star Trek introduced by games, where-as I tackle the question from the point of view of meaning and interpretation, noting the ways that Star Trek games excludes aspects of the series metatext which sustained the interests and participation of its female fans. METHODOLOGY In recent years, I have been called upon to develop overview essays that synthesize significant new theoretical and methodological developments. For example, the Hop on Pop project was intended to focus attention on new methodological and conceptual models for studying the politics and pleasures of popular culture. In a manifesto , "The Culture That Sticks to the Skin: Towards a New Paradigm in Cultural Studies," co-authored with Jane Shattuc and Tara McPherson, we make a case for the emergence of a new perspective, one born of a closer affective relationship to popular culture, a greater emphasis on the particularity of specific case studies which are nevertheless understood within a larger context, a commitment to language which makes these ideas more accessible to a broader public, and an awareness of the interplay between global and local factors. An earlier version of this
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manifesto, "Cultural Studies: The Next Generation," appeared as the forward to a special issue of Continuum. In both Continuum and in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, we brought together more than 40 essays by young and established cultural scholars which demonstrate these new approaches at work. In "The Work of Theory in the Age of Digital Transformation," published in Toby Miller and Robert Stam's A Companion to Film Theory, I offer an overview and critique of developments in digital theory suggesting the ways that it resembles or differs from earlier forms of media theory. Specifically, I describe four important dimensions of the emerging digital theory -- the shifting relationship between academic and vernacular theories of digital change, the concept of critical utopianism as a way of using future prediction to critique present conditions, and the use of digital media to revitalize the study of previous media and to examine points of intersection between media. "Media in Transition: An Introduction," co-authored with David Thorburn for our book, Media in Transition, attempts to demonstrate how a comparative and historically informed approach might help us to better understand the process of media change. The essay specifically addresses both political changes and aesthetic changes brought about through the introduction of new communication and information technologies into pre-existing social and cultural contexts. "Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss," which appeared in Christine Gledhill and Linda William's Reinventing Film Theory, revisits core issues in theorizing the cinematic audience and ends with the suggestion that such accounts are limited if they do not fully address a new media environment where film may be consumed through many different communication channels and where film content intersects with other media content in many different ways.
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MEDIA CONVERGENCE We are living in an age when changes in communications, storytelling and information technologies are reshaping almost every aspect of contemporary life -- including how we create, consume, learn, and interact with each other. A whole range of new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content and in the process, these technologies have altered the ways that consumers interact with core institutions of government, education, and commerce. OVERVIEWS I have increasingly come to prefer the term, media convergence, to describe the full context of media change. In "Convergence? I Diverge," one of my Technology Review columns, I offer a basic overview of different kinds of convergences -- technological, economic, aesthetic, organic, and global -- which are redefining our media environment. It is a good starting point for understanding much of my other recent writing on this topic. "The Work of Theory in the Age of Digital Transformation", published in Toby Miller and Robert Stam's A Companion to Film Theory, makes the case for a new mode of media theory which reflects the opportunities and challenges of the media age. Central to this argument is a consideration of the ways that digital change is provoking theorizing not only with the academy but across all of those sectors being reshaped by the new media and an urge for academic theory to move beyond the classroom to engage in a larger public conversation about those changes. "From Home[r] to the Holodeck", presented at the Post-Innocence: Narrative Textures and New Media Conference at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia in 1998, represented another attempt to define the place of the humanities as a means of responding to the challenges of the changing media environment and includes some ideas about theorizing the process of media change which are developed more fully in "Media in Transition: An Introduction," co-authored with David Thorburn. One important discourse on media change has come through science fiction, which emerged in the 1920s as part of a larger effort to promote popular access to information on scientific discovery and technological innovation. I developed a series of forums
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involving contemporary science fiction writers discussing the key themes of media change underlying their work. Transcripts of these conversations with Gregory Benford, Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, James Patrick Kelly, Ellen Kushner, Frederick Pohl, Allen Steele and Sarah Zettel can be found on the Media in Transition website. I provided an overview on the relationship of science fiction and media change intended as an introduction to the various transcripts entitled "Media and Imagination: A Short History of American Science Fiction." With Christopher Weaver, I developed an MIT course on Popular Culture in the Age of Media Convergence. The syllabus of that course is on-line and provides a good reading list for anyone wanting to know more about this topic. An important aspect of this site are the various student critiques of contemporary media product which display, with varying degrees of competency or mastery, some of the core concepts to emerge from the class. I am currently developing a book proposal exploring more fully how these various forms of media convergence are impacting contemporary popular culture. Watch this space for more news as the book develops. CULTURAL CONVERGENCE If the phrase, media convergence, can be used to describe the kinds of technological and economic changes which are fostered the flow of media content across multiple delivery technologies, cultural convergence describes the new ways that media audiences are engaging with and making sense of these new forms of media content. I have argued that cultural convergence has preceded, in many ways, the full technological realization of the idea of media convergence, helping to create a market for these new cultural products. I first introduced the concept of "cultural convergence" in "The Stormtroopers and The Poachers," a talk which I gave at the University of Michigan which was transcribed for circulation of Philip Agre's Red Rock Eater News mailing list. I later fleshed out that essay more fully for an anthology on cult audiences which will be published in Paris next year. "Interactive Audiences?", which will be published in xx, explores how Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence might shed light on the behavior of media audiences in this new era. Specifically, I explore how the knowledge culture of fandom is transformed through the use of networked communications and how the new media alter reader's relations to texts, to media producers, and to each other. I trace various ways that the media industries are responding to the challenges of a more participatory culture. I wrote an introduction to Kurt Lancaster's Interacting with Babylon 5 that explains how Babylon 5 might be read as symptomatic of this larger process of media and cultural convergence.
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THE DIGITAL RENAISSANCE Across a range of journalistic pieces, mostly published in Technology Review, I have developed these concepts of media and cultural convergence to describe the present moment as a kind of Renaissance culture, one being transformed -- for both better and worse -- as the social, cultural, political, and legal institutions respond to the destabilization created by media change. Among the topics I have addressed have been digital media's impact on Journalism ("..."), the emergence of new forms of global culture ("Culture Goes Global"), the potentials of interactive television ("TV Tomorrow"), the production of knowledge in an information rich environment ("Information Cosmos"), the emergence of new youth cultures in cyberspace ("The Kids are Alright Online"), and the impact of digital media on our understanding of intellectual property ("Digital Land Grab.") Although not published in Technology Review, "Contacting the Past," can be understood as part of this same strand in my writing -- explaining how the early history of radio as a participatory medium might shed light on our current period of media transition. DIGITAL CINEMA I have become increasingly interested in studying new aesthetic forms that have emerged in response to the potentials of digital media. One such area of interest is digital cinema. Digital cinema can refer to many different things, ranging from the use of digital cameras in film production or digital projection in film exhibition to the use of the web as a delivery system for films. Our Digital Cinema conference explored many different aspects of this topic. In "The Director Next Door," one of my Technology Review columns, I explore how the development of the web as a distribution channel might empower amateur filmmakers not only to make new kinds of films but also to reach new audiences. I briefly discuss here the ways that commercial media is starting to recruit media makers and content from the web. I explore the intersection between commercial and amateur media making more fully in "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Parody and Appropriation in an Age of Cultural Convergence," which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's d. film anthology. Here, I argue that Star Wars functioned as a "catalyst" encouraging fans to embrace the potentials of digital production and distribution, resulting in an enormous grassroots movement of Star Wars parodies. As a result of this essay, I was asked to develop a festival of fan-made films to be shown at the Walker Art Institute and to develop program notes explaining my choices. COMPUTER GAMES I became interested in computer and video games more than a decade ago when my
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son purchased his first Nintendo. A short time later, I wrote my first essay, "x Logic: Placing Nintendo in Children's Lives," which sought to review an emerging body of scholarly literature on games and to stress the importance of atmospheric design and spatial narrative to this emerging medium. I built on that concept of spatial storytelling through a dialogic essay, "Nintendo and New World Narrative," which I co-authored with Mary Fuller and which appeared in Steve Jones's Communicating in Cyberspace. I took a more social historical approach to game space in "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Playspace" in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Here, I argued that a comparison between traditional gendered play spaces and computer games might shed light on the challenge of developing games which might appeal equally to girls and to boys. I have recently returned to reconsider the relationship between space and narrative in "...", which thinks about game design as a form of informational architecture which provides the preconditions for emergent and embedded forms of storytelling. In "Art Form for the Digital Age," published in Technology Review, I make the case that games are a new "lively art," along the lines outlined by Gilbert Seldes in the 1920s, and explore what we might learn about game aesthetics through analogies to the silent cinema. These ideas are fleshed out more fully in "....", an essay which will appear in ....and in "...", an essay developed in conjunction with "Game On," an exhibition of games as art at London's Barbican Art Center. Another important aspect of my interest in games centered around the challenges of expanding the diversity of games content in order to attract more girls to gameplaying. I hosted an MIT conference which brought women in the games industry to campus to explore the then emerging "girls game" movement and to engage in dialogue with academic feminists who had written on this topic. The book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which I co-edited with Justine Cassell, grew out of that conference. Our introductory essay, "Chess For Girls?" explores the contradictions which surround the girls game movement, seeking to complicate easy ideological judgements about the value of these new kinds of software for girls. "Voices From the Combat Zone" brought together online writings by women gameplayers, showing an alternative version of digital feminism which focused on empowering women to do combat with men in digital playspaces rather than designing more traditionally feminine kinds of games. "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek Through Digital Media", coauthored with Janet Murray for Greg Smith's On A Silver Platter, tackles the challenge of designing games for women from a different angle. Using Star Trek as a case study, I argue that those aspects of the original television series that attract female consumers have been systematically stripped away as the franchise was translated into video and computer game formats. Here, the issue isn't whether games should be redesigned to attract women but why decisions are being made to cut back on aspects of existing material which has already proven successful
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in engaging female consumers. I have increasingly sought to engage in a larger dialogue with people in the games industry about the current state and future potential of games as a medium. In collaboration with the Interactive Digital Software association, I helped to organize the first national academic conference on video and computer games, bringing together leading game designers and game critics (academic and journalistic) for a two day conversation about the medium. More than 400 pages of transcripts of that event have been posted on the web and constitute an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the current state and future direction of the games industry. Through the Comparative Media Studies program, I have organized a series of creative leaders workshops with Electronic Arts, a leader in the games industry, to explore issues of character, narrative, emotion, and community and to point towards some new directions for game design. We have helped to organize a series of workshops and presentations at such industry gatherings as the Games Developers Conference, E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Exposition), and Siggraph, which have helped to enlarge the industry conversation about games. We are currently working with Microsoft to explore the potential use of game for learning. Our task is to make the case for games as a potential instructional and simulation platform and to develop prototypes of how one might combine state of the art game play with MIT quality science and engineering instruction. As we have taken this conversation about games into the public sphere, my work has gained a great deal of attention within the games press and general interest publications alike. My favorite stories to date include a far reaching interview with Kurt Squire in Joystick 101, a conversation on games and violence in Gamasutra, and ....
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MEDIA CONSUMPTION All media theory makes assumptions about the nature of the media audience. In some cases, those assumptions emerge through introspection or through reading audiences as if they were products of formal and ideological structures of texts or through borrowing models from psychology or... Audience research seeks to directly engage with empirical audiences in order to better factor their experiences and perspectives into its accounts. In my opinion, what is important about audience research is not necessarily its ability to arrive at some truth, since it still reads the audience through some theoretical framework which makes some aspects visible but may blind us to others, but it opens up a dialogue between researchers and audiences and, if done well, forces us to be more accountable for the claims that we make about media consumption and interpretation. OVERVIEWS I offered an overview of the methods and theoretical models surrounding audience research, at least as they are applied to cinema, in "Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss", which appeared in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Theory. Here, I use Thelma and Louise as a case study for examining how audience researches have looked at aspects of the text, contexts of reception, and interpretive communities to map the reception process, and end with some ideas about how what we learn from fan communities might inform academic criticism. Anyone who wants to better understand my own approach to audience research might start with two lengthy published conversations, one with Taylor Harrison, which first appeared in Enterprise Zones, and the other with Matt Hills, which was published in Intensities. Across these two conversations, I try to contextualize my fan studies research and deal with the academic and personal stakes in researching the audience. The Intensities dialogue represents an exchange between two generations of fan researchers on such topics as the impact of media convergence on fan culture, the relationship between fandom and academia, the problematic analogy between fandom and religion, the value of psychoanalysis for discussing fan cultures, and the challenges of writing about and documenting the affective dimensions of fandom.
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STUDYING FANDOM I have been an active television and cult media fan for more than two decades, well before I entered academic life. When I first began studying media in graduate school, I was enormously frustrated with academic representations of media consumption, because their vision of isolated, passive, and ideologically vulnerable consumers were so at odds with my highly social, engaged, empowered, and creative experiences as a fan. I often joke that I got tired of being told to get a life and decided to write a book instead. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was that book -an attempt to map fandom as an interpretive and creative community actively appropriating the content of television for its own pleasures. My work drew heavily on ideas from Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life and was informed by my mentor, John Fiske, whose ideas about media audiences are best represented in his book, Television Culture. Nothing prepared me for the response to Textual Poachers either within the academy, where it is still widely taught more than a decade after its original publication, within fandom itself, where passages of the book routinely surface as signature lines on e-mail, or in journalism, where the book has helped to reshape the ways reporters cover the fan community. I am now in negotiations with Routledge to develop an expanded and updated new addition of the book to deal with the ways that fandom has changed over the past decade as a result of networked computing and media convergence. "Interactive Audiences?, which will first appear in xx, maps some of those changes and suggests some new directions in my own thinking about fandom. Here, I draw on Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence to describe the links between affect, knowledge, and community in a media environment that has facilitated new kinds of interactions between fans, producers, and texts and where industry operates on an assumption of an active and potentially collaborative consumer. "The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Popular Culture in the Digital Age", which first appeared on Red Rock Eater News and more recently has been expanded and translated into French for publication in xx, offered another take on the changing status of fans, exploring contradictory responses to fan culture from a media industry eager to absorb aspects of fan aesthetics but uncomfortable with the image of a grassroots community of cultural producers whose use of its intellectual property can not be adequately policed. The issue of fandom and intellectual property law also surfaces in "Digital Land Grab," which was published in Technology Review. In my "Foreward" to Kurt Lancaster's Interacting With Babylon 5, I explore what performance studies might contribute to our understanding of this new fan culture, looking at the ways that media producers are creating new spaces for fans to interact with and participate within the fictional worlds of their programs. "Fandom, the New Identity Politics," which appeared in Harpers, explores the political dimensions of contemporary fan culture, drawing parallels between fan politics and debates among
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queer activists, and urging us to think in new ways about what might be described as categories of cultural preference. Both of these essays deal with the issue of people dressing up and performing the parts of fictional characters, albeit from very different theoretical perspectives. Textual Poachers has often been read as a book about Star Trek fans. Perhaps this is because my very first essay on fan fiction, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten", which first appeared in Studies in Mass Communication, dealt with Star Trek as its primary case study. In fact, Textual Poachers dealt with the female fanzine community, which cuts across many different media products. It was not intended either as a study of Star Trek fans per se nor a totalizing account of fandom, but a specific case study of a fan community. To make this point, I followed up Textual Poachers with a book that did deal with Star Trek fans, Science Fiction Audiences: Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Their Followers, which I co-authored with John Tulloch. In my sections of the book, I tried to demonstrate the ways three different fan communities -- male MIT students, female fanzine writers, and the members of a queer fan club -- interacted with Star Trek. Each group took something different from their encounter with the series, depending on, among other things, their understandings of science fiction as a genre, their existing interests and fantasies, and their forms of social interaction and cultural production. Of the case studies in the book, "Out of the Closet and Into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek" has been the most widely reprinted and the most influential. It is an example of what John Hartley calls "Intervention Analysis" in which the academic researcher joins forces with the media audience for an activist purpose. In this case, I wanted to lend my support to a letterwriting campaign which wanted to see a gay, lesbian, or bisexual character included on the television program as a reflection of its historic commitment to the acceptance of diversity. INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES Shaping Science Fiction Audiences was the idea that fandom constituted an interpretive community or, more accurately, communities. Interpretive communities are social groups which share similar intellectual resources and patterns of making meaning. With interpretive communities, meanings are debated and over time, some loose consensus emerges. There is, of course, never total agreement, but there appears to be some agreement about what kinds of disagreements can be tolerated and which ones throw you beyond the parameters of a particular group. Interpretive communities become especially visible in net discourse when they collide with each other, producing flame wars. Flame wars occur on fan lists, I argue, where the core assumptions which are taken for granted by individual participants are too much at odds with each other to be tolerated, forcing them to be dealt with in more explicit and often more impassioned ways.
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Through the years, I have developed a number of case studies of specific fandoms that might be read as interpretive communities, trying to offer detailed accounts of the process of their interpretive activities and how their interpretations of specific programs fit within the larger context of their lives. For example, in "It's Not a Fairy Tale Any More!: Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast," which first appeared in the Journal of the University Film and Video Association and later in Textual Poachers, I examine a group of female fans of Beauty and the Beast, suggesting how they drew on the program's balance of romance and action-adventure to work through contradictions and uncertainties about the place of femininity in an era where women are assuming more and more professional responsibility. I demonstrated the place of genre in shaping both their evaluations of individual episodes and their expectations about where the series was likely to take them and then discuss the fragmentation and reinvention of their community when the producers "retooled" the series in an effort to attract more male viewers. By contrast, "Do You Enjoy Making The Rest of Us Feel Stupid?: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery's Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, dealt with the predominantly male fans on an early internet discussion list which was preoccupied with the challenge of determining who killed Laura Palmer and had constructed a vivid image of David Lynch as a "tricky" author to justify their own intensive reading of the series. Here, again, notions of genre plays a significant role, since they tended to fold the soap opera aspects of the series into their reading of it as a mystery, using the challenge of solving the crime to justify their speculations about interpersonal relationships. A third case study, "Going Bonkers!: Children, Play and Pee-Wee," first published in Camera Obscura and later reprinted in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis's Male Trouble, dealt with children as media consumers, suggesting that children do not so much watch television as play with it. Here, I draw on children's play, stories, and artwork to reveil their attempts to work through the ambiguities surrounding Pee-Wee Herman's man-child persona, seeing this as part of a larger process of exploring what it means to gain maturity at a time when they were making a transition from the home to kindergarten.
FANS AS CULTURAL PRODUCERS One of my more significant contributions to audience research has been to shift attention from fans as meaning producers towards fans as cultural producers, who transform the act of consumption into various forms of creative expression. Textual Poachers describes the art world of fandom in some detail. Other essays, written at the same time or subsequently, look more closely at specific forms of fan creation. "If I Speak With Your Sound: Fan Music, Textual Proximity and Liminal Identification", which appeared in Camera Obscura and "Strangers No More, We Sing: Filking and
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the Social Construction of the Science Fiction Fan Community," which appeared in Lisa Lewis's The Adoring Audience, dealt with filk, a genre of fan-generated folk music. In the first essay, I used filk as a means of complicating our understanding of fan identification with series characters as well as exploring how fans used filk songs to express their ambivalent feelings about their own experiences as media consumers. In the second essay, I compared filk to traditional folk culture, stressing its community building functions. In "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Parody and Appropriation in an Age of Cultural Convergence," which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's d-film, I examine fan contributions to the digital cinema movement. Here, I try to reconcile claims made about media convergence within a political economy framework with claims made about participatory culture within a cultural studies framework, seeing Star Wars as both the defining example of the new transmedia corporate franchise and as the catalyst for an enormous amount of grassroots cultural production. In one of my Technology Review columns, "The Director Next Door," I offer some additional thoughts about digital cinema as an alternative distribution venue for amateur and independent filmmakers. In "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek Through Digital Media," co-authored with Janet Murray and published in Greg Smith's On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology, I use what we know about fandom as an interpretive and creative community to assess the kinds of interactivity on offer in Star Trek computer and video games. What we learned was that those aspects of the series which had sustained the interests and participation of female consumers were systematically stripped aside in order to develop games that more perfectly satisfied the interests of the game industry's predominantly male demographic. HISTORICAL AUDIENCES Most of the work referenced here draws on various forms of ethnographic research to map the activities of contemporary media consumers. The challenges of documenting historical media audiences are somewhat more daunting. Two of my essays can be thought to deal directly with historical media audiences and they adopt very different techniques for reconstructing those viewers. In "Shall We Make It for New York or For Distribution?: Eddie Cantor, Whoopee, and Regional Resistance to the Talkies," I draw on trade press reports and industry surveys to reconstruct a history of hinterland resistance to certain genres -- especially the musical -- which had emerged as Hollywood made the transition to talking pictures. I argued that the early talkie period exaggerated the importance of northeastern cities, which were among the first to have theaters wired for sound, where-as the solidification of sound cinema restored the power of hinterland markets and forced a rejection of strategies that had seemed promising only a year earlier. I documented the repositioning of Jewish comedian
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Eddie Cantor in response to those shifting market pressures. In "Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory," which I co-authored with Lynn Spigel for William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson's The Many Lives of the Batman, we tried to construct the "popular memory" of the 1960s cult television series through focal group interviews of people who recalled watching the program as children. Here, we combined research into the contemporary reception of the series with oral history techniques, reading recent responses as illustrating the processes by which personal and collective experiences are transformed and mythologized through memory. VERNACULAR THEORY My thinking about fandom has been tremendously influenced by Thomas McLaughlin's Street Smarts and... McLaughlin challenges our conception of theory production as an exclusively academic activity, forcing us to reflect on the place of theory-making in a range of other sectors, including fandom. Everyday people develop theories to explain their own relationships to media and these theories can be as sophisticated on their own terms as those produced within the scholarly community. He challenges us to engage more openly with theoretical dialogue with these vernacular theorists. I have taken up his challenge in two different published works. In "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back," with appeared in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, co-edited with Justine Cassell, I reprinted essays about gender and computer games which first appeared on a range of fan websites. Here, the self-proclaimed "game grrls" offered a significant critique of the ideological assumptions shaping the "girls game" movement, challenging us to rethink academic assumptions about what women want from games. In "The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows," which was co-edited with Cynthia Jenkins and Shoshanna Green and appeared in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander's Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, we introduced academic readers to various attempts by slash fans to theorize slash writing. Here, the three editors were active participants in an APA, an amateur publication, which regularly discussed slash and its relationship to other forms of sexual representation and we reprinted our own fannish contributions to the APA alongside other contributions. MEDIA LITERACY My interest in media audiences has led me in recent years to become more outspoken in advocating the development of media literacy resources for our schools. To some degree, this activism has been inspired by my disgust at the easy fit between media effects research (which often ascribes little or no agency to consumers) and the kinds
Henry Jenkins
of moral panic generated by cultural warriors in Washington and elsewhere. My own research has shown media audiences to be active, critical, constantly testing media discourse against their own perceptions of the world, constantly reworking or appropriating it for their own uses. I had stayed away from media literacy education because most of it has been developed with the goal of shaping student's tastes and operates on the assumption that media is doing bad things to us. I wanted to rethink media literacy as a set of skills which includes both reading and writing, consuming and producing media texts. It needs to start with a keen awareness of children's existing uses of new media technologies and the place of popular culture in the formation of their personal and subcultural identities. This research should then shape classroom activities that help to encourage creative and ethically responsible uses of media technologies. I am currently in the process of developing a research team, along with Justine Cassell, Mitchell Resnick, and Sherry Turkle, which would research children as media users and get that information out to concerned policy-makers, teachers, school administrators, psychologists, and others. The shifts in my thinking about media literacy education can be traced across several of my essays. "Empowering Children in the Digital Age: Towards a Radical Media Pedagogy", which was published in Radical Teachers, discusses my skepticism about the myth of childhood innocence underlying much media literacy education and proposes a more radical approach which empowers children to critique and rewrite media texts. The Columbine Massacre and the moral panic that followed forced me to pay greater attention to this issue, as might be suggested by my testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and my essay, "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington" which was written in response to that experience. I wrote two essays, "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want to Hear About Youth and Media", which appeared in Independent School, and "The Uses and Abuses of Popular Culture: Raising Children in the Digital Age", which appeared in The College Board Review. Both countered widespread claims that media violence had inspired the recent wave of school shootings, drawing on insights from audience research to offer a more complex account of the place of violent entertainment in the lives of contemporary teens. As part of a school outreach effort, we produced a study guide for teachers to use to discuss contemporary media developments with their students. In addition, I engaged in debates with moral reformer David Grossman and conversations with journalist Jon Katz about Columbine and media violence. In response to requests that I provide some model for how parents can develop better
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communication with their children about popular culture, I wrote "The Monsters Next Door: A Father-Son Conversation about Buffy, Moral Panic and Generational Differences" as a dialogic essay with my son about one of our favorite television shows, using it as an entry point into thinking about the psychological and social roots of moral panic and generational conflict. I also developed a talk which sought to explain to journalists, parents groups, librarians, and civil liberties organizations how teens were currently making use of web technologies, "It's The Only Thing I Have Complete Control Over: Teen's Use of the Web," which also inspired one of my Technology Review columns, "The Kids Are Alright Online." These activities suggest the potential value of audience research for framing policy debates about media literacy education and youth access to digital technologies.
Henry Jenkins - Children's Culture
CHILDREN'S CULTURE The popular culture produced for, by, and/or about children. Children's culture is not "innocent" of adult political, economic, moral or sexual concerns. Rather, the creation of children's culture represents the central arena through which we construct our fantasies about the future and a battleground through which we struggle to express competing ideological agendas. CHILDREN AS MEDIA CONSUMERS "Going Bonkers!': Children, Play, and Pee-Wee" represents my earliest writing on children's culture, produced as part of an independent study under the direction of John Fiske, when I was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The essay used as its starting point a "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" party for my son and his kindergarten age friends. The essay argues that children's characteristic engagement with television content involves play (which is spontaneous, unstructured and exploratory) rather than games (which are structured, goal-oriented, and rule-bound); that the kindergarten age students used Pee-Wee's ambiguous age status to explore their own mixed feelings about leaving home and going to school; and that the program's "Ket"-like aesthetic enabled children to express a cultural identity distinct from their parent's demands upon them. "Going Bonkers!" appeared initially in Camera Obscura but was reprinted in the book, Male Trouble. COMPUTER GAMES Several of my projects have involved looking at computer games, which represent one of the most important new forms of children's media in recent years. "x Logic" was a review of Marsha Kinder's Playing With Power and Eugene Provenzo's Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo but also includes some original analysis of the spatial rather than narrative-focus of video games and the ways that gameplaying fits within children's everyday lives. Extending these arguments, "Nintendo and New World Travel Narratives"was a dialog with Renaissance literature scholar Mary Fuller about the category of "spatial stories," a concept derived from the work of Michel de Certeau. We argue that certain kinds of narratives lack the focus on characterization, causality, and linear plot development
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which defines classical storytelling and instead focus on movements through and the occupation of narrative space. We argue for a fundamental congruence between Nintendo games and earlier forms of travel narratives. This essay appeared in Steve Jones' anthology, Cyber-Society. The issue of gender and computer games forms the focus of my forthcoming book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which is co-edited with Justine Cassell (from the MIT Media Lab). This book brings together essays by scholars in a range of fields, including educational psychology, cultural studies, social science research, and media design, and includes interviews with six key women in the games industry and a selection of webzine writings by game grrlz. The book takes a snapshot of the current "girls game" movement as a way of understanding the intersection between academic and entrepreneural feminism in the late 1990s. In our introductory essay, "Chess for Girls?: Feminism and Computer Games," we trace through the range of political and corporate responses to the "gender gap" in the computer game industry, outlining some of the contradictory assumptions about gender shaping current decisions about game design, development, and distribution. In "Complete Freedom of Movement': Computer Games as Gendered Playspaces," I continue my exploration of video games as "spatial stories," suggesting the ways that the genre conventions of the "boys game" responded to features in traditional backyard "boy culture," moving them inside in response to children's diminishing access to physical playspaces in their own neighborhoods. Then, I continue to examine the history of gender distinctions in children's book publishing as a way of examining the successes and failures of the "girl game" movement. Specifically, the essay includes a close consideration of Purple Moon's Secret Paths Through the Forrest and Theresa Duncan's Chop Suey and Zero Zero. My arguments about the relationship between computer games and traditional backyard "boy culture" formed the basis for an interview with Next Generation magazine which centered around issues of video game violence. In February 2000, the Comparative Media Studies Program hosted a conference, Video and Computer Games Come of Age, which brought together leading figures from the games industry with critics, academics, and the public for two days of intense conversation about the current state and future directions of this emerging storytelling medium. In an essay for Technology Review titled "An Art for the Digital Age," I made the argument that video and computer games constitute a new "lively art." I borrow the concept of "lively art" from Gilbert Seldes, who wrote in the 1920s to put forward the argument that the most important American arts for the 20th century would be popular
arts, such as Hollywood movies, jazz, comic strips, and Broadway musicals. PERMISSIVE CHILD-REARING AND POPULAR CULTURE I am currently considering writing a book-length study of the impact of permissive child-rearing doctrines on post-war popular culture aimed at children. This research has resulted in a series of already published essays examining major landmarks of the period in terms of their relationship to the changing conception of the child. "The Sensuous Child: Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Sexual Revolution" offers a provocative look at changing conception of children's sexuality as reflected in advice to parents on such issues as masturbation, "playing doctor," and parental nudity. It traces the shift from the anti-sensualism associated with the pre-war work of behaviorist William Watson to the celebration of sensuality and exploration of the body associated with the post-war work of Benjamin Spock and others. This essay appears in my collection, The Children's Culture Reader. "'The All American Handful': Dennis the Menace and the Bad Boy Tradition" fits Hank Ketchum's popular comic strip and the television series adaptation within a tradition of writings about bad boys which date back to the 19th century and which provided the culture with a way of exploring its conflicting feelings about masculinity. This essay appears in The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Change. "'Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie" uses the classic children's novel, Lassie Come Home, and its television manifestation to explore the intersection between our sentimental valuation of the dog and of the child. Specifically, I examine moments in the television narrative when Lassie changes ownership as crisis points in the program ideology, exploring how the series negotiates these transitions and how each shift reflects some changes in the core assumptions behind the series. This essay appears in Kid's Media Culture edited by Marsha Kinder. "'No Matter How Small': The Democratic Imagination of Doctor Seuss" examines the ways that shifting post-war assumptions about childhood were linked to larger debates about democracy and represented a domestic extension of the pre-war Popular Front movement. I examine the links between Doctor Seuss's pre-war and wartime activities as an editorial cartoonist for PM and as a propagandist working in the Capra Unit and his post-war writings for children. This essay will appear in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture. CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE The Children's Culture Reader brings together a range of pre-published essays by
social historians, cultural scholars, literary critics, anthropologists, psychologists, and others, mostly centered around the politics of childhood innocence, the construction of children's sexual and gender identities, and the relationship between children's play and children's consumption. The Workbook section reproduces a number of primary documents drawn from child rearing guides from the 1910s-1960s. "The Innocent Child and Other Myths" is the introduction to this collection. Using a consideration of Susan Molinari's address to the 1996 Republican National Convention and Hilary Clinton's speech to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, I demonstrate the complex relationship between the image of the innocent child and adult politics. Then, I offer an overview of the ways that our understanding of the child has shifted across the last five hundred years and the ways that cultural scholars and others have understood the issue of children's cultural and political agency. The pedagogical implications of this work are examined in an essay published in Radical Teacher titled "Empowering Children in the Digital Age: Towards a Radical Media Pedagogy." Here, I argue for a mode of teaching which starts from the assumption that popular culture is a meaningful part of children's lives and that teachers should empower them to more actively manipulate and appropriate its materials as a way of working through their implications for children's everyday lives. Here, I bring together my work on children's culture with my work on cultural appropriation and fandom. The syllabus for my course, "Understanding Children's Fictions," suggests some ways that classroom teachers might encourage students to reflect on the intersection between adult politics and children's culture. [link syllabus here] COLUMBINE AND BEYOND In the wake of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, I was called before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into "Marketing Violence to Youth." My testimony sought to challenge the dominant media effects paradigm and call for a more complex understanding of teen's relationships to popular culture. Testifying before Congress was a harrowing experience, which I described in my essay, "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington," which was widely posted around the web and eventually reprinted in Harpers. I was subsequently asked to write essays for educators, including "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want To Hear About Youth and Media." I participated in many different forums and discussions about this issue, including this exchange with slashdot journalist Jon Katz, which was held at MIT. I also visited high schools across the country to try to better understand teen's relationship to media, distributing this resource guide for teachers. I devoted one of my Technology Review columns to exploring how outcast youth benefit from their time spent in the on-line world, "The Kids Are Alright On-line."
Henry Jenkins
GENDER AND SEXUALITY Our sense of personal identity (gender) and our erotic relations (sexuality) are partially shaped by social and cultural factors, including the representations of gender and sexuality found in mass media and popular culture. Almost from the day I arrived at MIT, I have been deeply involved in the Women's Studies Program. I also served as the acting director of the MIT Gay and Lesbian Studies program for three years. Issues of gender and sexuality have been central to my work, including both my scholarship and my teaching. I have taught two courses specifically in this area -- Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture and Myths of Gender -- Masculinity. MASCULINITY Much of the scholarship in gender studies has emerged from feminist work and has tended to focus on the social construction of femininity and on the limitations that women experience in their professional and personal lives. A growing body of literature, also inflected by feminist theory and politics, has begun to turn the lens in the other direction -- to examine the social construction of masculinity. Many of my essays adopt this approach. Collectively, these essays represent an attempt to map some of the central genres of contemporary entertainment in terms of their often complex and contradictory representations of male identity. "Never Trust a Snake!: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama" uses genre theory to examine the melodramatic dimensions of television wrestling and its "fit" with the social and economic experience of working class American males. Specifically, I draw on the work of Norbert Elias to examine the ways that sports function as an authorized space of male emotional release and to consider the ways that the fictional structure of wrestling makes it especially effective for provoking strong emotions. This essay first appeared in Aaron Baker and Todd Boyd (ed.), Out of Bounds : Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity Because of this essay, I was interviewed for the Canadian documentary, Wrestling With Shadows, which will appear on the Arts and Entertainment Channel this fall. "The Laughing Stock of the City: Male Dread, Performance Anxiety and Unfaithfully
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Yours" examines masculine responses to another genre -- film comedy. One of my few ventures into psychoanalytic theory, I offer an account of the relationship between male identity formation and a dread of women and suggests the ways that comedy may serve useful psychic functions in helping to resolve male fears about their own inadequacies in comparison to our larger-than-life ideals about heroic masculinity. This approach helps me to examine the complexities of Preston Sturge's Unfaithfully Yours and to explain why this film has been widely perceived as an artistic failure. This essay originally appeared in Kristine Karnack and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) Classical Hollywood Comedy. "Dennis the Menace, 'The All-American Handful'" represents the intersection between my work on children's culture and my work on masculinity, examining the narrative tradition of "bad boy" comedy as embodying certain masculine fantasies about escape from matriarchal control and then exploring how the 1950s comic strips and 1960s television series based on Dennis the Menace expressed specific concerns of the postwar generation about fatherhood and domesticity. This essay initially appeared in a slightly edited form in Michael Curtin and Lynn Spigel (Eds.) The Revolution Wasn't Televised:Sixties Television and Social Conflict. "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" examines the ways that contemporary video games build upon traditions of gendered play which emerged in the context of 19th century "Boy Culture." This essay draws on cultural geography, social history, and research on children's literature, to map the spaces open for boys and girls within contemporary video games. It appears in Justine Cassel and Henry Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. For more on this project, see the Children's Culture section. FEMALE COMIC PERFORMANCE Another important strand in my work has dealt with the issue of female comic performance. For a long time, most histories of film comedy made little or no reference to female stars, even though female clowns have surfaced in almost every period of film history. A growing body of feminist scholarship has sought to reclaim these stars and understand how their films allowed an expression of the contradictory attitudes towards femininity at play within the culture. "'Don't Become Too Intimate With That Terrible Woman!': Wild Women, Disorderly Conduct and Gendered Laughter in Early Sound Comedy" looks at the representations of gender relations within the early 1930s films of three comic stars, W.C. Fields, Winnie Lightner, and Charlotte Greenwood. Fields' comedies fit within a larger tradition I call "Comedy of Marital Combat" which reflects male anxieties about the growing authority women exercised in the domestic sphere; Winnie Lightner's films use comic masquerade to express a female resistance to traditional conceptions of
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feminine beauty and compliance; Charlotte Greenwood's So Long Letty turns the "Comedy of Marital Combat" on its head to express why women might not find domestic life so rewarding. This essay first appeared in Camera Obscura and then appeared in my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. "'You Don't Say That in English!': The Scandal of Lupe Velez," written to appear in a forthcoming collection of essays on female comic performance edited by Kristine Karnack, represents a revision and reconsideration of my own earlier work. Specifically, I look at the intersection of race and gender in the films of Lupe Velez, a Mexican-American comic star who is remembered today more for her scandalous life and death than for her screen appearances. I examine the ways that the figure of "the unruly woman" or the "woman on top" helped to naturalize existing prejudices against Mexican-American women, even as it allowed a limit space for women to question socially-sanctioned gender roles. FEMALE AUTHORSHIP "'Compromised Cinema': Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island " examines the space open for female political and aesthetic exploration in the exploitation films produced by Roger Corman in the 1960s and 1970s. Corman offered new filmmakers, including women like Stephanie Rothman, the chance to make films and to express their own perspectives on contemporary society provided they were willing to fulfill the exploitation cinema's expectations of sex, nudity, and violence. Using Terminal Island as a case study, I examine how Rothman was able to make these very elements the central vehicles for expressing her distaste for contemporary gender relations and for exploring utopian fantasies of female empowerment and social transformation. This essay was written to appear in a book on Trash Cinema being edited by Eric Schaeffer. GENDER, SEXUALITY AND INTERPRETATION Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. This book offers an ethnographic perspective on the mostly female fan communities surrounding such popular television series as Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, The Professionals, and Blake's Seven. Specific chapters consider the ways that fan critical practice relate to work done by David Bleich and others on gender and reading; the struggle between Beauty and the Beast fans and producers over the series' generic status as part romance and part action-adventure series; the rewriting of television series through fan fiction and the complex gender and sexual politics surrounding slash, a genre of homo-erotic romance featuring television characters such as Kirk and Spock. I am often asked by people reading or teaching this book where they can find slash. More and more of it is becoming available on the web, though it is often of mixed
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quality. The best website to get started reading on-line slash is Satyricon Au Go-Go. My contributions to Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek continue this exploration of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and interpretation, and include close considerations of the ways female fans rewrite the relationship between Kirk and Nurse Chapel as a way of resolving the program's contradictory attitudes towards the role of women in Star Fleet; the history of the efforts by gay, lesbian, and bisexual fans to lobby for the inclusion of a queer-positive character in Star Trek; and the status of Star Trek at MIT as a means of working through complicated attitudes about the relationship between mind and emotion and for exploring the students' own growing mastery over issues of science and technology. "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking" was an attempt to pull together excerpts from slash fans theorizing about slash writing. So much academic writing has emerged in recent years on the subject of slash, but little of it has been written by participants in this subculture. I wanted to use my access to academic publishing to make the ideas of slash fans more accessible to a broader community. This essay, which I co-edited with Cynthia Jenkins and Shoshanna Green, will appear (someday) in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Eds.) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity. "Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss" offers an overview of the ways that people have theorized audience response to the cinema. At the core of this essay is the close consideration of one fan story which depicts Thelma and Louise as lesbian vampires. I trace how this story might be understood in relation to the original film, its critical reception, the subcultural practices of fandom, and research on queer audiences. This essay was written to appear in a collection on different approaches to film studies being edited by Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill.
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TALES OF MANHATTAN:
MAPPING THE URBAN IMAGINATION THROUGH HOLLYWOOD FILM
By Henry Jenkins False Starts The first chords of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" are heard. The sun glistens over the Manhattan skyscape. The black and white images possess the sheen of old Hollywood glamour photographs. Woody Allen stammers the opening lines: "Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idealized it all out of proportion." Then, he stops, corrects himself, substitutes "romanticized" for "idealized," and continues, "To him no matter what the season, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin." "Ah, No, Let me start this all over." In the opening montage of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), Allen's hesitations, revisions, and contradictions reflect his ambivalence towards New York. Sometimes, Allen emphasizes glamour and romance, sometimes aggravation and self doubt. In one passage, he "thrives on the hustle and bustle of the crowds and the traffic." In another, he is "desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage." Searching for a consistent vantage point from which to capture the totality of Manhattan in a single paragraph, he, of course, is doomed to fail. Allen's ambivalence is reinforced by the images and music. The still photographs, which borrow from classic representations of the city, are only loosely linked to the narration. The Soulvka King and the Empire Diner are treated with the same reverence as Times Square and the Guggenheim. A young couple kiss on a penthouse balcony; two black teenagers shoot baskets in the projects. Allen's narration suggests that the Gershwin soundtrack expresses the protagonist's romanticism, yet "Rhapsody in Blue" also uses jarring bursts of percussion, unanticipated fanfares, and syncopation to express the clashing and contradictory qualities of urban life. Allen makes no effort to coordinate the images and cutting to its rhythms. Only in the final moments do sound and image come together: fireworks burst over the Manhattan skyline and Gershwin's music explodes into a crescendo of clashing cymbals and pounding drumbeats.
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/manhattan.html (1 of 21) [2007-06-28 02:18:49]
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Images of the Cinematic City In his classic study, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch sought to bring to city design an appreciation of the aesthetics of urban experience as a "temporal art," recognizing that our perceptions of the city change and unfold over time. The book opens with an acknowledgment of the complexity and multiplicity of urban life, suggesting that the city can never be reduced to a single stable image but can only be understood in kinetic and dynamic terms: At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequence of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences... Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in meanings and memories...Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all...Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own. While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail. Lynch sought to bring greater clarity and sensuality to our "images" of our native cities and to design urban spaces with more striking features that would enable a more coherent "cognitive mapping" of their basic parameters. At the same time, Lynch recognized that city-dwellers needed to be taught to perceive their cities in new ways. Lynch saw urban studies as a way of building a more educated and appreciative audience for urban design. Lynch recognized that our "images" of cities, then, are partially shaped by formal properties of the cities themselves and partially by the process of perception and interpretation through which we construct mental representations of those properties. In The Image of the City, Lynch is interested primarily in the experiential process by which city dwellers develop a sense of their native turf. However, our mental maps of familiar cities incorporate not only memories of direct encounters but also second-hand experiences gained through mediated interactions with various representations of those cities -- paintings, photographs, written descriptions, films, television programs, and the like. In an oft-cited passage from America, Jean Baudrillard argues that visiting a European city where the urban environment seems to be a "reflection of the paintings" one has just scrutinized in the galleries, while Manhattan "seems to have stepped right out of
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the movies." This impression of Manhattan as a cinematic city is not surprising when one considers that one recent filmography of feature-length movies set in New York City listed more than 500 titles. In many cases, New York simply provides the setting for these films, a convenient and familiar backdrop for the narrative action, but this paper will be more centrally concerned with those cases where filmmakers sought to make movies about Manhattan, trying to give aesthetic shape to their own particular perceptions of America's most famous city. Such an essay can not, of course, exhaust the full range of urban images to circulate in the American cinema, but my goal is to focus attention on a set of aesthetic and ideological problems at the heart of representing the "cinematic city." For Lynch, the "legibility " of a city image was what enabled it to become such a powerful basis for affective associations and metaphoric meanings: "The image of the Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion, greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and reinforces the meaning." The image of a city, for Lynch, must remain "plastic to the perceptions and purposes of its citizens." The "city image" in film, however, already comes to us as interpreted through the powerful creative intelligence of an artist who wants us to see that skyline in a certain way. When Lynch writes about the "image of the city," then, he is primarily interested in formal features that make it harder or easier for us to grasp the city's essential structures, but when we discuss the cinematic image of the city, we are entering a space where formal and ideological issues merge. Reading Lynch from the perspective of someone who studies cinema and not cities, what I find most striking is that he discusses urban form in a vocabulary which closely parallels the ideals of the classically constructed narrative. Lynch, for example, speaks of a "melodic" structuring of landmarks and regions along a succession of paths, which he suggested might follow a "classical introduction-development-climax-conclusion" pattern. Yet, Lynch is acutely aware of the various factors that prevent the city from achieving such a classical narrative form, that disrupt or break down its coherent development or fragment our perceptions of it. An ill-considered development deal may mar the urban landscape, blocking our ability to see important landmarks or to move fluidly between nodes. In one sense, the cinema would seem to be the perfect form to express the dynamic properties of the city, since like urban design itself, cinema is a "temporal art form," but the cinema brings its own expectations about what a classically constructed story looks like -- expectations which urban-based stories often find themselves unable to satisfy. Classically constructed stories remain focused on particular characters, their motives, their goals, their memories, and their experiences. The challenge for the filmmaker is to create a story that situates the individual in relation to the city in such a way that the film preserves what is distinctive about the metropolis -- congestion, simultaneity, heterogeneity, randomness, fragmentation, in short, incoherence. SPATIAL STORIES
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Cultures, Michel De Certeau tells us, construct stories to explain and justify their occupation of geographic spaces, to describe and record their collective journeys and migrations, and to map the boundaries between known and unknown territories. Telling a story is an act of clarification that bestows coherence on ambiguous or ambivalent relationships between people and places. "Every story is a travel story," De Certeau writes, and often, the stories themselves circulate beyond their original cultures, justifying one community to another. The cinema emerged in the midst of a period of dramatic transformation within American culture. The urban population of the United States quadrupled in the forty years between 1870 and 1910. The cinema helped the United States to negotiate the tensions and uncertainties surrounding its transition from a predominantly pastoral society to a predominantly urban and suburban one. From the start, the American cinema was closely associated with the urban experience. The earliest films often documented a moment in time at a specific location, facilitating a process of virtual tourism. In Europe, such films typically linked colonial powers with the far-flung reaches of their empires. In the United States, cinema brought images of the emerging American metropolis to the hinterlands. Exhibition was the central economic force behind the vertically-integrated studio system which dominated American film production from the 1920s until the late 1940s. For the five major studios, their primary exhibition revenue came from the urban hubs where they owned almost all of the theaters. Rural and hinterland audiences were secondary markets. Urban markets determined what films would be made and what aesthetic sensibilities would dominate the American film industry. Consequently, the majority of Hollywood films of the studio era centered on urban experience, albeit with a certain nostalgia for America's pastoral past. The Hollywood cinema explained to city-dwellers the nature of their own experience and transmitted traces of that experience to a broader population being gradually absorbed into urban areas. Such films spoke to both immigrants from other countries who were hoping to better understand their new life in America and migrants from rural areas who were hoping to accommodate themselves to their new urban homes. This is not to say that the American cinema offered a coherent or totally accurate picture of urban life. Urbanization provoked highly charged and often deeply ambivalent feelings even for -- or perhaps especially for -- those who lived in New York or Los Angeles. Many were horrified by mass culture given the prevailing ideology of rugged individualism. Often, they came to the city seeking a social mobility and personal freedom they could not enjoy in the villages where their families had lived for generations. However, they also feared the alienation and isolation of inhabiting a world of strangers and they felt buffeted by the rapid pace and fragmented nature of modernity. Hollywood's spatial stories gave expression to both these utopian and dystopian impulses, seeking to reconcile them through a more totaling account of
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the city. Though our contemporary relationships to the city are dramatically different from those that shaped these earlier spatial stories, the genre conventions that emerged during this important transitional period continue to exert a powerful influence over subsequent representations. Contemporary artists give new form to their perceptions of urban life, but often, they do so in dialogue with these earlier representations. They quote them, as Allen does in Manhattan when he evokes a succession of classic photographs representing the New York skyline, or they rewrite them, as we will see in the example of Dark City, which merges the visual vocabulary of the film noir tradition with more contemporary science fiction trappings. For those reasons, any attempt to understand the contemporary cinematic city must always position those representations in relation to earlier images. PANORAMIC PERSPECTIVES Early writers emphasized the fragmentation and constant sensory bombardment of city life, traits that they felt resulted in perpetual disorientation and confusion. The cinema was the ideal apparatus for recording the diversity of urban experience. Cinema was an art form based on sequencing and juxtaposing image fragments to construct a more meaningful whole. Cinema could give shape to collective experience, while retaining the particularity of individual narratives. Margaret Cohen has argued that the cinema's synthesizing function was prefigured by a 19th century French genre of popular writings, which she calls "Panoramic Literature." Rather than telling a single story about fictional characters and their experiences, such works sought to tell the collective story of the city. Panoramic works create a composite account which combines written descriptions and narratives with various graphic representations, including maps, charts, cartoons, etchings, and photographs. Panoramic literature sought to record and classify all aspects of everyday experience. Cohen notes, "Panoramic texts evince a characteristic narrational mode: They are composed of micro-narratives with no direct continuity from plot to plot." Often, panoramic works had multiple authors, each writing in different genres with different styles and tones. The cinema absorbed many of these panoramic impulses, constructing a moving record of everyday life. Many early films were literally panoramas, offering views out the windows of streetcars, views pointing into busy intersections, views looking off rooftops. These films encourage a pleasure in scanning the image and observing ordinary interactions. An evening's entertainment at the movies, which might be composed of short comedies, dramas, documentaries, travel films, and the like, was itself a composite picture of turn-of-the-century life, though gradually, the feature film with its classically constructed narrative replaced "the cinema of attractions". Some later American films still adopted this panoramic structure, bringing together stories by
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multiple authors through some unifying structure based on thematic associations or movements through space. Tales of Manhattan (Julian Duvivier, 1942) uses the improbable circulation of a dress coat to link a series of short stories by some of the period's top screenwriters (including Ben Hect, Donald Ogden Stewart, Alan Campbell, and Lamar Trotti). The coat takes us from the arts world (worn by Charles Laughton as a struggling concert conductor or Charles Boyer as a successful Broadway star) to the shanty town inhabited by a group of black sharecroppers. The stories range from the broadly comic (W.C. Fields as a charlatan temperance lecturer) to the tragic (Edgar G. Robinson as a down-and-out man who dresses up to attend his college reunion). From the 110th Floor: Of course, the use of the term, panoramic, is misleading. These works were less panoramas than collages, composite pictures taken from multiple perspectives in which each element maintains some degree of separation from the others. Such works value diversity rather than coherence. A panorama, on the other hand, creates a totalizing perspective that integrates a wide array of elements into a single vista. What often gets lost in a panorama is the particularity of individual experiences. In his essay, "Walking in the City," Michel De Certeau describes the experience of observing Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center. New York City unfolds around him like a panorama. His vantage point flattens the city into geometric patterns devoid of human activity: Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of a sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The giant mass is immobilized before the eyes. De Certeau is fascinated with the false sense of totality ("seeing the whole") created by this panoramic perspective: "To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp." We build our modern towers of Babel not to reach the sun, he suggests, but rather to see and know the urban world below us. One of the ways that this desire is fed is through the production and circulation of picture postcards which reproduce this "celestial" view of the city and make it available to many who have never visited the top of the World Trade Center. Architectural critic Alvin Boyarsky has examined picture post cards as a conventional system for representing urban life, suggesting that they adopt a pictorial vocabulary that has remained relatively unchanged for more than sixty years and that varies only
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minimally from city to city. The postcard embraces an ideology of urban progress, celebrating the man-built environment. Each postcard offers an emblematic image of the city, encapsulating the visit and allowing its transmission to those back home. The postcard, thus, depends on monumentalism, translating the cluttered urban environment into "sights" that can be isolated and recorded, dropped in the mail or plastered in scrapbooks. The most characteristic vantage points on New York City include civic landmarks photographed from a low-angle position, the skyline itself viewed from a boat in the harbor or across one of the bridges, or the aerial perspective looking down on the city streets. The focus is mostly on architecture, not people (except as parts of crowds). The art of the cinema is not the art of the postcard. Cinema's focus is on movement, juxtaposition, and narrative, not static, emblematic, or monumental images. The cinema can not remain in the clouds, if it wants to tell the stories of those who walk below. Yet, the opening montage in Manhattan draws liberally on the postcard's visual repertoire. Allen situates his actors against the backdrops of familiar New York landmarks -- Diane Keaton and Woody Allen watch the sunrise over the Brooklyn Bridge; they have a spat amid the planetarium's alien moonscape. A more complex play between "celestial" and more earthly perspectives can be found in Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story (1961),one of the first Hollywood musicals to make extensive use of location shooting. The film opens with a sequence of spectacular helicopter views looking down on the island of Manhattan. From such heights, we can see cars and buildings, but no people. However, we hear faint echoes of whistling and snapping fingers. A series of shots brings the camera closer to the ground to show us a group of teenagers loitering in a vacant lot. The scale of the film has shifted. We are now on ground level, inhabiting turf contested by the Jets and the Sharks. The camera toys with the spectator, making dramatic shifts in shot scale, swish panning from location to location, often racking focus or zooming out midshot to show unanticipated aspects of the image. The moment one side dominates a shot, suddenly the other appears from off-camera, moving in from the left and the right, or even from above and below the original framing and the power dynamic shifts. In a few moments, the film maker moves us from the skies to the streets and it is this shift that enables the story to begin. The shift also represents a move from a "unified" conception of the city to one that sees the urban sidewalks as a space being actively contested between recent immigrants and longer-term residents, one segregated by race, class, gender and nationality as well as a set of borderlands where different communities come together. From the Sidewalk: West Side Story prefigures De Certeau's own shift in focus. If the viewer standing atop the World Trade Center remains "alien" to the inhabited world below, those who walk the streets become active participants. Though individually "illegible," the aggregate of many such movements constitutes the story of urban life:
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The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. Such uncoordinated movements, De Certeau argues, can not be adequately expressed through abstractions, whether those of the artist or the urban planner: Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. De Certeau argues for a sociology that respects these "singularities" rather than searching for a totaling account. The opening of Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories (1989) explores these "qualitative" differences in ways of moving through the city, representing Manhattan from a pedestrian's perspective. An initial montage shows the morning migrations of urban office workers, a mass of people pushing their way down the sidewalk, pouring out of the subway or waving frantically for taxi cabs. Three men arrive at the same cab seconds apart. They each grab at the door and try to push the others away. When one of them gets into the back seat, the others seize him by his legs and yank him out again. The rapid cutting between different images and the monumental music express the stress and tension of rush hour traffic. Here, Lane self-consciously echoes a justly famous montage sequence from Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), which compared the crowds shoving onto the subway to a flock of sheep being herded into the stockyards. The rhythms of Lane's cutting and music shift as we pick up the trajectory of an aged street person pushing a shopping cart full of belongings. The takes become longer, preserving the slower pace of his footsteps. Deep-focus compositions position him against other unfolding narratives, as he moves past bodies sleeping on the streets and people rummaging through trash cans. Our eye strays to observe a series of street performers, lingering long enough to appreciate their acts, before the tracking shot takes us a little further through Washington Square. In each case, the music shifts tone and genre to reflect the performers' individual sensibilities. Lane constructs a powerful class-based contrast between the urban environment as experienced by those who move with purpose and those who wander because they have no home and no job. As De Certeau suggests, the pedestrian's movements are unpredictable and shadowy,
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following no fixed trajectory, indifferent to the intended flow of traffic or the desired use of space. "To walk," De Certeau suggests, "is to lack a place." Lane builds his contemporary silent comedy, in the tradition of Chaplin, around such local acts of appropriation and disruption, seeing the homeless as the protagonists of their own stories living in the "shadows" of the great public drama of work life. From a Lower Balcony: Between the streets and the skies, there are many other perspectives, which offer a middle ground between alien abstraction and intimate involvement. The choice de Certeau poses for us, between "voyeurs and walkers" is, in some sense, a false one, though as we will see, middle level generalizations are often difficult to convert into spatial stories. In "Seen From the Window," Henri Lefebvre describes what he observes from his lower balcony. Lefebvre's perch is much closer to the street than De Certeau's, allowing him some distance from individual pedestrians and yet enabling him to focus on the rhythms and patterns of collective movement. He has not lost touch with human scale, experiencing the city not as a static spectacle but as a series of intersecting narratives. From the opening paragraphs, LeFebvre is interested in the process of perception and interpretation: Noise. Noises. Rumors. When rhythms are lived and blend into another, they are difficult to make out. Noise, when chaotic, has no rhythm. Yet, the alert ear begins to separate, to identify sources, bringing them together, perceiving interactions....Over there, the one walking in the street is immersed into the multiplicity of noises, rumors, rhythms...But from the window noises are distinguishable, fluxes separate themselves, rhythms answer each other. He wants to document different durations of time, ranging from the intervals between green and red lights to the cyclical shifts from morning to night, as they influence the activity in the streets. LeFebvre's essay ends with the suggestion that the rhythms of the city are "much more varied than in music"; "no camera, no image or sequence of images can show these rhythms. One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a memory, a heart." LeFebvre sees perception and interpretation as active processes that can not be readily separated from their contexts. A similar fascination sparked a genre of documentary films known as "City Symphonies." As that designation suggests, the central metaphors running through Manhattan (Paul Strand, 1921), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttman, 1927), or Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) are musical; these films orchestrate the rhythms of urban experience. Often, like LeFebvre, these film makers were fascinated with the cyclical quality of a day in the life of a great city, starting at dawn and ending after dark, showing patterns of collective movement often invisible to individuals focused only on personal goals and activities. Empty streets come to life, fill with people, and then empty again at the end of the day. Berlin and the other city
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symphonies represent collective patterns of work, eating, recreation, and rest, built up from single images which themselves express individual or particularized experiences. These images purposely cut across class distinctions, bring together many different occupational groups, mix and match men and women. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) is a contemporary city symphony, set to Philip Glass's minimalist music. Koyaanisqatsi contrasts the gradual rhythms of the natural world with the frantic pace of modernity, seeing urban life as "crazy life...life in turmoil...life out of balance... life disintegrating." Reggio uses stop-motion photography to accelerate the action. A huge pile of newspapers evaporates in a matter of seconds. Subways become hives of insects as mobs of people flit from place to place. The flow of traffic becomes a throbbing pattern of light surging through urban arteries. Strategic juxtapositions create a succession of analogies between the population flow along crowded sidewalks and the flow of hot-dogs down a conveyer belt. Its pixilated images involve a play with perception as we struggle to focus on individuals, to sort out specific actions from the pulsating rhythms of the mass. Periodically, Reggio slows down the motion to offer portraits of individuals, looking like squirrels caught in headlights. In the film's final moments, the shot of a city taken from outer space is compared with the microscopic surface of a computer circuit, each indecipherable and yet clearly structured. The film wants us to perceive this acceleration of modern perceptual experience as horrific. Yet, there is a haunting beauty about Reggio's images, such as a giant moon flowing rapidly across the nighttime sky or the glistening lights of cars whizzing along the freeway. We are fascinated by the city's ordered but relentless rhythms. From the Pages of a Guidebook: City symphonies existed on the fringes of the narrative cinema. Their abstraction from individual human experience meant that they did not fit comfortably within the character-centered storytelling associated with the Classical Hollywood Cinema. How do we move from large scale structures focused on collective activity to more personal stories that still express something of the complexity and heterogeneity of urban life? One common structure for spatial stories centers around the tour. Looking at the city through a visitor's eyes helps us to recognize distinguishing characteristics that we ignore in our daily lives. We underestimate the cities where we live, never able to see them with the wonderment that bring tourists to see the sights. One function of spatial stories is to transform the city from a mundane space into a fantastic one, but the tour structure carries its own dangers. Tour guides lead us around by the nose and often do not leave us open to spontaneous discoveries or personal experiences. They prescribe where we should look and what we will see. They reduce the city to its landmarks. "What can happen in one day," a construction worker asks the trio of sailor boys on leave in On The Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949) and as if to answer that question, the next number, "New York, New York," compresses an entire tour of the
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city into a three minute segment. Each shot shows a different location and a different mode of transportation, as the boys race each other across the Brooklyn Bridge, ride horse drawn carriages, take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, point at the sites through the roof of taxi cabs, take the subway, gallop on horseback, whiz by on bikes. As the story unfolds, we learn that Chip (Frank Sinatra), who has never been anywhere but Peoria, has structured the whole day -- in fifteen minute increments - according to his grandfather's 1905 guidebook. The guidebook represents one way of organizing the eclectic experiences of the Metropolis, designating a series of sights worthy of particular notice (because, as De Certeau suggests, they are "believable," "memorable," or "primitive") and structuring a route between them that lends coherence and purpose to the day. The guidebook fails Chip in two important ways. First, it does not capture the protean quality of the city. Many of the landmarks he hopes to see -- the Hippodrome, the Floradora Girls -- have been displaced by more contemporary attractions. As the female taxicab driver explains, "A big city changes all the time." Instead, she offers him "the one thing that doesn't change" -- the experience of love and romance. He wants to see the Flatiron Building and she wants to get him back to her place. And this suggests the other way that the guidebook fails him -- displacing the personal, particularized narratives of individuals with totalizing, abstracted representations of the city. In disgust, she protests in a later scene, "whisper sweet nothings in my ear like the population of the Bronx or how many hot-dogs were sold in the last fiscal year at Yankee Stadium." Only when Chip tosses his dated guidebook off the ledge of the Empire State Building does he enjoy Manhattan's real pleasures. Long before Chip rejects his guidebook, On the Town abandons his itinerary for another route through New York City -- one determined by Gabey (Gene Kelly) and his search for the girl of his dreams. The musical maps the city's heterogeneity onto the composite figure of "Miss Turnstiles," this month's poster girl for the subway system: "She's a home loving girl but she loves high society's whirl. She loves the army but her heart belongs to the navy. She's studying painting at the museum and dancing at Symphonic Hall." And she has the one trait that allows her to perfectly personify Manhattan -- she wasn't born there. In fact, she comes from Gabey's own hometown, Meadowville. Despite his friends' constant claims that it is impossible to find one girl among the multitudes, Gabey keeps running into and losing her again and his pursuit takes him through the city's museums, concert halls, high rises, and nightclubs. Here, the shared experience of the guidebook tour gives way to the particularized goal of the search. Both offer the potential stories which center around movements through space but one focuses on the individual experience while the other foregrounds the collective. Both depend on the act of looking: one an act of looking at, the other an act of looking for. From the Countryside: Not surprisingly, a large percentage of Hollywood's spatial stories center around visitors who come to the city from regional cities like Peoria,
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small towns like Meadowville (On the Town), Mapletown (The Clock) or Glenwood Falls (The Out-of-Towners) or from the countryside. Often, such films build a thematic opposition between town and city which is closely modeled on Ferdinand Tonnies's classic distinction between Gemeinschaft (Community) and Gesellschaft (Society). Phillip Kasinitz provides a useful summary of these concepts: For Tonnes, Gemeinschaft is a type [of] social solidarity based on intimate bonds of sentiment, a common sense of place (social as well as physical), and a common sense of purpose. Gemeinschafts, he argues, are characterized by a high degree of face-to-face interaction in a common locality among people who have generally had common experiences.... In a Gesellschaft, in contrast, relationships between people tend to be impersonal, superficial and calculating, and selfinterest is the prevailing motive for human action. Social solidarity is maintained by formal authority, contracts and laws. These differences surface especially powerfully in the silent cinema, when the American people were still adjusting to the new centrality of urban life to their national culture. Such a distinction structures, for example, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). A woman from the city comes to the country on vacation and destabilizes the relationship between a farmer and his wife. The city woman is depicted as operating outside the shared moral norms of the rural community. She has little respect for the institutions that hold the community together. She is soon the subject of gossip, one of the mechanisms which Tonnies argues help to enforce the stability of the Gemeinschaft by creating sanctions against the violation of its norms. The seductive and socially fragmenting force of the city is vividly represented in one of the film's key moments as the city woman urges the farmer to murder his wife and run away with her. She writhes in her slinky black dress as she describes to him the temptations and sensations of the city and images of urban nightlife (city skylines, bright lights, jazz bands) appear behind her almost as if they were projected onto a movie screen. Murnau uses camera movements, superimposition, and layered images to convey something of the heterogeneity, intensity, and fragmentation of the Gesellschaft. The farmer's wife, by contrast, is a plain, simple woman who loves her husband and remains faithful to him, despite his infidelities. When she visits the city, she is drawn towards simple pleasures, such as watching the church wedding of a young couple or getting a photograph taken with her spouse. She is suspicious of the easy, informal social relations of the city, anxiously eyeing the manicurist who trims her husband's nails. The city is full of threats and seductions that can destroy a marriage; they both are eager to return home to the country. The story is a familiar one -- the farm couple comes to the city, takes in its sights, and then returns back home where they belong. In Neil Simon's The Out-of-Towners (1970), George (Jack Lemmon), a small town businessman, comes to New York City
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with his wife, Glen (Sandy Dennis) for a job interview. George and Glen have big plans for how they will enjoy their night on the town, but all of their plans go awry. Before the night is over, George and Glen stand, shivering, starving, and desperate, in a New York Police Station. "We were in a hold-up. We might have been killed," Glen proclaims, but they have great difficulty holding the attention of the police officer on duty. The sanitation strike which has left the city piled high with garbage has at last been settled, they are told, but now the milkmen have gone out. A horde of people all press towards the desk, each with their own stories of crime, woe, and distress, each interrupting with their own demands for resolution and assistance. Gwen is herself distracted, worrying about everyone's problems but her own: "I know what you're going through," she explains, which is, of course, literally true. George and Gwen's troubles stem from their assumption that their experiences matter when the city operates on the basis of statistics, not individuals. One missed train, one lost piece of luggage, one mislaid hotel reservation, one stolen wallet, one important business transaction amount to little. There are too many people, too many problems, for city services to respond to any of them. And, George can only react by trying to order the events by preparing for a law suit, taking down names, making a list of grievances, as if the whole experience were one great conspiracy against him. He screams to the skies, "You're just a city. Well, I'm a person and a person is stronger than a city. You're not getting away with anything. I have all your names and addresses." In the end, the couple finds they have no place in the city and they go back home to the Midwest, a region with a stronger sense of human proportion. On a Street Corner: Gemeinschaft, as Tonnes describes it, has many of the familiar features of a classically constructed narrative -- a unity of time and place, a consistency of viewpoint, a shared goal, a relatively limited cast of characters. In fact, to illustrate the social relations that arise in such a culture, Tonnes constantly evokes plots that have long been building blocks of the western storytelling tradition -- stories of the relationship between generations, between father and son, between siblings, between husbands and wives, between neighbors. In such a world, relationships are defined through their continuity and reciprocity, the intensity and permanence of the emotional investments we make in other community members. Relationships within a Gesellschaft culture, on the other hand, are "transitory and superficial"; people have many more social encounters in such a world but they do not cohere into a consistent narrative, because they do not demand the same emotional investments and thus do not leave lasting imprints. Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931), which is based on a stage play by Elmer Rice, was a bold experiment in narrative form because it attempts to create a plot structure appropriate for a Gesselschaft culture. Set on a tenement block, the film's opening scenes have little or no consistent focus. Children play in the streets. Neighbors linger on their stoops, shout from window to window, come and go along the sidewalks. Their conversation shifts from topic to topic. They get into arguments that reflect their
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conflicting moral codes. Vidor captures the seeming randomness of Rice's plot with fluid camera movements that sweep the space, following dialogue from window to window, or tracking down the street with one character and then pivoting and tracking back with another.[fig.10] Within these early scenes, there are many potential plots -- a woman cheating on her husband, a young couple awaiting a birth, a family about to be evicted because they can no longer pay their bills, a sister worried about her brother. In one shot, the camera pans across adjacent windows that reveal residents shaving, dressing, stretching and exercising, bouncing their babies, hanging the laundry, applying make-up. Each neighbor seems totally unself-conscious about the close proximity of the others. Only late in the film does a single plotline dominate: a husband returns home unexpectedly and catches his wife in the arms of her lover; he murders her and the entire community is drawn into the investigation and its aftermath. Street Scene signals its sudden shift in plot structure by altering its editing style -- from long-takes and camera movements to close-ups and rapid editing. A succession of reaction shots show the startled and alarmed people as they witness the acts of violence or run down the street to see what has happened. Then, finally, the camera pulls back to show the entire city block mobbed with people. The multiplicity of urban life coheres into a narrative only when disaster occurs. Even then, coherence is provisional. Soon, attention will be drawn elsewhere. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) could almost be understood as an attempt to update Street Scene. Rice and Vidor documented the cultural conflicts that arose within a multicultural neighborhood as waves of immigration were changing the character of life on the Lower East Side. Street Scene's Jews, Italians, Irish, and Swedes watch each other with suspicion, debate religious and social values, hurl ethnic slurs, but somehow co-exist on the same block. They constitute a community, despite their differences. Do the Right Thing is about the uneasy compromises that enable life to continue in a multiracial Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Through a series of vividly drawn vignettes, Spike Lee moves us beyond sociological generalizations to more directly experience the emotional investments various characters make in having their own "place" in this evolving community. Who speaks for this community? The hot-tempered "Buggin' Out," the sputtering Smiley with his photocopied images of great black leaders, the dignified but drunk "mayor," the fast-talking disc-jockey Senior Love Daddy, the wise crone Mother Sister, or the pragmatic and unreliable Mookie? Each has a chance to articulate BedStuy's values, but Spike Lee offers us little way of reconciling their contradictory assumptions. The neighborhood seems constantly on the verge of racial conflict, as Sal's son resents having to work on "the planet of the apes," Buggin' Out demands that there should be pictures of "brothers" on the restaurant's wall of fame, the old black men who sit on the street corner sputter with rage over Korean immigrants buying up
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business in their neighborhood, Radio Rasheim's rapping Boombox tries to drown out his Hispanic neighbor's salsa, and the locals feud with a Celtics supporter who has invested in an old "brownstone" on their block. At one dramatic moment, the story stops altogether as Lee shows us one character after another hurling racial epithets directly into the camera in a montage sequence that traces the cycle of hate and bigotry. As individuals, these people can form friendships, make moral and personal distinctions, find ways to relate to each other, even parent children together. But, as representatives of their own racial communities, they can only fight for space and seethe over historic injustices. Lee's film, no less than Street Scene, depends upon a nostalgia for an organic community whose ties extend across generations and beyond cultural boundaries. Sal evokes such a vision of Bed-Stuy when he describes the experience of owning his own restaurant there for decades: "I watch the little kids grow old and the old people grow older...They grow up on my food." Lee calls attention to the affection that Sal has for Mookie and his sister and the friendship between Mookie and Sal's younger son. He depicts Sal as someone who has learned to compromise to avoid conflict and who respects the hierarchy of the community. Yet, Lee has little faith that these kinds of sentimental attachments can transcend society-wide racial conflicts, which are evoked moments later by a shot of graffiti scrawled on the side of the wall, "Tawana told the truth," or by the images of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that Smiley peddles in the street. When violence erupts, the incidents are pulled into the history of police brutality against black defendants. There is an eerie familiarity to the moment when the firemen turn their hoses off the blaze and direct them against the community members who have gathered to watch Sal's place burn to the ground. No less than Rice and Vidor, Lee wants to use this street corner society as a microcosm to speak about the larger history of urban America. Much as in Street Scene, the opening moments of Do The Right Thing are episodic, with their focus shifting from one vivid character to another, until we know our way around Lee's fully drawn and richly populated milieu. And much like Street Scene, the film builds towards a moment of violence when all of the various characters and their stories come together. The violence in Street Scene was personal -- a jealous husband murders his wife -- though in the tightly-woven communities of the Lower East Side, it is impossible to extract oneself fully from your neighbor's business. The violence in Do the Right Thing is collective and political. No one can remain neutral, as becomes clear as the spiritual Mother Sister shouts for her neighbors to "burn it down" and then, moment later, cries with horror at the destruction that has been unleashed. In the end, personal loyalties matter little. Mookie, who Sal described as "a son," smashes a trash can through the pizzeria window. But, racial loyalties are of vital importance; the Korean grocer shouts over and over, "I no white. You, Me, the Same," trying to close ranks against the Italians while preserving his own precarious status in the neighborhood. All social ties are temporary, unstable. The story of the city is being re-negotiated along the
Henry Jenkins
borderlands where different racial groups come together or break apart. At the Train Station: Train stations are narrative nexuses where paths cross and new relationships are formed. What happens within such spaces depends heavily upon chance, upon the random ebb and flow of urban traffic. People are brought together and they are separated. Yet, in the hands of an artist, such flux can become meaningful. The risk, of course, is that the characters will be swamped by the bustle surrounding them. A train pulls into Penn Station at the opening of Vincente Minelli's The Clock (1945) and a mob of people disembark. Among them is Joe (Robert Walker), a serviceman on leave. When he stops beside an escalator to read his newspaper, Alice (Judy Garland), an attractive office worker, trips over him and breaks the heel of her shoe. They meet and fall in love. Later, the couple gets separated at Grand Central Station. Pushing through an indifferent mob, Alice gets on a subway train and Joe doesn't. They still don't know each other's names and have no way of finding each other again. When Alice seeks advice at the local USO club or when Joe asks a newspaper stand owner whether he saw a girl get off a train, they are met with incredulousness: "I see a thousand girls get off trains." All girls look alike to the man who sells the papers; but only one girl will do for the soldier in love. Yet, despite all the odds, they do find each again and the closing moments of the film bring them back to Penn Station once more - now a young married couple separating for the first time. The camera pans slowly past the people awaiting their trains. A father clutches his newborn baby. Elderly mothers hold onto their servicemen sons. A husband discusses last minute details of family business. An old officer bids farewell to his wife, a young black man to his father, and young lovers kiss one last time. But, in each cluster, there is at least one person who is serving his country and all of them are saying goodbye. What brings the young lovers together again is not so much chance as predestination. From its beginnings, the classical Hollywood cinema was suspicious of the arbitrariness of chance and coincidence. Ideally, its stories were structured around wellmotivated causal event-chains. Conventions mandated that each event should be linked, logically and inextricably to all those that come before and all of those that follow it. In romantic comedy, however, causality often gives way to predestination. Some couples are made for each other and will be united, one way or another. The more daunting the obstacles in True Love's path, the more inevitable the coupling seems. Consequently, the city becomes the ideal setting for romantic comedy - one that translates chance encounters into inevitable romances, provides appropriate backdrops for courtship, and contrasts the intimacy between the lovers with the alienation of urban culture. Though the enormity of Manhattan constantly threatens to engulf them, their love story stands out against the hurried backdrop of New York's various
Henry Jenkins
terminals. But this "city of strangers" can just as readily lend itself to erotic nightmares. In Martin Scorsese's black comedy, After Hours (1985), a young adventurer encounters a mysterious woman at an all-night Laundromat and gets pulled into her story, venturing into Soho during the wee hours of the morning. However, nothing coheres or makes much sense in this farce about contemporary urban alienation. As one character warns him, "different rules apply when it gets this late." A series of random encounters with eccentric women strips him step by step of all the trappings of his identity - his wallet, his car keys, his clothing, even his hair (punk rockers threaten to give him a Mohawk). An emblem of the role of happenstance in the film, the twenty dollar bill he is clutching blows out the window of the fast-moving cab leaving him no way to pay his tab and no way to get back home. Later in the film, the bill ends up plastered onto a sculpture he encounters in his ramblings. Everything seems connected to everything else, but not in predictable ways. Everything that happens is subject to multiple interpretations and our protagonist usually misunderstands what is happening to him. He spots a group of Hispanic men struggling with a television set, which he assumes must be stolen. When he screams, they drop it and run away, which convinces him that he has foiled a crime in progress. It turns out that both men are normally criminals but they have actually bought this set: "See what happens when you pay for stuff." As the night unfolds, he finds himself under suspicion for local break-ins, chased through the streets by an angry mob. An artist's sketch of his face is plastered on every telephone post. Robbed of his identity, he has no way to free himself from their unjust suspicions. Lost in a strange neighborhood, he has no friends or families he can draw upon for support or assistance. Through the Rear-View Mirror: Hollywood's spatial stories repeatedly tell us that we are a product of the spaces we inhabit. As we move through the city, we do not remain separate from it; the city becomes a part of us, alters our behavior, redefines our identities. In Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle's eyes pear intently into the rear view mirror. Rain splatters on the windshield and the wipers swish it away. The street outside is a neon blur. Red and blue flashing lights illuminate the human figures that bob in slow motion along steamy streets. And the taxi cab scurries about the city, picking up passengers and dropping them off. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver risks incoherence in trying to tell the story of a man who sees everything and understands little, who is constantly in movement and yet moves without purpose. "I go all over," he tells us, "It doesn't make any difference to me." The world as seen from the mirror of Bickle's cab is a lonely place full of lonely people, and he holds it in horror and contempt: "All of the animals come out at night..." He imagines the approaching apocalypse: "Some day a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets." Bickle becomes, in Scorsese's film, the personification of New York - sometimes romantic, sometimes brutally violent. Bickle embodies the random events and unstable
Henry Jenkins
social relations of urban culture, constantly shifting his goals and tactics. The parts only come together retrospectively, when his violent impulses are redirected from his plans to assassinate a presidential candidate and towards the task of rescuing a young prostitute. He shoots his way into the brothel, leaving a path of bloody bodies, sitting in a dazed and confused state until the police arrive to take him away. None of this makes any sense. For the newspapers, however, Bickle has become a hero. The eyes of New York are upon him. By the film's closing images, all of coherence has broken down into a fragmented, almost cubist image, which recalls the stylized and subjective representations of New York that Frank Stella created in the 1920s and 1930s. We see the world partly through his front windshield, partially through his rearview mirror. The scene is almost abstract, flashes of light and color that sometimes take shape into something we recognize, but more often remain blurry and indistinct. Anticlimax: Hollywood's spatial stories struggle to balance their utopian and dystopian conceptions of the city, their belief in urban progress and their anxiety about the collapse of old social institutions. The film artists try to reconcile their focus on the totality of the urban environment and their fascination with the complex interplay between multiple experiences. Such tensions run through our attempts to theorize the city and to give it aesthetic form. The forces shaping urban experience are complex, multidirectional, transient, and often totally invisible. Nevertheless, we imagine urban life as controlled by secret societies, hidden forces, conspiracies, smoke-filled rooms. The current popularity of conspiracy theories in popular culture suggests our compelling need to personify the governing forces behind urban life and our fear that they may not be directly observed or readily mapped. Dark City (Alex Prokas, 1997) offers a noir-ish vision of the postmodern city, depicting urban space as an incomprehensible maze. The city is mutating before our eyes. Nothing remains the same; nothing matters. Yet, Prokas suggests, the city follows a secret logic; its citizens are manipulated by hidden forces. The Dark City is not New York, not any place in particular. It has been, we have been told, "fashioned on stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one." Dark City makes stunning use of morphing to literally restructure the city before our eyes. We watch new buildings rise from the concrete. Old buildings grow window ledges, expand into domes. While the city sleeps, dark hooded figures creep among us, changing our clothes, imprinting new memories, moving us from place to place, so that when we awake we are enmeshed in a different life, become part of an alternative narrative. Our memories are distilled, "mixed like paints," and then re-injected into us, offering no reliable way of understanding who we are and what is happening to us. As one of the characters explains, "They steal people's memories and swap them between us -- back and forth, back and forth -- until nobody knows who he is anymore." The protagonist awakens, naked and without any memories, conscious while others sleep,
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observing but not fully comprehending other people's behavior as he pears through their windows. His search for an explanation is mirrored by the detectives and their serial murder investigation (which may or may not lead back to him). In a classic noir, the detective was a lone individual who understood better than anyone else the code of the city. His search for truth promised to untangle the web of relationships that link the story's various characters. In the neo-noir Dark City, the detectives do not have a clue; they have no hope of finding answers. One detective has been driven mad by the complexity of this city, scrawling endless spirals and scribbling cryptic words on his apartment walls. "I've been spending time in the subway, riding in circles, thinking in circles. There's no way out. I've been over every inch of the city." Though he never understands what he has discovered, his circles do contain the pattern that holds all of this together, linking an early shot of rats being run through a circular maze with the great clock which controls the waking and sleeping of the citizens and with our final image of the city -- a spiral of skyscrapers arranging on a flat surface floating in the vast emptiness of space. But there is a conspiratorial logic here. The city is controlled by the Strangers, who personify de Certeau's "alien" or "celestial" perspective. They are hooded figures with featureless faces and bald heads; they are interchangeable, sharing a collective memory. They are the very embodiment of urban experience as a totality, of a deterministic logic that allows little or no room for particular experience. Through a process of experimentation, they hope to understand the individuality that makes us human. They are the ones who move the hands of the clock, who set the rhythms of urban experience. If there is, in the end, a story of the city, they are its authors and its architects. They, alone, enjoy absolute mobility -- they dwell in secret places underneath the city; they can walk among us without being seen; they can hover over the city streets peering down at the pedestrians. Dark City, thus, uses the struggle against the Strangers to personify the core conflicts that have run through this essay -- the conflict between abstraction and particularity, between the city understood as a totality or as heterogeneity, between the urban environment experienced as ordered or as random and chaotic. What this paper has described is the struggle to give shape and form to urban experience, to find its rhythms, map its labyrinthian streets, record its protean activities, and give it an cohesive identity. This project has inspired -- and arguably, defeated - the imagination of America's greatest filmmakers. The story of the city can't be told - at least not as a totality. There is no structure, no coherence, only simultaneous activities, people walking down sidewalks, pushing their way onto subway trains, standing in their windows, waiting impatiently at police stations, wandering aimlessly through museums, pursuing their own particular paths without regard to each other. There is no single vision which can express and contain our complex and contradictory feelings
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towards the American metropolis. There are only ways of seeing, only provisional vantage points which offer a succession of near perfect images of urban life. Kevin Lynch arrived at almost the same place. There is a curious passage near the end of The Image of The City where Lynch tries to imagine an alternative form that might preserve his own sense of the multiplicity of urban meanings and experiences while achieving the legibility and clarity that was central to his aesthetic conception of the city. For a few paragraphs, Lynch imagines the city as given ideal expression in a multilinear and polysequential form. Though Lynch would not have had access to the analogy in 1959, Lynch imagines something akin to hypertext: Intuitively, one could imagine that there might be a way of creating a whole pattern, a pattern that would only gradually be sensed and developed by sequential experiences, reversed and interrupted as they might be. Although felt as a whole, it would not need to be a highly unified pattern with a single center or an isolating boundary. The principal quality might be sequential continuity in which each part flows from the next -- a sense of interconnectedness at any level or in any direction. There would be particular zones that for any one individual might be more intensely felt or organized, but the region would be continuous, mentally traversible in any order. This possibility is a highly speculative one: no satisfactory concrete examples come to mind. Lynch seems to suggest that the city itself might be structured as a hypertext, but suppose that the hypertext gave us a more perfect representation of the city precisely because it was multilinear and interactive. Suppose a future artist were to construct such a hypertext, one in which the four million stories that O. Henry imagined in New York City were all recorded, and viewers could traverse each narrative and observe their points of intersection and digression. Suppose we could represent at once the abstract patterns of movement and the particular journeys, searches, and tours that motivated individual experience. Suppose the structuring elements of this hypertext were Lynch's various paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, the features around which so many spatial stories arise and play themselves out. Suppose this artist were to construct the perfect model of the urban experience, one that was truly totalizing in its perspective. Could we as spectators comprehend such a story? Would we have time or the interest to experience the complex interweavings of its various plot strands? Could we feel its rhythms and witness the unfolding of random chance, romantic predestination, and urban indifference? Could we stand over the sum total of human experience as if it were a panorama or a picture postcard? This would be a truly celestial --and inhuman -- perspective.
Henry Jenkins
The All American Handful
Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington By Henry Jenkins
This is the story of how a mild mannered MIT Professor ended up being called before Congress to testify about "selling violence to our children" and what it is like to testify. Where to start? For the past several months, ever since my book, from Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games appeared, I've been getting calls to talk about video game violence. It isn't a central focus of the book, really. We were trying to start a conversation about gender, about the opening up of the girls game market, about the place of games in "boy culture," and so forth. But all the media wants to talk about is video game violence. Here is one of the most economically significant sectors of the entertainment industry and here is the real beach head in our efforts to build new forms of interactive storytelling as part of popular, rather than avant-garde, culture, but the media only wants to talk about violence. These stories always follow the same pattern. I talk with an intelligent reporter who gives every sign of getting what the issues are all about. Then, the story comes out and there's a long section discussing one or another of a seemingly endless string of anti-popular culture critics and then a few short comments by me rebutting what they said. A few times, I got more attention but not most. But these calls came at one or two a week all fall and most of spring term. Then, with the Littleton shootings, they increased dramatically. Suddenly, we are finding ourselves in a national witch hunt to determine which form of popular culture is to blame for the mass murders and video games seemed like a better candidate than most. So, I am getting calls back to back from the LA TIMES, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Village Voice, Time, etc., etc., etc. I am finding myself denounced in The Wall Street Journal op-ed page for a fuzzy headed liberal who blames the violence on "social problems" rather than media images. And, then, the call came from the U.S. Senate to see if I would be willing to fly to Washington with just a few days notice to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee hearings. I asked a few basic questions, each of which feared me with greater dread. Turned out that the people testifying were all anti-popular culture types, ranging from Joseph Lieberman to William Bennett, or industry spokesmen. I would be the only media scholar who did not come from the "media effects" tradition and the only one who was not representing
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popular culture as a "social problem." My first thought was that this was a total setup, that I had no chance of being heard, that nobody would be sympathetic to what I had to say, and gradually all of this came to my mind as reasons to do it and not reasons to avoid speaking. It felt important to speak out on these issues. A flashback: When I was in high school, I wore a trenchcoat (beige, not black), hell, in elementary school I wore a black vampire cape and a medallion around my neck to school. I was picked on mercilessly by the rednecks who went to my school and I spent a lot of time nursing wounds, both emotional and some physical, from an essentially homophonic environment. I was also a sucker for Frank Capra movies -- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington most of all -- and films like 1776 which dealt with people who took risks for what they believed. I had an amazing high school teacher, Betty Leslein, who taught us about our government by bringing in government leaders for us to question (among them Max Cleveland, who was then a state legislature and now a member of the Commerce Committee) and sent us out to government meetings to observe. I was the editor of the school paper and got into fights over press censorship. And I promised myself that when I was an adult, I would do what I could to speak up about the problems of free speech in our schools. Suddenly, this was a chance. I also had been reading Jon Katz' amazing coverage on the web of the crackdown in schools across America on free speech and expression in the wake of the shootings. Goth kids harassed for wearing subcultural symbols and pushed into therapy. Kids suspended for writing the wrong ideas in essays or raising them in class discussions. Kids pushed off line by their parents. And I wanted to do something to help get the word out that this was going on. So, it didn't take me long to say yes. I was running a major conference the next day and then I would have one day to pull together my written testimony for the Senate. I didn't have much in my own writings I could draw on. I pulled together what I had. I scanned the web. I sent out a call for some goth friends to tell me what they felt I should say to Congress about their community and a number of them stayed up late into the night sending me information. And I pulled an all-nighter to write the damn thing that was really long because I didn't have time to write short. And then, I worked with my colleague, Shari Goldin, to get it proofed, edited, revised, and sent off to Congress. And to make arrangements for a last minute trip. When I got there, the situation was even worse than I had imagined. The Senate chamber was decorated with massive posters of video game ads for some of the most violent games on the market. Many of the ad slogans are hyperbolic -- and selfparodying -- but that nuance was lost on the Senators who read them all dead seriously
and with absolute literalness. Most of the others testifying were professional witnesses who had done this kind of thing many times before. They had their staff. They had their props. They had professionally edited videos. They had each other for moral support. I had my wife and son in the back of the room. They are passing out press releases, setting up interviews, being tracked down by the major media and no one is talking to me. I try to introduce myself to the other witnesses. Grossman, the military psychologist who thinks video games are training our kids to be killers, won't shake my hand when I wave it in front of him. I am trying to keep my distance from the media industry types because I don't want to be perceived as an apologist for the industry -- even though, given the way this was set up, they were my closest allies in the room. This is set up so you can either be anti-popular culture or pro-industry and the thought that as citizens we might have legitimate investments in the culture we consume was beyond anyone's comprehension. The hearings start and one by one the senators speak. There was almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats on this one. They all feel they have to distance themselves from popular culture. They all feel they have to make "reasonable" proposals that edge up towards censorship but never quite cross the constitutional lines. It is political suicide to come out against the dominant position in the room. One by one, they speak. Hatch, Lieberman, Bennett, the Archbishop from Littleton.... Bennett starts to show video clips which removed from context seem especially horrific. The fantasy sequence from The Basketball Diaries reduced to 20 seconds of Leonardo DiCaprio blasting away kids. The opening sequence from Scream reduced to its most visceral elements. Women in the audience are gasping in horror. The senators cover their faces with mock dread. Bennett starts going on and on about "surely we can agree upon some meaningful distinctions here, between Casino and Saving Private Ryan, between The Basketball Diaries and Clear and Present Danger..." I am just astonished by the sheer absurdity of this claim which breaks down to a pure ideological distinction that has neither aesthetic credibility nor any relationship to the media effects debate. Basketball Diaries is an important film; Clear and Present Danger is a right wing potboiler! Scorsese is bad but Spielberg is good? Meanwhile, the senators are making homophobic jokes about whether Marilyn Manson is "a he or a she" that I thought went out in the 1960s. These strike me as precisely the kind of intolerant and taunting comments that these kids must have gotten in school because they dressed differently or acted oddly in comparison with their more conformist classmates. By this point, we reach the hour when the reporters have to call in their stories if they are going to make the afternoon addition and so they are heading for the door. It's down to the C-Span camerawoman and a few reporters from the game industry trade press.
And then I am called to the witness stand. Now, the chair is something nobody talks about. It is a really, really low chair and it is really puffy so you sit on it and your butt just keeps sinking and suddenly the tabletop is up to your chest. It's like the chairs they make parents sit in when they go to talk to elementary school teachers. The Senators on the other hand sit on risers peering down at you from above. And the whole power dynamics is terrifying. Grossman starts to attack me personally, claiming that a "journalism" professor and a "film critic" have no knowledge of social problems. It takes me a while for the attacks to sink in because they are so far off the mark. I am not a journalism professor and I am not a film critic. I am a media scholar who has spent more than 15 years studying and writing about popular culture and I do think I have some expertise at this point on how culture works, how media is consumed, how media panics are started, how symbols relate to real world events, how violence operates in stories, etc., etc. And that's what I was speaking about. I am doing OK with all of this. I am surprisingly calm while the other people speak, and then Senator Brownback calls my name, and utter terror rushes through my body. I have never felt such fear. I try to speak and can hardly get the words out. My throat is dry. I reach for a glass of water and my hands are trembling so hard that I spill water all over the nice table. I am trying to read and the words are fuzzing out on the page. Most of them are handwritten anyway by this point because I kept revising and editing until the last minute. And I suddenly can't read my writing. Cold sweat is pouring over me. I have visions of the cowardly lion running down the halls in OZ escaping the great blazing head of the wizard. But there's no turning back and so I speak and gradually my words gain force and I find my voice and I debating the congress about what they are trying to do to our culture. I take on Bennett about his distorted use of The Basketball Diaries clip; explaining that he didn't mention this was a film about a poet, someone who struggles between dark urges and creativity, and that the scene was a fantasy intended to express the rage felt by many students in our schools and not something the character does, let alone something the film advocates. I talked about the ways these hearings grew out of the fear adults have of their own children and especially their fear of digital media and technological change. I talked about the fact that youth culture was becoming more visible but its core themes and values had remained pretty constant. I talked about how reductive the media effects paradigm is as a way of understanding consumer's relations to popular culture. I attacked some of the extreme rhetoric being leveled against the goths, especially a line in TIME from a GOP hack that we needed "goth control" not "gun control." I talked about the stuff that Jon Katz had been reporting about the crackdown on youth culture in schools across the country and I ended with an ad-libbed line, "listen to your children, don't fear them." Then, waited.
The Senator decided to take me on about the goths, having had some staff person find him a surprisingly banal line from an ad for a goth nightclub which urged people to "explore the dark side." And I explained what I knew about goths, their roots in romanticism and in the aesthetic movement, their nonviolence, their commitment to acceptance, their strong sense of community, their expression of alienation. I talked about how symbols could be used to express many things and that we needed to understand what these symbols meant to these kids. I spoke about Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience as a work that spoke to the current debate, because it spoofed the original goths, the Aesthetics, for their black garb, their mournful posturing, and said that they were actually healthy and well adjusted folks underneath but they were enjoying playing dark and soulful. The Senator tried repeating his question as if he couldn't believe I wasn't shocked by the very concept of giving yourself over to the "dark side." And then he gave up and shuffled me off the stand. The press warmed around the anti-violence speakers but didn't seem to want to talk to me. I just wanted to get out of there. I felt no one had heard what I had to say and that I had been a poor messenger because I had stumbled over my words. But several people stopped me in the hallway to thank me. And dozens more have sent me e-mail since having seen it on C-Span or heard it on the radio or seen the transcript on the web or heard about it from friends. And suddenly I feel better and better about what had happened. I had spoken out about something that mattered to me in the halls of national power and people out there had heard my message, not all of them certainly, but enough. I know the fight isn't over -- at least I hope it isn't. There will be more chances to speak, but I felt like I had scored some victory just by being there and speaking. Someone wrote me that it was all the more powerful to have one rational voice amid a totally lopsided panel of extremists. People would see this was a witch hunt of sorts. I'd like to believe that. The key thing was that I got a statement into the record that was able to say more than I could in five minutes and people can now read it on the web. What follows is the text of my oral remarks that are rather different from the written statement because I was still doing research and writing on the airplane. I am Henry Jenkins, Director of The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. I have published six books and more than fifty essays on various aspects of popular culture. My most recent books, The Children's Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games deal centrally with the questions before this committee. I am also the father of a high school senior and the house master of a MIT dormitory housing 150 students. I spent my life talking with kids about their culture
and I have come here today to share with you some of what I have learned. The massacre at Littleton, Colorado has provoked national soul searching. We all want answers. But we are only going to find valid answers if we ask the right questions. The key issue isn't what the media are doing to our children but rather what our children are doing with the media. The vocabulary of "media effects," which has long dominated such hearings, has been challenged by numerous American and international scholars as an inadequate and simplistic representation of media consumption and popular culture. Media effects research most often empties media images of their meanings, strips them of their contexts, and denies their consumers any agency over their use. William Bennett just asked us if we can make meaningful distinctions between different kinds of violent entertainment. Well, I think meaningful distinctions require us to look at images in context, not looking at 20 second clips in isolation. From what Bennett just showed you, you would have no idea that The Basketball Diaries was a film about a poet, that it was an autobiographical work about a man who had struggled between dark urges and creative desires, that the book on which it was based was taught in high school literature classes, and that the scene we saw was a fantasy which expressed his frustrations about the school, not something he acts upon and not something the film endorses. Far from being victims of video games, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had a complex relationship to many forms of popular culture. They consumed music, films, comics, videogames, television programs. All of us move nomadically across the media landscape, cobbling together a personal mythology of symbols and stories taken from many different places. We invest those appropriated materials with various personal and subcultural meanings. Harris and Klebold were drawn toward dark and brutal images that they invested with their personal demons, their antisocial impulses, their maladjustment, their desires to hurt those who had hurt them. Shortly after I learned about the shootings, I received e-mail for a 16 year old girl who shared with me her web site. She had produced an enormous array of poems and short stories drawing on characters from popular culture and had gotten many other kids nationwide to contribute. Though they were written for no class, these stories would have brightened the spirit of writing teachers. She had reached into contemporary youth culture, including many of the same media products that have been cited in the Littleton case, and found there images that emphasized the power of friendship, the importance of community, the wonder of first romance. The mass media didn't make Harris and Klebold violent and destructive and it didn't make this girl creative and sociable but it provided them both with the raw materials necessary to construct their fantasies.
Of course, we should be concerned about the content of our culture and we all learn things from The mass media. But popular culture is only one influence on our children's imaginations. Real life trumps media images every time. We can shut down a video game if it is ugly, hurtful, or displeasing. But many teens are required to return day after day to schools where they are ridiculed and taunted and sometimes physically abused by their classmates. School administrators are slow to respond to their distress and typically can offer few strategies for making the abuse stop. As one Littleton teen explained, "Everytime someone slammed them against a locker or threw a bottle at them, they would go back to Eric and Dylan's house and plot a little more." We need to engage in a rational conversation about the nature of the culture children consume but not in the current climate of moral panic. I believe this moral panic is pumped up by three factors. 1) Our fears of adolescents. Popular culture has become one of the central battlegrounds through which teens stake out a claim on their own autonomy from their parents. Adolescent symbols from zoot suits to goth amulets define the boundaries between generations. The intentionally cryptic nature of these symbols often means adults invest them with all of our worst fears, including our fear that our children are breaking away from us. But that doesn't mean that these symbols carry all of these same meanings for our children. However spooky looking they may seem to some adults, goths aren't monsters. They are a peaceful subculture committed to tolerance of diversity and providing a sheltering community for others who have been hurt. It is, however, monstrously inappropriate when GOP strategist Mike Murphy advocates "goth control" not "gun control." 2) Adult fears of new technologies. The Washington Post reported that 82 percent of Americans cite the Internet as a potential cause for the shootings. The Internet is no more to blame for the Columbine shootings than the telephone is to blame for the Lindbergh kidnappings. Such statistics suggest adult anxiety about the current rate of technological change. Many adults see computers as necessary tools for educational and professional development. But many also perceive their children's on-line time as socially isolating. However, for many "outcasts," the on-line world offers an alternative support network, helping them find someone out there somewhere who doesn't think they are a geek. 3) The increased visibility of youth culture. Children fourteen and under now constitute roughly 30 percent of The American population, a demographic group larger than the baby boom itself. Adults are feeling more and more estranged from the dominant forms of popular culture, which now reflect their children's values rather than their own. Despite our unfamiliarity with this new technology, the fantasies shaping contemporary video games are not profoundly different from those that shaped
backyard play a generation ago. Boys have always enjoyed blood and thunder entertainment, always enjoyed risk-taking and rough housing, but these activities often took place in vacant lots or backyards, out of adult view. In a world where children have diminished access to play space, American mothers are now confronting directly the messy business of turning boys into men in our culture and they are alarmed at what they are seeing. But the fact that they are seeing it at all means that we can talk about it and shape it in a way that was impossible when it was hidden from view. We are afraid of our children. We are afraid of their reactions to digital media. And we suddenly can't avoid either. These factors may shape the policies that emerge from this committee but if they do, they will lead us down the wrong path. Banning black trenchcoats or abolishing violent video games doesn't get us anywhere. These are the symbols of youth alienation and rage -- not the causes. Journalist Jon Katz has described a backlash against popular culture in our high schools. Schools are shutting down student net access. Parents are cutting their children off from on-line friends. Students are being suspended for displaying cultural symbols or expressing controversial views. Katz chillingly documents the consequences of adult ignorance and fear of our children's culture. Rather than teaching children to be more tolerant, high school teachers and administrators are teaching students that difference is dangerous, that individuality should be punished, and that self expression should be constrained. In this polarized climate, it becomes IMPOSSIBLE for young people to explain to us what their popular culture means to them. We're pushing this culture further and further underground and thus further and further from our understanding. I urge this committee to listen to youth voices about this controversy and have submitted a selection of responses from young people as part of my extended testimony. Listen to our children. Don't fear them.
Contacting The Past
Contacting the Past: Early Radio and the Digital Revolution

by Henry Jenkins 1,482 words posted: december 3, 1997
The recent science fiction film, Contact, opens with a dramatization of how sound waves travel through space. As the camera pulls back through our solar system, the soundtrack goes back into time, past landmark moments in the history of broadcasting -- the release of the Iran Hostages, All in the Family, The Beatles, Milton Berle, the end of World War II, FDR's fireside chats -- and then, the silent void of space. The sounds of silence, in this case, mask the erasure of history. The casual viewer of the film might assume radio begin sometime in the late 1920s and early 1930s, already operating within a national system of commercial broadcasting. What we didn't hear were thousands of overlapping voices as amateur radio operators shouted their call letters and their messages into home-made crystal sets. What we didn't hear were the dots and dashes made by Marconi and countless other experimenters, amateur and professional, who perfected the technology. Contact, a corporate product, makes it impossible to imagine radio outside corporate control. Perhaps, the filmmakers concluded that such sounds would be too arcane for a mass audience, confusing rather than illuminating. Yet, this erasure of broadcast history is perplexing when you consider how often Contact returns to the image of ham radio, although its operators are more interested in communicating with the dead or with space aliens than with each other. In choosing not to reference the era of amateur radio, Contact lost the chance to increase public awareness of an age when participatory radio was the norm, rather than a marginal recreation.
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Widespread ignorance of this history has tremendous consequences at the present moment. Once again, we are discussing the prospects of utopian or apocalyptic change wrought by an emerging communications technology -- in this case, digital media. Once again, we are seeing the potential for a broad-based participatory medium, and once again, we run the risk of losing it all to corporate interests. The digital revolution, we are told, will enable us to participate in virtual communities which overcome the alienation and isolation of contemporary urban life. The digital revolution will facilitate participatory democracy. The digital revolution will sweep aside the gatekeepers, allowing free expression and broad access to information. The digital revolution will free us from national governments; we are now citizens of the "global village" or free minds afloat in cyberspace. We live in an age where our ideas are evaluated on their own merits, not on the basis of visual markers like age, gender, race, or personal appearance, a world where nobody knows you're a dog. We can all find a home on the net, some place where everyone knows your name. This is the world according to Wired and Mondo 2000. Or alternatively, the digital revolution will destroy the American home, as our innocent children are exposed to video game violence, pornography and cybersex. The digital revolution will isolate us from real world communities and real world politics; cyberspace is a nether world of illusionism, fraud, and escapism. The digital revolution will destroy the rational culture of the book and replace it with the chatter of second-rate minds. This the world according to Time, Newsweek and CNN. Everywhere we turn, the digital revolution has been met with sensationalism and overstatement; rarely has it been confronted with much historical consciousness. If we are going to chart a middle path between utopianism and media-bashing, if we are going to make meaningful predictions about digital media's actual impact, if we are going to make intelligent decisions about its regulation and its financing, if we are going to take full advantage of its potential for community-building, political activism, knowledge transfer, and self expression, then we
Contacting The Past
need to study the past. We can't just talk about interactive technologies; we need to know more about human interactions with technologies.
Here, at MIT, we need to be engaged in a systematic dialogue among historians, humanists, and social scientists knowledgeable about media's past and those who are imagining, designing, and building media's future. That means, we need to find ways around the great divide between the "two cultures," between science and engineering on one side and the humanities, arts, and social sciences on the other. The two guys on the MIT seal -- one holding the book, the other holding tools --need to turn around and talk with each other! The challenges confronting us are both technological and cultural, matters of hardware and software and matters of community and democracy, and we are not going to respond adequately to those challenges unless we take both sides seriously. If we look to the past, we will discover that the same social, political, cultural and economic impulses that are fueling the digital revolution sparked most previous communications revolutions. As the North American continent was settled, we required technologies that met the challenge of reaching out and communicating with other Americans across massive distances. Americans demanded participation in the political and cultural debates shaping their democratic republic. And, they wanted contact with the mother countries they left behind. Radio was one of many communication technologies promoted as bringing the world into our parlor. From the start, radio was sold as a participatory medium; many assumed there would be as many transmitters as receivers. Radio would enable everyday citizens to communicate their ideas, feelings, and experiences; it would would give rise to a new and more democratic culture. Early advocates like Hugo Gernsback spun elaborate fantasies about a world radically transformed through better communications and transportation. Many built their own crystal sets and joined an expanding amateur radio culture. Much as we now talk of "surfing the web," they spoke of "fishing the ether," bringing in remote signals, listening to faraway conversations, and participating in geographicallydispersed communities. From 1906 to 1912, amateur use
Contacting The Past
dominated the technology, with the airwaves literally clogged with signals. Problems arose, with pranksters tapping into government or military communications channels, transmitting false information, or assuming fake identities, and there was growing concern about radio's moral content. The more one reads about the amateur radio culture of the early 1900s, the more strongly one sees parallels with the cyberculture of the late 20th century.
Learning more about this history can help us to identify the forces which caused a dramatic shift in radio's use from a grassroots medium to a more centralized system of commercial broadcasting. By the early 1920s, radio was dominated by two national networks -- NBC and CBS -- which still rule television today. Many factors contributed to this change, including increased government regulation of the airwaves intended to secure governmental and military communications during World War I and, then, to protect the growing interests of the broadcast companies. The attractiveness of radio as a means of spreading advertising messages also played a central role in displacing its grassroots use. Most consumers found it easier to buy sparkling clean radio receivers, made to look like nice furniture, rather than to build their own transmitters, and they were content to listen to entertainment and news, rather than engage in conversation. Our contemporary talk radio may be the last vestige of this earlier participatory ideal. There are early warning signs that something similar might happen to digital culture -- the overloading of AOL, the Communication's Decency Act, increased government interest in regulating cyberspace, the growth of push-advertising, and the development of low cost technologies which enable us to point-and-click but not to type (great for home shopping, poor for cyber democracy). While we've been busy celebrating the net's participatory dimensions, corporate mergers concentrated most of our national media resources -- newspapers, radio stations, television networks, cable outlets, film production companies, etc. -- in the hands of four or five major multinational conglomerates such as Viacom and Warners Communications Inc. This media concentration expands the rule of cultural gatekeepers over what messages get into broad circulation, even if we can now speak back in cyberspace.
Contacting The Past
I don't mean to sound like a prophet of doom. Many factors indicate that the digital revolution will have a more enduring social, cultural, and political impact than the amateur radio movement did. Yet, ignorance, apathy, and self-confidence blind us to real threats to maintaining a broad-based participatory media. MIT needs to take the lead in educating not only our own community but the broader public about the emerging digital culture and its historical context. Students who would like to know more about these issues are encouraged to enroll in a new HASS-D subject, 21L:015 Introduction to Media Studies, which examines the social, cultural, and political impact of communications technologies from Homer to cyberspace. All members of the MIT community are encouraged to learn more about media studies through a year-long series of events, including speakers, conferences, film screenings, and readings by noted science fiction writers, sponsored by the Media in Transition Project and funded by the Markle Foundation.
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Saturday, February 3 8:30 - 9 am Bldg. 51 9 -10:15 am Wong Aud.
Registration in Ting Foyer, Bldg. 51 EMERGING MODELS OF LEARNING Keynote: Chris Dede, Harvard GSE, Next Generation "Virtual Environment" Technologies for Enhanced Learning
10:15 -10:45 am (Rooms to be assigned)
Conference divides into discussion sessions led by:
Jo-Ann Castano, Castano Design Associates, Encouraging Women in Technology Mary Hopper, CMS visiting scholar, and Ralph Summer, Saluda Elementary, S.C., Where's the Media? Models for Creating and Distributing Teacher- and Student-Made Digital Media Mark Kelsey and Kris Kay, Cambridge Community TV (CCTV) Howard Lurie, Facing History and Ourselves, Facing History on the Web
10:45 - 10:55 am
Break
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10:55 -11:25 am 11:25 - 11:35 am 11:35 am - 12:30 pm Wong Aud. 12:30 -1:30 pm Ting Foyer 1:30 - 2:45 pm Wong Aud.
Rotate discussion sessions Break General discussion Bag lunch MEDIA LITERACY Keynote: Bonnie Bracey, George Lucas Foundation
2:45 - 3:15 pm (Rooms to be assigned)
Conference divides into discussion sessions led by:
Jerry Crystal, Carmen Arace Middle School, Bloomfield, CT, The Three Ts of Cyberethics in Schools Mark Destler, Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) Mary Leyden, Bernardston Elementary, MA, Candid Candidates Vera L. Walker, Xavier University, LA, What a Tangled Web We Weave: Media Literacy, Symbol Systems and Learning
3:15 - 3:25 3:25 - 3:55 pm 3:55 - 4:05 pm 4:05 - 5 pm Wong Aud. 5 - 5:15 pm
Break Rotate discussion sessions Break General discussion Break
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5:15 - 6:30 pm Wong Aud.
Screening of student-produced films
Henry Jenkins
"THE INNOCENT CHILD AND OTHER MODERN MYTHS" by Henry Jenkins INTRODUCTION In the Summer of 1996, the Democratic Party held its presidential nominating convention in Chicago and the Republican Party held its convention in San Diego. Both gatherings focused as much on childhood and the family as on tax cuts or other traditional issues. The Republicans wanted to overcome the gender gap, while the Democrats wanted to show they still felt our pain after Clinton's support for devastating welfare cutbacks. Neither could resist the attractions of the innocent child. Both conventions offered classic stagings of parental concern. Susan Molinari, Congresswoman from Queens, presented the Republican keynote address, speaking as a misty-eyed and perky young "mom" about how her daughter's recent birth had refocused her political priorities. Network camera crews dutifully provided close-ups of her husband and her father hugging the newborn. After the speech, they brought the baby, Susan Ruby, to the podium for her mother to hold before the cheering crowds. The cameras were equally obliging when the first lady, Hillary Clinton, addressed the Democratic convention several weeks later. Hillary and her handlers hoped to shift public attention from her controversial role in shaping health care policy onto her more traditional concern for America's children. When she spoke about the nation as a "family," the camera consistently showed the first daughter, Chelsea as visible proof of Hillary and Bill's success as parents. These close-ups of Susan Ruby and Chelsea rendered explicit the implicit politics of these occasions, giving us concrete images to anchor more abstract claims about childhood and the family. Both Susan and Hillary gained authority from their status as "moms" and both supported their agendas by referencing their children. While their political visions were dramatically different, the images of children they evoked, and the rhetorical purposes they served, were remarkably similar. Both Molinari and Clinton tapped into an established mythology of childhood innocence in the late 20th
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century. The myth of childhood innocence, as James Kincaid notes, "empties" the child of its own political agency, so that it may more perfectly fulfill the symbolic demands we make upon it. The innocent child wants nothing, desires nothing, and demands nothing -- except, perhaps, its own innocence. Kincaid critiques the idea that childhood innocence is something pre-existing - an "eternal" condition -- which must be "protected." Rather, childhood innocence is a cultural myth that must be "inculcated and enforced" upon children. This dominant conception of childhood innocence presumes that children exist in a space beyond, above, outside of the political; we imagine them to be noncombatants who we protect from the harsh realities of the adult world, including the mudsplattering of partisan politics. Yet, in reality, almost every major political battle of the 20th century has been fought on the backs of our children, from the economic reforms of the Progressive Era (which sought to protect immigrant children from the sweatshop owners) and the social readjustments of the Civil Rights Era (which often circulated around the images of black and white children playing together) to contemporary anxieties about the digital revolution (which often depicts the wide-eyed child as subject to the corruptions of cybersex and porn websites). The innocent child carries the rhetorical force of such arguments; we are constantly urged to take action to protect our children. Children also have suffered the material consequences of our decisions; children are the ones on the front lines of school integration, the ones who pay the price of welfare reform. We opportunistically evoke the figure of the innocent child as a "human shield" against criticism. Until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics of the child. Like everyone else, we have a lot invested in seeing childhood as banal and transparent, as without any concealed meanings of the sort that ideological critics might excavate, as without any political agency of the kinds that ethnographers of subcultures document, as without any sexuality that queer and feminist critics might investigate. Carey Bazalgette and David Buckingham identify a "division of labor" within academic research, which subjects youth culture to intense sociological scrutiny while seeing childhood as a fit subject only for developmental psychology. Children are understood as "asocial or perhaps, pre-social," resulting in an emphasis on their "inadequacies," "immaturity" and "irrationality," on their need for protection and nurturing. Because developmental psychology focuses on defining and encouraging "normative" development, it does not provide us tools for critiquing the cultural power invested in childhood innocence. Sociological critics focus on the "deviance" and "destructiveness" of youth cultures, their "irresponsibility" or the "rituals" of their subcultural "resistance." While we often celebrate the "resistant" behaviors of youth cultures as subversive, the "misbehavior" of children is almost never understood in similar terms. This historic split has started to break down over the past five or six
Henry Jenkins
years, as more and more cultural scholars examine childhood. This marginalization effects not only how we understand the child, its social agency, its cultural contexts, and its relations to powerful institutions but also how we understand adult politics, adult culture, and adult society, which often circles around the specter of the innocent child. The Children's Culture Reader is intended to both explore what the figure of the child means to adults and offer a more complex account of children's own cultural lives. Given the wealth of material about childhood which has emerged in sociology, anthropology, pedagogical theory, social and cultural history, women's studies, literary criticism, and media studies in recent years, it seems important to identify what this collection won't do. It will not be a collection of essays centered primarily around issues of motherhood, fatherhood, adult identities, pedagogy, schooling, advertising, media reform, mass marketing, computers, public policy and the like, though all of these topics will be explored in so far as they impact contemporary and historical understandings of childhood. A surprising number of the essays written about children's media, children's literature, or education manage not to talk about children or childhood at all. The essays in The Children's Culture Reader, on the other hand, will be centrally about childhood, about how our culture defines what it means to be a child, how adult institutions impact on children's lives, and how children construct their cultural and social identities. This book is not intended as a guidebook for media and social reformers, not a series of attacks on the corrupting force of mass culture on children's lives. Rather, it will challenge some key assumptions behind those reform movements, rejecting the myth of childhood innocence in order to better map the power relations between children and adults. This book avoids texts that see children primarily as victims in favor of works that recognize and respect their social and political agency. Some may question the "political stakes" in studying the child, especially in moving beyond powerful old binarisms about adult corruption and victimized children. Such myths have survived because they are useful, useful for the left as well as for conservative and patriarchal agendas. At a time when Republican crime bills would try children as adults and toss them into federal prisons or when we want to motivate state action against child abuse, images of innocent and victimized children are our most powerful weapon. Yet, the right increasingly draws on a vocabulary of child protection as the bulwark of their campaign against multiculturalism, feminism, Internet expression and queer politics. Any meaningful political response to this conservative agenda must reassess childhood innocence. In this introductory essay, I outline work on children's culture across a range of
Henry Jenkins
disciplines and suggest some of this research's implications for thinking about contemporary cultural politics. In doing so, I will identify what I see as three major strands in recent writings about childhood: (1)the examination of the meanings which children carry for adults; (2)historical research into our shifting understanding of the relations between children and adults; and (3)studies of children as cultural and social agents. Each of the next three sections of this introduction takes one of those strands as its central focus. In the closing section, I return to the question of the politics of childhood and outline some of the implications of this research. Too often, our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults. Such a conception of the child dips freely in the politics of nostalgia. As Susan Stewart suggests, nostalgia is the desire to recreate something that has never existed before, to return to some place we've never been, and to reclaim a lost object we never possessed. In short, nostalgia takes us to never-neverland. This book assumes that childhood is not timeless, but rather subject to the same historical shifts and institutional factors that shape all human experience. Children's culture is not the result of purely top-down forces of ideological and institutional control, nor is it a free space of individual expression. Children's culture is a site of conflicting values, goals, and expectations. As Henry Giroux has argued: "Children's culture is a sphere where entertainment, advocacy and pleasure meet to construct conceptions of what it means to be a child occupying a combination of gender, racial and class positions in society." Children, no less than adults, are active participants in that process of defining their identities, though they join those interactions from positions of unequal power. When children struggle to reclaim dignity in the face of a schoolyard taunt or confront inequalities in their parents' incomes, they are engaged with politics just as surely as adults are when they fight back against homophobia or join a labor union. Our grownup fantasies of childhood as a simple space crumbles when we recognize the complexity of the forces shaping our children's lives and defining who they will be, how they will behave, and how they will understand their place in the world. PART ONE
THE "FORT" AND THE "VILLAGE": THE POLITICS OF FAMILY VALUES
"The child was there waiting...defenseless and alluring, with no
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substance, no threatening history, no independent insistences. As a category created but not occupied, the child could be a repository of cultural needs or fears not adequately disposed of elsewhere.... The child carries for us things we somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes anxieties we want to be divorced from and sometimes pleasures so great we would not, without the child, know how to contain them." -- James Kincaid. In this section, I will examine the convention speeches of Molinari and Clinton as embodying different ideological strategies for mobilizing the figure of the innocent child. For Hillary Clinton, the child represents our "bridge to the 21st century," the catalyst transforming uncontrollable change into meaningful progress, while for Susan Molinari, the child represents our link to the past, carrying forth family tradition and "the American Dream" in a troubled world. For Clinton, the child is a figure of the utopian imagination, enabling her to conceive of a better world -- a new "village" -that must be built in the present. For Molinari, the child is a figure of nostalgic remorse, whose violated innocence demands that parents "hold down the fort" against contemporary culture. But, both women, in Kincaid's sense, use their children to "carry things." As Kincaid acknowledges, the very impermanence of childhood, its status as a transitional (and fragile) moment in our life cycle, enables many different symbolic uses: "Any meaning would stick but no meaning would stick for long." Often, in our rhetoric, the child embodies change, its threat and its potential. The child, both literally and metaphorically, is always in the process of becoming something else. As Kincaid writes: "If the child had a wicked heart from birth, that heart could be ripped out and a new one planted there in no time. If the child was ignorant, that wouldn't last long; if disobedient, there was always the whipping cure; if angelic, death would take him or, more likely, her; if loved or loving, that too would pass." Childhood -- a temporary state -- becomes an emblem for our anxieties about the passing of time, the destruction of historical formations, or conversely, a vehicle for our hopes for the future. The innocent child is caught somewhere over the rainbow -between nostalgia and utopian optimism, between the past and the future. The American (Heterosexual) Dream Within the Republican ideology of family values, the innocent child is most often figured in relation to the past, threatened by the prospect of unregulated change, endangered by modernity, and denied things previous generations took for granted. Molinari told how her grandfather had "bundled up a young son and left Italy in search of a dream," an "American dream," which "passed down" from generation to generation, until "a seat in a Queen's barbershop led to a seat in the U.S. Congress."
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Her "American dream" was, at core, the story of heterosexual courtship and reproduction: "find a job, marry your sweetheart, have children, buy a home and maybe start a business and in the process, always build a better life for your children." This "American" dream has become harder to achieve in the face of crippling taxes and other assaults upon the family. Far from an incidental detail, the child surfaces here both as a reward for living the right life and as a responsibility heterosexuals bear. Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men offers a somewhat more critical account of this 1950s era version of the "American dream." Psychological discourse of the period made the reproductive imperative not only a social obligation but a test of maturation and sexual normality. Getting married and having children became one of those things "mature," "normal" adult men were expected to do, while the failure to father was seen as evidence of maladjustment, immaturity, and often, homosexuality. Ehrenreich notes, "fear of homosexuality kept heterosexual men in line as husbands and breadwinners; and, at the same time, the association with failure and immaturity made it almost impossible for homosexual men to assert a positive image of themselves." If having children became proof of mature heterosexuality, then, it is hardly surprising that the reverse -- the prospect of homosexuals having access to children - was regarded as a horrifying contamination. While Ehrenreich's book recounts the breakdown of this formulation over the past three decades of male-female relations, its persistence in Molinari's speech, and in Republican rhetoric more generally, suggests it is still a powerful tool for enforcing normative assumptions about gender roles and sexual identities. This common-sensical connection between heterosexuality and childhood innocence undergirds the exercise of homophobia in the late 20th century. The idea that only heterosexuals can bear -- or should raise -- children shapes custody decisions which deny lesbian mothers access to their offspring. The shock that occurs when queerness and children's culture come together shaped the Southern Baptist Convention's choice of Disney as the target of its campaign against corporations that provide health insurance for domestic partners. The image of the crazed pedophile threatens the employment rights of gay teachers and led to a campaign to get Bert and Ernie banned from Sesame Street because of their "unnatural" relations. Molinari's version of the "American Dream" represents a more benign version of these arguments, one that erases -- rather than denounces -homosexuality as an aspect of American family life. The Politics of Motherhood For a moment, Molinari can't resist the tug of the myth of the innocent child as an agent of progress. The birth of her daughter, Molinari argues, makes her "think a little less about how the world is and a little more about the world you'll leave behind for your children." However, the conservative logic of her argument pulls her back towards the present as a decline from a past golden age, towards the "real pressures" which prevent modern moms and dads from achieving their parent's dreams. The
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modern world, she suggests, is a world which places our innocent children at risk: "Every morning they [parents] hesitate, at the kindergarten door, even if only for a moment, afraid to let go of that small hand clinging so tightly onto theirs." For a moment, Molinari hesitates, gesturing towards feminist protests against the unreasonable expectations placed on contemporary women, only to retreat back towards a more traditional solution: "I don't know a mom today who isn't stretched to her limits trying to hold down a job and trying to hold down the fort too. How many times have we said to ourselves that there just aren't enough hours in a day.... Well, the Republicans can't promise you any more hours in your day but we can help you spend more hours at home with your children." The threat is transformed: it is no longer unequal gender relations, poverty or unfair conditions of employment, but the idea of working outside the home, which renders working "moms" miserable. Her speech sees returning to the home as the natural desire of all women and depicts women's professional lives as an unwanted obligation that better tax policies would render unnecessary. The figure of the defenseless child has been consistently mobilized in both support of and in opposition to American feminism. Since women have carried special responsibilities for bearing and caring for children, their attempts to enter political and economic life have often been framed in terms of possible impacts on children and the family. Fatherhood is one role among many for most men; historically, for many women, motherhood was the role that defined their social, economic, and political identity. Early suffrage leaders represented their campaign for the vote in the late 19th and early 20th century as a logical extension of their responsibilities as mothers to shield the home from the corruptions of the outside world. This maternal politics, or "domestic feminism," focused its attention on issues of alcoholism and prostitution and on the social conditions faced by the children of the urban poor. As one early suffrage leader explained, "The Age of Feminism is also the age of the child." Yet, this maternal politics also restricted women's political voice to a narrow range of issues associated with children, home and family. Speaking as mothers gave the early feminists, who came mostly from the upper and middle classes, a vocabulary for linking their experiences, across class and racial divides, with those of other women. The revitalization of American feminism in the 1960s and 1970s often focused around issues of abortion, daycare, child custody, and other family issues; middle class women's entry into identity politics emerged from consciousness raising strategies and the recognition that the "personal is the political." Women could gain economic autonomy only by shifting child-rearing burdens within the family and only by gaining greater control over the reproductive process. Decades later, Hillary Clinton evoked this rhetorical tradition of sisterly solidarity through
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motherhood when she told her convention audience, "I wish we could be sitting around a kitchen table, just us, talking about our hopes and fears for our children's futures." This tradition of maternal feminism has given urgency to female politicians when they speak on behalf of children. Heather Hendershot has shown, for example, that Action for Children's Television gained attention from the press and from the Federal Communications Commission in the 1970s because it could speak as a group of "mothers from Newton;" ACT expressed impatience with the demands for traditional media effects research and spoke with "common sense" about the impact of media on their own children's lives. Yet, the heightened public discourse about maternalism has also provided a weapon for criticizing female politicians as "bad mothers" when they place too much attention on issues not directly linked to childhood or the family. Hillary Clinton was sharply criticized for the public roles she played in her husband's administration and for her flip remarks about not wanting to be reduced to "baking cookies." In her convention speech, she made fun of the need to reposition herself as a mother, joking that she might appear at the Democratic convention arm in arm with "Benti the child-saving gorilla from the Brookfield Zoo." Dan Quayle's 1992 attacks on Murphy Brown's status as an unwed mother became a major campaign issue. The figure of the absent mother, the neglectful mother, the mother who abandons her children for political and economic ambition, always shadows the use of the maternal voice in American politics. Two of Clinton's choices to become the first female Attorney General of the United States were ultimately withdrawn because of public controversy surrounding their child-rearing arrangements, questions rarely if ever raised in considering the confirmation of male cabinet appointments. So, it is perhaps not surprising that when Molinari claimed common cause with other working mothers, it was in part to urge their return to the kitchen table. Less than a year after she delivered the keynote address at the Republican national convention, Molinari herself resigned from the U.S. Congress to accept a job as a network anchorwoman, justifying her choice on the grounds that it would allow her to spend more time with her daughter. The Suffering Father and the Unhappy Child Republican formulations of the innocent child depict the home as "a fort" where mothers and fathers must protect their children from the chaos of modern life. Adopting characteristically military metaphors, the former general, Colin Powell, spoke to the Republican convention about the need for families to remain strong in order to: "withstand the assaults of contemporary life...resist the images of
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violence and vulgarity which flood into our lives every day... [and] defeat the scourge of drugs and crime and incivility that threaten us." This formulation of family values uses the figure of the innocent child to police boundaries between the family and the outside world. It often masks class and racial divisiveness, despite the presence of the African-American Colin Powell as a living symbol of Republican efforts towards becoming a "party of inclusion." This formulation, as Eric Freedman notes, also presupposes that the primary threat to our children comes from outside, while most cases of violence against children and most cases of "missing children" can be traced back to family members. The Republican version of "family values," which sharpens our fears and anxieties about outside forces, lets the family itself off the hook. One of the most memorable moments of the Republican convention involved the speech of a wheelchair bound former policeman, crippled in the line of duty and now an advocate of tougher sentencing laws. He was attended by his young son, who stood behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder throughout the speech. With a slow and pained voice, he explained: "My son, Conner McDonald, is nine years old and he has never seen his father move his arms or legs but when he puts his soft hands to his father's face I feel the promise of America and when he looks into my eyes I know that he can see the pride of America." Few images more perfectly capture the melodramatic qualities of this "family values" politics! One of the moment's most striking aspects was its embodiment of male vulnerability and suffering. If conservative ideology has tended to hold women responsible for nurturing and raising the child, it sees the father as a breadwinner and as a bulwark protecting the family against the outside world. As Robert L. Griswold notes: "Men's virtual monopoly of bread winning has been part and parcel of male dominance. The seventeenth century patriarch has long since disappeared, but twentieth-century men have profited from their status as fathers. The linkage between fatherhood and bread winning, for example, has helped legitimate men's monopoly of the most desirable jobs....So, too, insurance policies, pension plans, retirement programs, tax codes, mortgage and credit policies, educational opportunities and many more practices have bolstered men's roles as providers." If women have found a politics based on motherhood a double-edged sword, justifying both their ability to speak in the public sphere and their continued restriction to the
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domestic sphere, men have found fatherhood a win-win situation, justifying their continued presence in public life, which, in turn, explains their negligible role in childrearing. While the charge of being a negligent mother can be directed against any woman entering into politics, the "dead-beat dad," only now emerging as a political category, is treated as an aberration - a breakdown of the family wage system. There is something unnatural, then, about this spectacle of a father, who desperately wants to care for his son but is unable to do so. The wounded father, who can not wrap strong arms around his needful son, and the wide-eyed son, who struggles to still believe in the "pride" of his nation, intensify our horror over the breakdown of law and order. As Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger notes, the discourse of childhood innocence has historically provided powerful tools for criticizing the "vicious, materialistic, and immoral qualities of American society." The horrors of modernity are magnified through children's innocent eyes. Children serve as "soft and smiling foils to a more grim and grownup reality." Young Conner, his blond hair slicked down, his blue eyes shifting nervously, personifies suffering innocence and its rebuke against the adult order. At the same time, as Heininger notes, the figure of the "pristine" child has been an "indispensable element of American optimism": "It is precisely because the young are untainted that the nation can willingly vest in them its best hopes." The father feels "the promise of America" in his son's touch. The speech precariously balances the image of Conner as already damaged by a harsh world against the image of Conner (and his unblemished innocence) as potentially healing that world. As Heininger explains, "because simplicity and innocence were considered to be children's most distinguishing characteristics, it followed that happiness should be their natural state." This ideologically powerful assumption allows us to direct anger against any social force that makes our children unhappy. As Kincaid argues, "an unhappy child was and is unnatural, an indictment of somebody: parent, institution, nation." The figure of the endangered child surfaced powerfully in campaigns for the Communications Decency Act, appearing as a hypnotized young face awash in the eerie glow of the computer terminal on the cover of Time, rendering arguments about the First Amendment beside the point. As one letter to Time explained, "If we lose our kids to cyberporn, free speech won't matter." The innocent child was to be protected at "all costs." Throughout the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole consistently characterized liberal politics and counter-cultural "social experiments" in terms of the threats they posed to our children: "crime, drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty and the abandonment of children." Higher taxes, Dole argued, meant a grandmother might be unable to call her grandchild or a parent might be unable to buy her child a book. Evoking the title of Hillary Clinton's best-selling book, Dole proclaimed: "After the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon
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which this country was founded, we are told it takes the village -- that is, the collective and thus the state -- to raise a child... I am here to tell you. It doesn't take a village to raise a child - it takes a family." Dole's slippage between the village, the collective, and the state is characteristic of a Republican rhetoric which reduces the problems of children to those confronted and solved by volunteerism and by individual families; Dole frames government action as the threat that makes children's lives miserable. Of course, many Republican solutions, such as the Communications Decency Act, depend upon the policing power of the village! Democratic Family Values Reworking conservative "family values" rhetoric -- and thus "taking the issue off the table" -- has been central to the "New Democrat" strategy of the Clinton Administration. The 1992 Democratic Party convention was framed around rethinking the concept of the family to reflect the diverse ways Americans live in the 1990s. Clinton and the other "New Democrats" embraced a broader range of social units, including, at least briefly, the idea that gay and lesbian couples might constitute viable families. Clinton and Gore retooled ancient conceptions of the leader as a law-giving patriarch, adopting a post-feminist construction of the nurturing father watching over his children's bedside; images of Clinton marveling over Chelsea's birth or Gore attending his son, after a near-fatal accident, surfaced throughout speeches and campaign biographies. This kinder, gentler conception of the patriarch emerges from what Robert L. Griswold calls the discourse of "New Fatherhood" in post-war America. While historically, fathers could gain power and authority from their public roles as breadwinners, they could now also get credit for their more private roles as educators and nurturers. While Griswold sees this shift as a response to the expanded economic role of women in the workplace and to feminist critiques of the family, he acknowledges that this new style of fatherhood often does not mean reciprocity of responsibilities. "Sensitive" male politicians can freely embrace the domestic sphere without becoming trapped there, while Hillary Clinton's shifts between domestic and public sphere politics provoke controversy. Hillary's law review essays defending the concept of "children's rights" and her participation in Marian Edelman's Children Defense Fund were ruthlessly attacked at the 1992 Republican convention by Marilyn Quayle and Barbara Bush as too "extremist" for a proper first lady. While she acknowledged in her writing that "the phrase 'children's rights' is a slogan in search of definition," Hillary Rodham presented a powerful case for reconsidering how the courts and other legal institutions dealt with children's issues. Sounding like many cultural critics of childhood innocence, Rodham wrote: "No other group is so totally dependent for its well-being on choices
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made by others. Obviously this dependency can be explained to a significant degree by the physical, intellectual, and psychological incapacities of (some) children which render them weaker than (some) older persons. But the phenomenon must also be seen as part of the organization and ideology of the political system itself. Lacking even the basic power to vote, children are not able to exercise normal constituency powers, articulating self-interests to politicians and working towards specific goals." She stressed the need of children to have a more powerful voice in custody disputes, insisted on an expanded conception of their rights to free expression, and argued for greater procedural protections for juveniles charged with criminal violations. Republican critics felt that her arguments depended on state authorities to protect children's interests even in the face of parental opposition and thus undermined the sovereignty of the family. Her book, It Takes a Village, reworked some of these earlier arguments, shifting from a discourse of children's rights to a language of parental responsibility. Her new approach to "family values" was consistent with the Clinton administration's endorsement of school uniforms, curfews, and the V Chip. Republican critics still found within the book's more banal prose signs of the state power central to her earlier formulations. Forming the New Village Lauren Berlant has argued that the Republican "family values" agenda involves a "downsizing" of the public sphere, a reduction of the role of politics in public life in favor of an exclusive focus on individual experience -- on a politics of personal responsibilities and self-interest rather than one of the collective good. The Clinton version of "family values" relocates the family within a revitalized public sphere. When Hillary speaks of the "village" and its responsibility for children, she evokes a middle ground between "the state" and the private, one consistent with her husband's unstable compromise between Republican pressures towards de-federalization and traditional liberal conceptions of government activism. Hillary's village metaphor emerges from a politics of communitarianism, in which the community maintains a social contract to insure the well-being of its members, a contract sometimes met by volunteerism and sometimes by government policy: "Home can -- and should - be a bedrock for any child. Communities can -- and should -- provide the eyes and enforcement to watch over them, formally and informally. And our government can -and should -- create and uphold the laws that set standards of safety for us all." Her book acknowledges the breakdown of traditional communities and the potential for new kinds of communities emerging in responses to changing technological and economic conditions. Rather than calling upon the community to preserve its traditional roles in protecting children, she calls a new community into being, one constituted through its mutual concern for children as much-needed agents of future progress. The village metaphor, with its evocation of the organic communities of small
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town American life, depends upon the historic linkage of childhood innocence to pastoralism (an image that can be traced back to Rousseau and the Romantics.) If the Republican formulation of family values pits the "collective" against the family, the Democratic version sees the individual and the community as vitally and positively linked. In her speech to the convention, Hillary Clinton evoked an image of a national community where: "Right now in our biggest cities and our smallest towns there are boys and girls being tucked gently into their beds and there are boys and girls who have no one to call Mom and Dad and no place to call home." What unites the haves and the have-nots, according to this account, is that all of us care about our children. Therefore, the needs of children must somehow be removed from the realm of the political and into a space of shared understanding and communal action, as we work together to create a "nation that does not just talk about family values but acts in ways that values family." Her vision of a world where "we are all part of one family" depends on state actions (such as "dedicated teachers preparing their lessons for the new school year...or police officers working to help kids stay out of trouble") but also on individual action ("volunteers tutoring and coaching children...and of course, parents, first and foremost.") These community members work together against various threats: "gang leaders and drug pushers on the corners of their neighborhoods...a popular culture that glamorizes sex and violence, smoking and drinking." Their united efforts on behalf of childhood innocence become the basis for a utopian revitalization of the nation. This image of transformation is explicit in the final paragraph of her book: "Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core -- not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes children to raise up a village to become all it should be. The village we build with them in mind will be a better place for us all." For Clinton, it is not simply that children need the village, but the future of the village depends upon its shared commitments to children. Race, Imperialism and the Child At a time when the Democratic Party was actively courting African- and AsianAmericans for their votes and their campaign contributions, her choice of an African proverb, one widely used in Afrocentric pedagogy, as the book's title could not have
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been an accident. Hillary cites Marian Wright Edelman, the African-American woman who is the founder and head of the Children's Defense Fund as a mentor and friend. At the same time, she retreats from the explicit links Edelman draws between children's plight and racial politics. Edelman connects present day struggles on behalf of children with the legacy of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement: "We must put social and economic underpinnings beneath the millions of African-American, Asian American, Latino, White and Native American children left behind when the promise of the civil rights laws and the significant progress of the 1960s and 70s in alleviating poverty were eclipsed by the Vietnam War, economic recession, and changing national leadership priorities." Edelman had been sharply critical of Clinton's capitulation to the Republicans on welfare reform, a decision which she estimated would place 5 million more children into poverty. Edelman recognizes that suffering occurs most often to particular children, marked by racial and class differences, while Hillary engages in what Jacqueline Rose describes as the "impossible fiction" of the universalized child. In our culture, the most persistent image of the innocent child is that of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, boy, someone like Conner, while the markers of middle classness, whiteness, and masculinity are read as standing for all children. It Takes A Village adopts a multicultural variant of this universalized child, depicting Hillary on the back cover surrounded by children of all different racial and ethnic background, all well-dressed, all squeaky clean, all smiling. The implications of this "Family of Man"-style image are complex: the photograph envisions a utopian community united despite racial differences, while at the same time, bleaching away Edelman's racial and class specificity. For several generations, progressive civil rights policies, especially those surrounding school desegregation, have rested on the hope that children, born without prejudice, might escape racial boundaries. As Shari Goldin notes, school desegregation advocates promote the image of black and white children interacting freely together on the playgrounds and in the schoolrooms as the advanced guard for tomorrow's "color blind" society. Hillary Clinton depicts childhood as an escape from racial antagonism when she recalls the old hymn, "Jesus Loves Me," which finds "all the children of the world, red, yellow, black, and white ... precious in His sight." She wonders how "anyone who ever sang" this song "could dislike someone solely on for the color of their skin." Her cover photo mimics classic pictures of Jesus "suffering the children." At the same time, segregationists -- from rural Alabama to South Boston -- often posed school busing as a violation of childhood innocence, as a cynical bureaucratic
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"experiment" which turned children into "guinea pigs," "scapegoats" and "hostages" of a "liberal agenda." Racism, no less than the Civil Rights movement, has mobilized our hopes and fears for our children. Moreover, as Ashis Nandy has suggested, dominant ideologies of racism and colonialism have often mapped onto racial and cultural others the image of the child as: "an inferior version of the adult -- as a lovable, spontaneous, delicate being who is also simultaneously dependent, unreliable and willful and thus, as a being who needs to be guided, protected and educated as a ward." Such paternalism framed the official politics of colonial domination and the unofficial politics of racial bigotry; white domination was presented as a rational (and benign) response to the "immaturity" of nonwhite peoples. Asian and African adults were often ascribed with the childlikeness of good "obedient" children or the childishness of bad "rebellious" children. Common Ground Both the Republican and Democratic formulations of "family values" cast popular culture as a social problem, roughly on the same level as crime and drugs. The same week that Congress passed welfare reform, President Clinton met with television executives to set up a ratings system and Bob Dole went to Hollywood to attack movie violence. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, who backed the welfare reform effort, has focused congressional attention on the problem of video game violence, which he calls the "nightmare before Christmas." In each case, the attacks on popular culture shift attention away from material problems effecting children and onto the symbolic terrain. Throughout the twentieth century, the myth of childhood innocence has helped to erect or preserve cultural hierarchies, dismissing popular culture in favor of middle-brow or high cultural works viewed more appropriate for children. As Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins write, "By evoking the 'threat to children,' social reformers typically justified their own position as cultural custodians, linking (either implicitly or explicitly) anxieties about violence, sexuality and morality to mandates of good taste and artistic merit." Within this protectionist rhetoric, taste distinctions get transformed into moral issues, with the desire to shelter children's "purity" providing a rationale for censorship and regulation. Once the innocent child has been evoked, it becomes difficult to pull back and examine these cultural issues from other perspectives, thus accounting for the bipartisan attacks against Hollywood. Both the Republican and Democratic versions of family values presuppose the innocent child as requiring adult protection; they both speak for the child who is
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assumed to be incapable of speaking for herself. Young Conner remains mute as his father speaks of his own sufferings and those of his son. Three-month old Susan Ruby was too young to talk, while the Clintons turned down Chelsea's request to speak at the convention, "protecting" her from the glare of the public spotlight. Both the Republican and Democratic visions presume a clear separation between childhood and adulthood, with different rights and responsibilities ascribed to each phase of human development. The myth of childhood innocence depends upon our ability to locate such a break, as well as upon our sense of nostalgic loss when we cross irreversibly into adulthood. As the next section will suggest, this particular conception of childhood innocence is of fairly recent historical origins. In this next section, I will move beyond contemporary debates between Republicans and Democrats to frame the concept of childhood innocence in a larger historiographic context. PART TWO THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD "Members of any society carry within themselves a working definition of childhood, its nature, limitations and duration. They may not explicitly discuss this definition, write about it, or even consciously conceive of it as an issue, but they act upon their assumptions in all of their dealings with, fears for, and expectations of their children." -- Karin Calvert Our modern conception of the innocent child presumes its universality across historical periods and across widely divergent cultures. The pre-socialized child exists in a state of nature. When we want to prove that something is so basic to human nature that it can not be changed (the differences between the genders, for example), we point to its presence in our children. This universalized conception of the innocent child effaces gender, class and racial differences, even if it holds those differences in place. This essentialized conception of the innocent child frees it of the taint of adult sexuality, even as we use it to police adult sexuality, and even as we use the threat of adult sexuality to regulate children's bodies. This decontextualized conception of the innocent child exists outside of culture, precisely so that we can use it to regulate cultural hierarchies, to separate the impure influence of popular culture from the sanctifying touch of high culture. This historical conception of the innocent child is eternal, even as our political rhetoric poses childhood as constantly under threat and always on the verge of "disappearing" altogether. In short, the innocent child is a myth, in Roland Barthes' sense of the word, a figure that transforms culture into nature. Like all myths, the innocent child has a history. In fact, one reason it can carry so many contradictory meanings is that our modern sense of the child is a palimpsest of ideas
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from different historical contexts -- one part Romantic, one part Victorian, one part medieval and one part modern. We do not so much discard old conceptions of the child, as accrue additional meanings around what remains one of our most culturally potent signifiers. In this section, I will not trace a single lineage of the myth of the child, a task well beyond the scope of this essay. Rather, I will outline how various historians have approached this question and will examine the most prevalent meanings that have stuck to the semiotically-adhesive child. The Origins of Childhood Philippe Aries begins his book, Centuries of Childhood, with the startling statement that childhood -- at least as we currently understand it -- did not exist prior to the Middle Ages. Childhood was not a cultural preoccupation, simply a brief phase of dependency passed over quickly and bearing little special importance. The category of the infant existed, since few passed beyond this stage in an era of extraordinary mortality, but the category of child did not, since those who could fend for themselves were treated as small adults. Children participated fully in all of the activities of the adult world, yet there seemed little need to separate them out as a social category. As the conception of a child as separate from an adult took shape, however, it still did not bear connotations of innocence. As Aries notes, sexual contact between children and adults, touching and stroking of the genitals, dirty jokes, sharing rooms and beds, and casual nudity, was taken for granted well into the ancient regime. Children were assumed to be closer to the body, less inhibited, and thus, unlikely to be corrupted by adult knowledge. The idea of the child as innocent first took shape, Aries argues, within pedagogical literature, helping to justifying a specialized body of knowledge centered around the education and inculcation of the young; this ideal rationalized the learned class's expanded social role and efforts to police their culture. Other historians suggest alternative or supplementary explanations for this modern conception of the child. One key factor was the emergence of commercial capitalism and the rise of the middle classes; the child became central to the discussion of transfer of property and the rights of inheritance. The emerging bourgeois classes placed particular importance on the education and rearing of their sons as preparation for participation in the market economy. Out of the future-orientation of capitalism came a new focus on child rearing and pedagogy. Some subsequent historians, notably Lawrence Stone and Lloyd de Mause, have pushed beyond Aries' account to suggest that pre-modern parents had little attachment to their children, treating them with neglect and abuse. These claims have been sharply criticized by other historians as going well beyond available evidence. The importance of Aries' research may not depend on whether he is correct on every particular: his book opened a space for examining the social construction of childhood
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as an ongoing historical process and for questioning dominant constructions of childhood innocence. As Aries notes: "The idea of childish innocence resulted in two kinds of attitude and behavior towards childhood: firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by life and particularly by the sexuality tolerated if not approved of among adults; and secondly, strengthening it by developing character and reason. We may see a contradiction here, for on the one hand childhood is preserved and on the other hand it is made older than its years." This contradiction runs through our modern conception of childhood innocence -- we desire it and we want to help children to move beyond it. Or, to use Aries's terms, we want to "coddle" the child and we want to "discipline" the child. This emerging distinction between child and adult also played a central role in shaping and regulating adult behavior. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias describes the gradual "refinement" of manners and etiquette as the upper classes adopted modes of behavior which separated them from the lower classes; the cultural transmission and imitation of those norms responded to the emerging middle class's desire for social betterment and political access. In his account, rules of etiquette must first be explicitly expressed and consciously imitated, but subsequently, are internalized, becoming part of what defines us as human. However, since these norms must be acquired, they must be transmitted to children, who are initially perceived as operating outside the civilized order. The child behaved in ways that adults would not, while the adults were obligated to shape the child into conformity with social norms. According to Elias, the child comes of age in a context of fear and shame; shame is the process through which social norms are internalized. Elias sees our history since the middle ages in terms of increased restraint of the body and tighter regulations of emotions, necessary to facilitate participation in ever-more complex spheres of social relations. However, more recent historians, such as John Kasson , have pointed to historical fluctuations during which society loosened or tightened its control over body and affect. These fluctuations determine whether parents "discipline" or "coddle" children, whether they react to violations of adult norms with horror or amusement. Drawing her evidence both from analysis of material culture and from popular discourse about childhood, Karin Calvert locates three distinct shifts in the cultural understanding and adult regulation of American childhood between 1600-1900. In the first phase, children led precarious lives confronting the harsh conditions of frontier settlement, subject to high infant mortality rates, "childhood illnesses, accidents, and a lack of sufficient nourishment." In such a culture, Calvert argues, childhood was experienced as "essentially a state of illness" or physical vulnerability: "Growing up meant growing strong and gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take care of oneself." Such a culture had little nostalgia for childhood, stressing the early
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acceptance of adult responsibilities. Child rearing practices sought to "hasten" selfsufficiency. Around the turn of the 18th century, attitudes shifted dramatically, with a "growing confidence in the rationality of nature." If before, parents saw themselves as protecting their children from natural threats, this new paradigm viewed excessive parental intervention as producing invalid children. Childhood was now perceived as a period of "robust health" during which "natural forces" took their course, allowing the young to grow into vital adulthood. Childhood was seen as a period of "freedom" before the anticipated constraints of adult civilization and so parents valued the "childishness" of their children, their nonconformity to adult expectations. In the third phase, from 1830-1900, adults did not simply take pleasure in childhood; they sought to prolong and shelter it as a special period of innocence from the adult world. As Calvert notes: "Childhood was imbued with an almost sacred character. Children were pure and innocent beings, descended from heaven and unsullied by worldly corruption. The loss of this childish innocence was akin to the loss of virginity, and the inevitable loss of childhood itself was a kind of expulsion from the Garden of Eden." This new myth of childhood innocence served, in part, as the basis for criticism of modernity and the breakdown of traditional forms of family and community life. Two Traditions: The "Free" Child and the "Disciplined" Child As Calvert's account suggests, our recognition of a fundamental difference between children and adults did not predetermine what significance got attached to that difference. One strong tradition, as Jackson Lears has noted, envied children's close relations to nature and their freedom from adult constraints. Romantic thinkers, such as William Blake or Jean- Jacques Rousseau, engaged in a "primitivist " celebration of children's "spontaneous feeling and intense experience." The child was emblematic of "freedom from social convention and utilitarian calculation." Adulthood was understood as corruption and formal education as an instrument that deforms the child's development. As Rousseau argues: "Nature intends that children shall be children before they are men. If we insist on reversing this order we shall have fruit early indeed, but unripe and tasteless and liable to early decay....Childhood has its own methods of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Nothing shows less sense than to try to substitute our own methods for these."
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Rousseau's Emile outlined an approach to education that linked learning to natural sensation and material consequences rather than adult instruction and regulation. Rousseau wanted to preserve children's pristine moral impulses, and especially to protect children's minds from the influence of books: "The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed.... Therefore education of the earliest years should be merely negative. It consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error....Exercise his body, his limbs, his senses, his strength but keep his mind idle as long as you can....Leave childhood to ripen in your children." The Romantics valued the child's easy access to the world of the imagination and sought to free themselves to engage with the world in a more child-like fashion. Another tradition, grounded in puritan assumptions, focused on adult responsibility to constrain and "manage" the child, shaping their development in accordance with community standards. According to Kincaid, the prevailing metaphors of Victorian child-rearing discourse emphasize the malleability of children's minds, their willingness and eagerness to submit to adults. Here children are not inherently evil -simply empty-headed -- and thus appropriately disciplined and instructed by their elders: "Children's minds are like wax, readily receiving all impressions." (1880) "Like clay in the hands of the potter, they are waiting only to be molded." (1882) "There is a pliability in the young mind, as in the young twig; which renders it apt to take any shape into which circumstances may press it." (1818) These wax, clay, and botanical metaphors rationalize increased adult control over children's minds and bodies, often resulting in harsh punishment. The persistence of these two contradictory strands -- one celebrating childhood freedom from adult control, the other insisting on the necessity of adult restraint -helps to explain the ebb and flow between authoritarian, discipline-centered and permissive, child-centered approaches. Yet, these contradictions can surface within the same thinker. Progressive era child-rearing experts, such as William Buron Forbush or G. Stanley Hall, simultaneously celebrated childhood freedom and advocated increased adult intervention into children's play. Forbush might state, "the infant is like the wild
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creature of the wood, and it is as cruel to confine the physical activities of young children as those of squirrels and swallows." Hall might state, "Childhood is the paradise of the race from which adult life is a fall." Yet, both promoted organized and supervised play activities, such as the Boy Scouts or the YMCA, and urged the development of classroom rituals intended to foster patriotism and religion. Drawing on social Darwinism, the young child was, in the words of one progressive reformer, "essentially a savage, with the interests of a savage, the body of a savage, and to no small extent, the soul of one." Hall and his associates were remarkably literal minded in insisting that the child be pushed through the various stages of civilization -- "from Rome to Reason" -- in order to gain adulthood. The "Value" of Childhood Hall's "Child Study Movement" responded to what economist Viviana A. Zelizer describes as a serious revaluation of the child within American culture. In the agrarian cultures of the 19th century, children were expected to contribute labor to the family farm as soon as they were physically able. More children meant more income. Even in the immigrant families of turn-of-the-century New York, children contributed to the household economy. However, the rising middle classes directed increased public pressure against child labor, placing new emphasis upon the child's sentimental value and pitting the ideal of the untarnished "child of God" (and of nature) against the horrors of working children. The sentimental conception of the child, Zelizer argues, compensated for the lost economic worth of child labor and quickly spread. Children were to be shielded from participation in the economy, either in terms of productive labor or in terms of relations of consumption. Public attitudes towards adoption shifted, for example, from a culture which encouraged the "boarding out" of children as cheap labor to one that emphasized sentimental bonds between adoptive parent and child; the result was a decreased demand for older boy children (deemed economically productive) and an increased demand for babies and young girls (viewed as cute and cuddly.) The death of children, no longer taken-for-granted, became a scandal that could be mobilized in reform campaigns. With improvements in children's physical well-being , the primary focus of child rearing shifted towards concerns with psychological development, with cultural materials scrutinized for their potentially damaging effects upon children's mental health. Attacks on popular culture, for example, reflected this new psychological and sociological conception of the child. Media reform campaigns started in the late 19th and early 20th century with criticisms of series books, joke magazines, and the comics, but soon spread to all commercial culture targeted at the young. Jokes magazines and comic strips, for example, were accused of destroying "all respect for law and authority," teaching "lawlessness," "cultivating a lack of reverence" and thereby "destroy[ing ] the American homes of the future." Such attacks also reflected children's increasingly central role as consumers.
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Advertising aimed at children violated the "social contract" forged during this period of sacredization. Madison Avenue, the critics charge, no longer viewed children as outside the sphere of economic life. However, as Stephen Kline suggests, the ideology of the "sacred" child also contained the roots of a consumerist ideology. The marketing of consumer goods was coupled with parents' concerns for their children's well-being, ideals of sanitation or education, and improvements in domestic life. The child became a central salesman for mass-marketed goods, with marketing researchers exploiting each new breakthrough in child psychology to more effectively reach this lucrative market. The Permissive Paradigm Writing in the 1950s, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a culture of production (with its demands for discipline and regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with its expectations of a "fun morality") as a major force shaping child-rearing practices in the 20th century. The emergence of permissiveness in the post-war era, she argues, was partially a response to the expansion of the consumer marketplace and the prospect of suburban affluence. Permissive conceptions of the child embraced pleasure (especially erotic pleasure) as a positive motivation for exploration and learning. Bodily urges, seen as dangerous and threatening in early 20th century formulations, were now regarded as benign forces which could be "redirected" into more appropriate channels. Permissiveness represented an Americanization of Freudian psychoanalysis and its "discovery" of childhood sexuality. The association with childhood rendered these new (and foreign) ideas "innocent," allowing adults to rethink their own sexuality as well. At the same time, permissiveness represented an ideological response to the Second World War and public distaste for anything smacking of authoritarianism. The mobilization of children as "citizen soldiers" during the war had led parents to rethink the distribution of power within the family in political terms. In the post-war era, child rearing experts promoted permissive approaches as more "democratic," as helping to prepare children for participation in the post-war era. Within this discourse, children's relations to their parents paralleled citizens' relations to the state; many child rearing guides centered around discussions of domestic jurisprudence. The core ideology behind permissiveness can be traced back to progressive currents in American thought. Benjamin Spock, the most popular child-rearing expert of the immediate post-war period, drew insight from his political involvement in the Popular Front Movement, from anthropological discoveries of Margaret Mead who stressed the more "liberated" approaches to children's sexuality found in various "primitive" cultures and from emerging ideas about "social engineering" within American sociology and psychology. Permissiveness's popularity in post-war America seems all the more ironic when read in relation to the militarization of American science and education, the cold-war, and McCarthyism. For some, the need to protect innocent children fostered public concern about the arm's race and thus increased support for anti-communism at home and abroad. For others, the romantic conception of the free child as a utopian escape from
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adult regulation offered a way of coping with grown-up repression and conformity. Post-War America was ripe for a new conception of parent-child relations; American women were having children at younger and younger ages; their dislocation from urban centers towards outlying suburbs separated them from their mothers and other traditional sources of child-rearing advice. Spock's book guided their day-to-day practices; its mixture of "commonsense" and expert advice offered a security blanket for young and inexperienced parents. This new approach to child rearing also helped to transform gender relations within the family, leading, as Robert Griswold notes, towards a reconceptualization of the father as playmate rather than patriarch, and preparing for the revival of feminist politics in the 1960s. At the same time, precisely because this shift in the power relations in the home meant a break with the way mothers and fathers had themselves been raised, young parents demanded more and more information and thus, permissiveness proved a highly productive cultural discourse. In the child-centered culture of post-war America, permissive themes and images surface everywhere, from advice manuals to magazine and television advertisements, from children's programming to adult novels. Not surprisingly, the child became a potent political metaphor with liberal critics characterizing Joseph McCarthy as "Dennis the Menace" and Spiro Agnew suggesting that anti-war protesters should have been "spanked" more often when they were children. Similarly, political metaphors surface consistently in child-rearing guides, with a guilty conscience compared to the Gestapo or parental control to "brainwashing." The mobilization of the image of the innocent child at the 1996 conventions reflected the continued break-down of the permissive era paradigm, which has been caught within conservative backlash against the 1960s "counterculture." Republican ideology has tended to embrace a more discipline-centered approach, while Democratic ideology tends towards "authoritative parenting" as a middle position between permissive and authoritarian approaches. Implications and Contradictions This history of the innocent child presupposes some relationship between large-scale ideological shifts and localized practices. Our beliefs about childhood have some impact on our treatment of children, just as shifts in material practices, such as the responses to industrialization Zelizer documents, impact on our conceptual frameworks. However, historical traces of individual child-rearing practices are difficult to locate prior to the 20th century. Historians of childhood depend upon adult records, most often upon records and advice from the learned classes and thus they may accurately reflect only the experience of the middle class. Children left few direct traces of how they responded to adult expectations. Only in more recent eras does the historical record support a more dynamic account -- one that sees competing interests
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between parents and children. The actual business of living and parenting during these historical periods was no doubt much messier than our intellectual and social histories might suggest. In our own times, parents often find themselves muttering "my parents would never have let me get away with that," reflecting an internal conflict between their own experience of childhood and their idealized conceptions of how children should be raised. Many contemporary parents hold themselves accountable to the ideals of the permissive family culture of the 1950s and 1960. These ideals can not be met within a changed economy that demands that both parents work outside the home or a changed social structure where more than half of American children have divorced parents. Faced with these uncertainties, parents, not surprisingly, are unable to maintain consistent ideology or a coherent style of parenting; instead, they respond to local conditions in confused and contradictory ways. Recent scholarship also suggests that contemporary America may be a far less "childcentered" nation than it imagines. Joe Kincheloe locates a core "ambivalence" in American attitudes towards childhood, while Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard F. Stein describe a "pathological" culture where "bad" children become scapegoats for our frustrations and guilt. Often, Scheper-Hughes and Stein suggests, we focus on the individual child-abuser as an aberration rather than acknowledge what our society exacts from its children. Their descriptions of abusive families, latchkey kids, and neglected children could not be further from the squeaky clean and loving ideals of permissive child rearing -- a nightmare culture which manifests itself most fully in black humor and horror movies. A history of the ideology of childhood, then, is most convincing when it acknowledges the continued circulation of old conceptions and the emotional tug of previous practices, when it sees change in gradual rather than revolutionary terms, when it can account for the complex negotiations that occur during moments of cultural transition, and when it can acknowledge the gap between our best intentions and our worst impulses. Children's culture is shaped at the global level through powerful institutions and at the local level through individual families. Through these everyday practices, the myth of the innocent child gives way to the reality of children's experience. PART THREE CHILDREN'S CULTURE "Parents and children negotiate all kinds of deals over television and toys....The battle lines between public versus commercial television, educational videos and literary adaptations versus toy-based animated series, this video over that one, or one more hour of viewing versus one
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less are redrawn continually in parents' and children's daily lives." -- Ellen Seiter Many important contributions to the new scholarship about childhood have made the child disappear; cultural critics and historians have pulled the rug out from under our prevailing cultural myths to show us that the innocent child is often a figment of adult imaginations. Philippe Aries taught us not only that childhood has a history but that there may have been a period before childhood existed. James Kincaid tells us that "what the child is matters less than what we think it is." Jacqueline Rose suggests that behind the category of children's fiction, there exists only a fictional child -- a projection of adult desire. Children's fictions, after all, are written by adults, illustrated by adults, edited by adults, marketed by adults, purchased by adults, and often read by adults, for children. As Rose's analysis suggests, children's writers have a wide array of motives, some illicit, some benign, for their desire to "get close" to the child and to shape her thoughts and fantasies. The examination of children's fiction, then, starts by stripping away the fantasy child reader, or even the fantasy of "children of all ages," in order to locate and interpret the adult goals and desires which shape cultural production. This displacement of the child from the center of our analysis was a necessary first step for critiquing the mythology of childhood innocence. Yet, such work often leaves children permanently out of equation, offering no way to examine the social experience of actual children or to talk about the real-world consequences of these ideologies. Increasingly, the child emerges purely as a figment of pedophilic desire. Rose suggests that our desire to erase children's sexuality has less to do with adult needs to suppress or regulate children's bodies than with the desire to "hold off" our "panic" at the prospect of sexualities radically different from our own. At the same time, she sees the process of storytelling as one of "seduction;" adults tell tales to justify their prolonged closeness to the objects of their desire. Photography critic Carol Mavor has traced the complex desires which link Lewis Carroll's photographs of naked girls with his children's books; both reflect his urge to arrest young girls' development at the moment when they first "bud" while forestalling the inevitable approach of adult sexuality and death. Far from a perversion of the Victorian era, this fascination with the erotic child, James Kincaid argues, is utterly pervasive in our contemporary culture, surfacing in scandal sheet headlines about molestation and murder, in Coppertone and Calvin Klein ads, and in popular films such as Pretty Baby. Such images, he suggests, allow us to have our cake and eat it too -- to be titillated by erotically charged images of children, while clinging to their innocence of adult sexual knowledge. These interpretations reveal some of the fundamental hypocrisy surrounding childhood innocence in Victorian and contemporary culture. For writers like Kincaid and Mavor, pedophilia becomes a scandalous category, shocking us out of complacency and forcing us to examine the
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power dynamic between children and adults. In evoking the shock of pedophilia, they are playing a dangerous game. Contemporary media scares about child molestation at day care centers are the latest in a long series of attempts to use the ideology of the innocent child to force working women back in the home, especially when coupled with equally sensationalistic accounts of latch key children and the horrors of video game/television violence. No one is denying that child seduction and molestation can be real problems, but the over-reporting of the most sensationalistic cases denies us any meaningful perspective for examining the actual incidence of such problems. These media campaigns leave working mothers feeling that there is no safe way to raise their children, short of providing them with the constant supervision demanded by child-rearing experts. In such a culture, almost all representations that acknowledge children's sexuality are subject to legal sanctions. Courts and media reformers are taking legal actions against award-winning art films like The Tin Drum, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, the class projects of a Harvard undergraduate, and hardcore pornography. Even Kincaid has been attacked in the British press for allegedly advocating pedophilia. Elementary schools in Wisconsin organized "secrets clubs" where children were encouraged to tell social workers about their parent's sexual and drug use habits. There is no question that our culture proliferates eroticized images of children, yet there is also no question that our culture engages in a constant and indiscriminate witch-hunt against anyone who shows too much interest in such images. Such hysteria makes it difficult for artists to question more traditional modes of depicting children, for social critics to ask hard questions about sexuality, or for mothers and fathers to be certain which family photographs might become weapons in child custody battles. I am not denying the validity of cultural analysis that recognizes pedophilic impulses, yet there are serious dangers in reducing the question of adult power over children to erotic desire. Strip away pedophilia and we are still left with questions about how contemporary scholarship might represent the power relations between children and adults. Many accounts of children's culture focus almost exclusively on the exercise of adult authority over children, leaving little space for thinking about children's own desires, fantasies, and agendas. For example, Stephen Kline denies children any role in the production of their own culture: "What might be taken as children's culture has always been primarily a matter of culture produced for and urged upon children...Childhood is a condition defined by powerlessness and dependence upon the adult community's directives and guidance. Culture is, after all, as the repository of social learning and socialization, the means by which societies preserve and strengthen their positions in the world."
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Children's culture is, within this formulation, something that happens to children. Children are not participants or contributors to that culture. However powerful it may seem as a criticism of the regulatory power of adult institutions, Kline's formulation rests on the familiar myth of the innocent and victimized child whom we must protect -- the mute one whose voice we must assume. Childhood Identities Writing about our fascination with eroticized images of young girls, Valerie Walkerdine suggests that popular culture is often experienced as "the intrusion of adult sexuality into the sanitized space of childhood." This model is too simple, she argues, since it denies children's own role in shaping and deploying these fantasies. As Walkerdine notes, such an account does not acknowledge, for example, the ways that working class girls actively embrace elements from adult erotic representations as offering a fantasy of escape from limited social opportunities or restrictive adult authority. Walkerdine would find equally simplistic any account which celebrated the working class girl's performance of erotic identities as "resistance to the position accorded her at school and in high culture," since this reading ascribes too much social autonomy to children. She describes popular culture as the site of contested and contradictory attempts to define the child. Children's culture is shaped both by adult desires and childhood fantasies, with material conditions determining whether or not we -- as adults or as children -- are able to enact our fantasies. Walkerdine represents a larger scholarly tradition that examines the complex processes by which children acquire identities or internalize cultural norms. Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets, for example, uses close readings of family photographs to explore her own struggle with her mother to define personal memory. Her autobiographical discussion becomes all the more poignant because, as a feminist, Kuhn recognizes the desperation behind her mother's attempt to project her own meanings onto her daughter: "If a daughter figures for her mother as the abandoned, unloved, child that she, the mother, once was, and in some ways remains, how can mother and daughter disengage themselves from these identifications without harm, without forfeiture of love?" In adopting the voice of the daughter, while acknowledging her mother's fears and fantasies, Kuhn reintroduces children's experiences into the discussion of "family values." Carolyn Steedman's The Tidy House explores how creative writing by young working class girls reveals a pained recognition of their parents' ambivalence towards child rearing. Steedman explains: "They knew that their parents' situation was one of poverty, and that the
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presence of children only increased that poverty....They knew that children were longed for, materially desired, but that their presence was irritation, regret and resentment. They knew that, in some clear and uncomplicated way, it would have been better had they never been born." Steedman reads the stories as the girls' "urgent" attempts to "understand what set of social beliefs had brought them into being." This tradition of feminist analysis slides back and forth between psychological and sociological investigation, exploring the charged and unstable relations between mothers and daughters in order to rethink the social and psychic dynamics of the patriarchal family. Such analysis casts the child -- whether understood through autobiographical introspection (Family Secrets) or textual analysis and ethnographic description (The Tidy House) -- as an active participant in these family dramas; children's desires, hopes, fears, and fantasies are central to the process of constructing personal identities. One limitation of our current research is that almost all such work has focused around issues of motherhood and femininity. This is not surprising given women's primary responsibility for child-raising. However, we lack solid critical analysis of the relations between fathers and sons within these same critical terms; we need more work on the construction of masculinity through the rituals of boyhood. Feminism probably offers the best tools for initiating such a project, yet few male scholars have adopted its modes of analysis to confront their own formative experiences. Children's Culture and Adult Institutions These recent studies of childhood have generated a more complex picture of the power relations between children and adults. Parents, schoolteachers, church leaders, social reformers, the adult world in general, are powerfully invested in "fixing" children's identities. Eve Sedgwick has explored how parental anxieties that their sons and daughters might grow up to be queer motivate the imposition of gender-specific behaviors on "tom boys" and "sissies." Sedgwick reviews psychological literature and clinical practices that confuse gender identification and sexual preference, seeing inappropriate dress, play, and mannerism as early warning signs that a child has homosexual tendencies. Sedgwick challenges efforts by the mental health profession to "maximize the possibility of a heterosexual outcome," wondering who speaks for the rights of queer children. Children are subject to powerful institutions that ascribe meanings onto their minds and bodies in order to maintain social control. Barrie Thorne suggests, for example, that teachers' needs to routinize their procedures and to break their classes into manageably scaled groups results in a constant reinforcement of the basic binaries
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between "boys and girls." Children are more likely to play together across gender differences in their own neighborhoods, outside of adult supervision, than within school cafeterias and playgrounds. Children's culture is shaped by adult agendas and expectations, at least on the site of production and often at the moment of reception, and these materials leave lasting imprints on children's social and cultural development. Elizabeth Segel has examined how publishers, librarians, and educators shape children's access to different genres, resulting in gender divides in reading interests that carry into adult life. The separation of domestic based stories for girls and adventure stories for boys re-affirm the gendering of the public and private spheres. Boy's books were often "chronicles of growth to manhood," while girl's books often "depicted a curbing of autonomy in adolescence." The two forms of literature prepare girls and boys for their expected roles in adult society. However, these gender designations are not totally rigid in practice. Young girls often read boys books for pleasure and boys books are more consistently taught in the classroom. On the other hand, boys typically have been reluctant to engage with books with female protagonists or feminine subject matter. Such an imbalance, Segel argues, extracts "a heavy cost in feminine self-esteem" and may be even "more restrictive of boys'... freedom to read." Ellen Seiter has extended Segel's analysis to the gendering of children's television. Feminists, she argues, may be well-meaning when they attack hyper-feminine programs like My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake, but their continued disparagement of the things girls like may contribute to -- rather than help to rectify -- girls' declining self esteem. The Resistant Rituals of Childhood Without denying the tremendous cultural power behind these adult efforts to control children's identity formation, scholarship on children's culture also acknowledges the ways children resist, transform, or redefine adult prerogatives, making their own uses of cultural materials, and enacting their own fantasies through play. Miriam FormanekBrunnel has researched the gender politics of doll play in the 19th century, indicating both ways that dolls were valued by adults as a means of inculcating domestic skills in young girls and the ways that doll play might "subvert convention, mock maternalism, and undermine restrictions." On the one hand, the gift of a doll was intended to encourage girls to sew and to rehearse other "domestic arts" expected of them as future wives and mothers; the fragility of china dolls required delicate movements and nurturing gestures. On the other, young girls often used the dolls to rehearse funerals and mourning rituals, expressing a core ambivalence about their future maternal roles, or played with them aggressively, chopping off their hair or driving nails through their bodies. Formanek-Brunnel suggests: "Girls in the process of constructing their own notion of girlhood engaged their parents in a pre-conscious political struggle to define, decide, and determine the meaning of dolls in their own lives and as
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representations of their own culture." Erica Rand's Barbie's Queer Accessories suggests such localized resistance continues in contemporary doll play. Rand solicited and interpreted adult's memories of Barbie play, finding that these recollections often circle around unsanctioned and often erotically charged play. Many lesbians remembered transforming the fashion model into a "gender outlaw," drawing on their memories of childhood doll play to frame "dyke destiny" stories. Just as the myth of childhood innocence naturalizes heterosexual assumptions about appropriate gender roles, "dyke destiny" stories suggest the inevitability of queer sexual orientation by tracing its roots back to early childhood. Rand encourages skepticism about such stories, examining the way that memory retrospectively rewrites the past to conform to our present-day identities. Rand sees a constant struggle within children's culture (and within adult memories of childhood) between moments of hegemonic incorporation and moments of resistance. The same girl or boy may sometimes conform and sometimes disobey. Adult institutions and practices make "bids" on how children will understand themselves and the world around them, yet they can never be certain how children will take up and respond to those "bids." A growing literature depicts children as active creators, who use the resources provided them by the adult world as raw materials for their play activities, their jokes, their drawings, and their own stories. Shelby Ann Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath's The Braid of Literature offers a detailed description of Heath's own young daughters as readers, documenting the many ways they integrated favorite books their lives. Children's books became reference points for explaining their own experiences. The girls often spoofed their language, characters, and situations. The young girls felt compelled not only to re-read favorite stories but to enact them with their bodies. Such play represents a testing of alternative identities. Maintaining a fluid relationship to adult roles, children try things out through their play, seeing if they fit or make sense, and discarding them when they tire of them. The Ket Aesthetic Adult control over the cultural materials which enter children's lives certainly constrains the array of ideas and identities they can use in their play; adult restrictions on play activities limit this process of ideological exploration; yet, nothing can fully block oppositional meanings from entering children's lives. Alison James has explored how children's relations to cheap candies (which are called "kets" in British slang) suggest an oppositional aesthetic, one that challenges or reverses adult categories and carves out a kids-only culture. Children embrace candies which provoke strange sensations (bubbling or crackling on their tongues), which incorporate unfamiliar taste combinations, which mimic things (rats, worms, etc.) adults refuse to eat, which embrace lurid or jarring colors, or which encourage playful and messy modes of consumption.
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James describes "children's culture" as children's space for cultural expression using materials bought cheaply from the parent culture but viewed with adult disapproval. Her account could not differ more from Kline's conception of a children's culture produced and controlled by adults. The cheaper they are in price, the more cultural goods are likely to reflect children's own aesthetic and cultural sensibilities. Materials children can purchase with their allowances (such as candy, bubblegum cards, or comic books) are less likely to bear the heavy imprint of adult gatekeepers than high cost items (books and videos) parents purchase as gifts. This "ket" aesthetic can also be recognized within children's television programs, such as the "scream-real-loud" realm of Pee-Wee's Playhouse or the slop-and-slime world of Nickelodeon's game shows, or in video games, which have often faced reformist pressures because of their use of scatological or gory imagery. As Marsha Kinder has suggested, Nickelodeon's self-promotion has often encouraged an ethos of "generational conflict," stressing that parents "just don't get" its appeal to children: "adults are untrustworthy; they wear deodorant and ties; they shave under their arms, they watch the news and do other disgusting things." Nickelodeon's self-presentation walks a thin line, using children's oppositional aesthetic to package shows (such as Lassie) which contain little parents would find offensive and creating programs (such as Kids Court or Linda Ellerbee's news specials) which almost -- but usually not quite -- embrace a politics of kid-empowerment. Some of Nick's shows encourage children to cast a critical eye towards adult institutions, teach them to be skeptical readers of media images, encourage them to take more active roles in their communities (including leading fights for free expression within their schools) and take seriously their own goals for the nation's future (as in their Kids Pick the President campaign coverage). Nickelodeon's claims to be "the kids only network" erects a sharp line between the realms of children and adults. This approach contrasts sharply with the children's programs of the 1950s (such as Howdy Doody and Winky Dink and You) which Lynn Spigel has characterized as inviting a "dissolution of age categories." Such programs, she argues, were "filled with liminal characters, characters that existed somewhere in between child and adult" and which encouraged a playful transgression of age-appropriate expectations. Spigel points to their covert appeal to adult fantasies of escaping into the realm of childhood free play from the conformity and productivity expected of grownups in Eisenhower's America. The Nickelodeon programs such as Double Dare or What Would You Do, on the other hand, stage contests between children and adults, invite children to judge their parents or to smack them with cream pies and douse them with green slime. They support children's recognition of a core antagonism with grownups, while positioning the network, its programs, and its spin-off products on the kid side of that divide. This desire to create an autonomous cultural space for children's play is not new, nor does such freedom from adult control necessarily retard the child's inculcation into
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anticipated social roles. Children must break with their parents before they can enter into adult roles and responsibilities. Children's play has often been a space where they experimented with autonomy and self-mastery. E. Anthony Rotundo's analysis of "Boy Culture" in 19th century America suggests its complex relationship to the adult world. As industrialization led to a greater division of labor, forcing men to leave the home to work in the factories and leaving women in the domestic sphere to raise the young, the formation of masculine identities entered a new phase. Young boys sought an escape from maternal restraint, fleeing into a sphere of male action and adventure. Their play with other boys was clearly framed as oppositional to adults, taking the form of daring raids on privileged adult spaces, comic assaults on parental authority, or simply a rejection of maternal rules and restrictions. Through this play, boys acquired the aggression, competitiveness, daring, self-discipline, and physical mastery expected of those who would inhabit a culture of rugged individualism. The more rambunctious and irresponsible aspects of this culture would need to be tempered as the young males entered adult jobs and family relations, yet this rough-and-tumble "boy culture" prepared them more fully for their future roles than the maternal sanctioned activities of the domestic sphere. Embracing a politics of appropriation and resistance runs the risk of romanticizing child's play as the seeds of cultural revolution. I use the word, romanticizing, with precision here. In many ways, the celebration of children as "gender outlaws" or cultural rebels can be traced back to Rousseau's celebration of the "natural" and "spontaneous" child as embodying a freedom not yet subordinated to the demands of the civilized world. While this myth of the child certainly has advantages over the more repressive image of the child as a blank slate or the multivalent image of the innocent child at risk, it is nevertheless a myth. Perhaps, there is no way for adults to speak of children without putting words in their mouths and turning them into symbols for our own use. However, Rotundo's analysis suggests one escape from this impasse, looking at the ways children's play represents a temporary space of freedom, while contributing actively to socialization and indoctrination into cultural values. Rotundo preserves the idea of children's social and cultural agency without assuming that they are outside the cultural formations or material conditions that shape all human interactions. CONCLUSION THE POLITICAL STAKES OF CHILDREN'S CULTURE "Children are at the epicenter of the information revolution, ground zero of the digital world.....After centuries of regulation, sometimes benign, sometimes not, kids are moving out from under our pious control, finding one another via the great hive that is the net....Children can for the first time reach past the suffocating boundaries of social convention, past their elders' rigid notions of what is good for them."
Henry Jenkins
-- Jon Katz The Children's Culture Reader seeks modes of cultural analysis that do not simply celebrate children's resistance to adult authority but provide children with the tools to realize their own political agendas or to participate in the production of their own culture. The challenge is to find models that account for the complexity of the interactions between children and adults, the mutuality and the opposition between their cultural agendas. Feminist analysis has taught us that politics works as much through the micro-practices of everyday life as through large-scale institutions and that our struggle to define our identities in relations to other members of our families often determines how we understand our place in the world. As I have been editing this collection, I have been continually asked to explain and justify the "political stakes" in re-examining children's culture. As this discussion has already suggested, I consider such questions misguided, both because they accept at face value the premise that childhood is a space largely "innocent" of adult political struggles and because they fail to recognize how foundational the figure of the innocent child is to almost all contemporary forms of politics. Issues involving children are often viewed as "soft" compared to "hardcore" issues like tax cuts, crime bills, and defense expenditures, a language that suggests historic divisions between a feminine domestic sphere and a masculine public sphere. Feminists have long campaigned for a reassessment of those priorities and a recognition of the political stakes in domestic life. Yet, the politics of the public sphere, no less than the politics of the domestic sphere, rests on the figure of the child, as we saw in the various evocations of childhood at the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Often, the figure of the brutalized and victimized child gets mobilized in campaigns to build support for war; the figure of the dead child is the most powerful trope in the campaign for tougher sentencing of criminals. For example, the recent "Megan's Law," which requires public notification of the movement of convicted child molesters and other offenders into the community, will be forever associated with the memory of a specific child victim. Moreover, without a politics of the family, without a progressive conception of children's culture, the left lacks the ability to literally and figuratively reproduce itself. We need to be engaged in the process not only of critiquing traditional conceptions of the family, but of imagining alternative ways that families might perform their responsibilities for the care and raising of the young. We need to think about our roles as parents, teachers, and citizens in ways that help us to prepare children to participate in the process of social change and political transformation. We need to embrace approaches to teaching and social policy which acknowledge children's cultural productivity and which provide them with the materials and skills they need to critically evaluate their place in the world. The Birmingham tradition of cultural studies helped us to question the labeling of youth cultures as "deviant" by adult standards, seeing in their "hooliganism" the signs of a
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subversive or resistant subculture. We still lack a similarly political vocabulary for examining moments when children buck adult demands. Instead, we frame such localized moments of resistance in moralistic categories of "naughtiness" or in developmental psychological terms as "testing limits." The need is to recognize that children's disobedience of teachers, for example, might originate in a context of economic or racial inequalities, might express something of the frustrations of coping with a world which devalues your interests and seeks to impose adult values onto your activities. If politics is ultimately about the distribution of power, then the power imbalance between children and adults remains, at heart, a profoundly political matter. Herb Kohl confronts these questions when he debates whether we should "burn Babar." He invites us to question whether our recognition of noxious ideologies in traditional children's literature (such as Babar's pro-colonialism agenda) compels us to banish them or whether we should encourage children to become critical readers locating and questioning the implicit assumptions they find in the culture around them. As Kohl writes: "The challenge parents face is how to integrate encounters with stereotypes into their children's sensibility and help their children become critical of aspects of the culture that denigrate or humiliate them or anyone else....Instead of prohibiting things that tempt children, this means allowing them the freedom to explore things while trusting them to make sensible and humane judgments." Jon Katz confronts these challenges when he shifts the focus of debates about cyberspace away from the question of how we might protect our children from corrupting influences (whether through legal sanctions or filtering technology) and towards how we might empower children to actively contribute to the political culture of the net. Katz argues that children, no less than adults, have "certain inalienable rights not conferred at the caprice of arbitrary authority," rights that include access to the materials of their culture and the technologies which enable more widespread communication as well as "the right to refuse to be force-fed other generation's values." Katz's polemical and suggestive essay points towards a reassessment of the role of education, away from a focus on the transmission of established cultural norms and towards the development of skills which enable children to question the society around them and to communicate their ideas, via new technologies, with others of their generations. He writes: "Children need help in becoming civic-minded citizens of the digital age, figuring out how to use the machinery in the service of some broader social purposes....But more than anything else, children need to have their culture affirmed. They need their parents, teachers, guardians and leaders to accept that there is a new political reality for children, and the
Henry Jenkins
constructs that governed their own lives and culture are no longer the only relevant or useful ones." Sally Mann confronts these challenges when she creates photographs of children, which emphasize their fears, anxieties, and uncertainties, their everyday scrapes and bruises, and sexuality rather than representing childhood as a wholesome utopia. At their best, Mann's photographs strip away the myth of childhood innocence to show the struggles of children to define themselves. Linda Ellerbee confronts these challenges when she creates television programs that encourage children's awareness of real-world problems, such as the LA Riots, and enable to find their own critical voice to speak back against the adult world. She trusts children to confront realities from which other adults might shield them, offering them the facts needed to form their own opinions and the air time to discuss issues. These critics, educators, and artists offer us models of a children's culture which is progressive in both its form and its content. They move beyond mythic innocence and toward a recognition and advocacy of children's cultural, social, and political agency. Such works do not ignore the fact that children suffer real material problems, including neglect, abuse, and poverty, and that there are times and places where adults must protect them from themselves and from the world. There are also times and places where we need to listen to our children and factor their needs, desires, and agendas into our own sense of the world and into the decisions that effects our children's lives. Children need adults to create the conditions through which they develop a political consciousness, to defend their access to the information they need to frame their own judgments, and to build the technologies which enable them to exchange their ideas with others of their generation. They need us to be more than guardians of the fort or protectors of the village, and we will not rise to those challenges as long as our actions are governed by familiar myths of the innocent child. The goal is not to erase the line between children and adult, which we must observe if we are both to protect and empower the young. The goal is to offer a fuller, more complex picture of children's culture that can enable more meaningful, realistic, and effective political change.
Henry Jenkins - "COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT": VIDEO GAMES AS GENDERED PLAY SPACES
"COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT": VIDEO GAMES AS GENDERED PLAY SPACES by Henry Jenkins
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A Tale of Two Childhoods Sometimes, I feel nostalgic for the spaces of my boyhood, growing up in suburban Atlanta in the 1960s. My big grassy front yard sloped sharply downward into a ditch where we could float boats on a rainy day. Beyond, there was a pine forest where my brother and I could toss pine cones like grenades or snap sticks together like swords. In the backyard, there was a patch of grass where we could wrestle or play kickball and a treehouse, which sometimes bore a pirate flag and at other times, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. Out beyond our own yard, there was a bamboo forest where we could play Tarzan, and vacant lots, construction sites, sloping streets, and a neighboring farm (the last vestige of a rural area turned suburban). Between my house and the school, there was another forest, which, for the full length of my youth, remained undeveloped. A friend and I would survey this land, claiming it for our imaginary kingdoms of Jungleloca and Freedonia. We felt a proprietorship over that space, even though others used it for schoolyard fisticuffs, smoking cigarettes or playing kissing games. When we were there, we rarely encountered adults, though when we did, it usually spelt trouble. We would come home from these secret places, covered with Georgia red mud. Of course, we spent many afternoons at home, watching old horror movies or actionadventure series reruns, and our mothers would fuss at us to go outside. Often, something we had seen in television would inspire our play, stalking through the woods like Lon Chaney Jr.s Wolfman or socking and powing each other under the influence of Batman. Today, each time I visit my parents, I am shocked to see that most of those sacred places are now occupied by concrete, bricks, or asphalt. They managed to get a whole subdivision out of Jungleloca and Freedonia!
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My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard. He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some blocks away which we could go on outings a few times a week and where we could watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my sons constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask Where? But, he did have video games which took him across lakes of fire, through cities in the clouds, along dark and gloomy back streets, and into dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces. Video games constitute virtual playing spaces which allow home-bound children like my son to extend their reach, to explore, manipulate, and interact with a more diverse range of imaginary places than constitute the often drab, predictable, and overly-familiar spaces of their everyday lives. Keith Feinstein (1997), President of the Video Game Conservatory, argues that video games preserve many aspects of traditional play spaces and culture, maintaining aspects that motivates children to: learn about the environment that they find themselves living in. Video games present the opportunity to explore and discover, as well as to combat others of comparable skill (whether they be human or electronic) and to struggle with them in a form that is similar to children wrestling, or scrambling for the same ball - they are nearly matched, they aren't going to really do much damage, yet it feels like an all-important fight for that child at that given moment. Space Invaders gives us visceral thrill and poses mental/physical challenges similar to a schoolyard game of dodge-ball (or any of the hundred of related kids games). Video games play with us, a never tiring playmate. Feinsteins comment embraces some classical conceptions of play (such as spacial exploration and identity formation), suggesting that video game play isnt fundamentally different from backyard play. To facilitate such immersive play, to achieve an appropriate level of holding power that enables children to transcend their immediate environments, video game spaces require concreteness and vividness. The push in the video game industry for more than a decade has been towards the development of more graphically complex, more visually engaging, more threedimensionally rendered spaces, and towards quicker, more sophisticated, more flexible interactions with those spaces. Video games tempt the player to play longer, putting more and more quarters into the arcade machine (or providing play value for those whove bought the game) by unveiling ever more spectacular microworlds, the
revelation of a new level the reward for having survived and mastered the previous environment. (Fuller and Jenkins, 1995) Video games advertise themselves as taking us places very different from where we live: Say hello to life in the fast lane. Sonic R for Sega Saturn is a full-on, pedal-to-the-metal hi-speed dash through five 3D courses, each rendered in full 360 degree panoramas....Youll be flossing bug guts out of your teeth for weeks. (Sonic R, 1998) Take a dip in these sub-infested waters for a spot of nuclear fishin.... Dont worry. Youll know youre in too deep when the water pressure caves your head in. (Critical Depth, 1998) Hack your way through a savage world or head straight for the arena.... Complete freedom of movement. (Die By the Sword, 1998) Strap in and throttle up as you whip through the most realistic and immersive powerboat racing game ever made. Jump over roadways, and through passing convoys, or speed between oil tankers, before they close off the track and turn your boat to splinters. Find a shortcut and take the lead, or better yet, secure your victory and force your opponent into a river barge at 200 miles per hour. (VR Sports, 1998) Who wouldnt want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by todays video games? Watch children playing these games, their bodies bobbing and swaying to the on-screen action, and its clear they are there in the fantasy world, battling it out with the orcs and goblins, pushing their airplanes past the sound barrier, or splashing their way through the waves in their speed boats. Perhaps, my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of the suburban back streets, or settled into my treehouse during a thunder storm with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, complete freedom of movement. This essay will offer a cultural geography of video game spaces, one which uses traditional childrens play and childrens literature as points of comparison to the digital worlds contemporary children inhabit. Specifically, I examine the fit between video games and traditional boy culture and review several different models for creating virtual play spaces for girls. So much of the existing research on gender and games takes boys fascination with these games as a given. As we attempt to offer video games for girls, we need to better understand what draws boys to video games
and whether our daughters should feel that same attraction. Video games are often blamed for the listlessness or hyperactivity of our children, yet sociologists find these same behavioral problems occurring among all children raised in highly restrictive and confined physical environments. (Booth and Johnson, 1975; van Staden, 1984). Social reformers sometimes speak of children choosing to play video games rather than playing outside, when, in many cases, no such choice is available. More and more Americans live in urban or semi-urban neighborhoods. Fewer of us own our homes and more of us live in apartment complexes. Fewer adults have chosen have children and our society has become increasingly hostile to the presence of children. In many places, no children policies severely restrict where parents can live. Parents, for a variety of reasons, are frightened to have their children on the streets, and place them under protective custody. Latch key children return from school and lock themselves in their apartments (Kincheloe, 1997). In the 19th century, children living along the frontier or on Americas farms enjoyed free range over a space which was ten square miles or more. Elliot West (1992) describes boys of 9 or 10 going camping alone for days on end, returning when they were needed to do chores around the house. The early 20th century saw the development of urban playgrounds in the midst of city streets, responding to a growing sense of childrens diminishing access to space and an increased awareness of issues of child welfare (Cavallo, 1991), but autobiographies of the period stress the availability of vacant lots and back allies which children could claim as their own play environments. Sociologists writing about the suburban America of my boyhood found that children enjoyed a play terrain of one to five blocks of spacious backyards and relatively safe subdivision streets (Hart, 1979). Today, at the end of the 20th century, many of our children have access to the one to five rooms inside their apartments. Video game technologies expand the space of their imagination. Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son could come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns. However, we sometimes blame video games for problems which they do not cause perhaps because of our own discomfort with these technologies which were not part of our childhood. When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Ct.) target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions which give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies which make it harder for most of us to own our homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. Moving Beyond Home Base: Why Physical Spaces Matter The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the
impact of sunshine and good exercise upon our physical well-being. Roger Harts Childrens Experience of Place (1979), for example, stresses the importance of childrens manipulations and explorations of their physical environment to their development of self-confidence and autonomy. Our physical surroundings are relatively simple and relatively stable compared to the overwhelmingly complex and ever shifting relations between people, and thus, they form core resources for identity formation. The unstructured spaces, the playforts and treehouses, children create for themselves in the cracks, gullies, back allies, and vacant lots of the adult world constitute what Robin C. Moore (1986) calls childhoods domain or William Van Vliet (1983) has labeled as a fourth environment outside the adult-structured spaces of home, school, and playground. These informal, often temporary play spaces are where free and unstructured play occurs. Such spaces surface most often on the lists children make of special or important places in their lives. M. H. Matthews (1992) stresses the topophilia, the heightened sense of belonging and ownership, children develop as they map their fantasies of empowerment and escape onto their neighborhoods. Frederick Donaldson (1970) proposed two different classifications of these spaces home base, the world which is secure and familiar, and home region, an area undergoing active exploration, a space under the process of being colonized by the child. Moore (1986) writes: One of the clearest expressions of the benefits of continuity in the urban landscape was the way in which children used it as an outdoor gymnasium. As I walked along a Mill Hill street with Paul, he continually went darting ahead, leapfrogging over concrete bollards, hopping between paving slabs, balancing along the curbside. In each study area, certain kids seemed to dance through their surroundings on the look out for microfeatures with which to test their bodies....Not only did he [David, another boy in the study], like Paul, jump over gaps between things, go tightrope walking along the tops of walls, leapfrogging objects on sight, but at one point he went mountain climbing up a roughly built, nine-foot wall that had many serendipitously placed toe and handholds. (p.72) These discoveries arise from active exploration and spontaneous engagement with their physical surroundings. Children in the same neighborhoods may have fundamentally different relations to the spaces they share, cutting their own paths, giving their own names to features of their environment. The wild spaces are far more important, many researchers conclude, than playgrounds, which can only be used in sanctioned ways, since they allow many more opportunities for children to modify their physical environment. Childrens access to spaces are structured around gender differences. Observing the use of space within 1970s suburban America, Hart (1979) found that boys enjoyed far
greater mobility and range than girls of the same age and class background. In the course of an afternoons play, a typical 10-12 year old boy might travel a distance of 2452 yards, while the average 10-12 year old girl might only travel 959 yards. For the most part, girls expanded their geographic range only to take on responsibilities and perform chores for the family, while parents often turned a blind eye to a boys movements into prohibited spaces. The boys Hart (1979) observed were more likely to move beyond their homes in search of rivers, forts and treehouses, woods, ballfields, hills, lawns, sliding places, and climbing trees while girls were more like to seek commercially developed spaces, such as stores or shopping malls. Girls were less likely than boys to physically alter their play environment, to dam creeks or build forts. Such gender differences in mobility, access and control over physical space increased as children grew older. As C. Ward (1977) notes: Whenever we discuss the part the environment plays in the lives of children, we are really talking about boys. As a stereotype, the child in the city is a boy. Girls are far less visible...The reader can verify this by standing in a city street at any time of day and counting the children seen. The majority will be boys. (p.152) One study found that parents were more likely to describe boys as being outdoors children and girls as indoor children (Newson and Newson, 1976). Another 1975 study (Rheingold and Cook), which inventoried the contents of childrens bedrooms, found boys more likely to possess a range of vehicles and sports equipment designed to encourage outside play, while the girls rooms were stocked with dolls, doll clothes, and other domestic objects. Parents of girls were more likely to express worries about the dangers their children face on the streets and to structure girls time for productive household activities or educational play (Matthews, 1992). Historically, girl culture formed under closer maternal supervision and girls toys were designed to foster female-specific skills and competencies and prepare girls for their future domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers. The dolls central place in girlhood reflected maternal desires to encourage daughters to sew; the dolls china heads and hands fostered delicate gestures and movements (Formanek-Brunnel, 1998). However, these skills were not acquired without some resistance. Nineteenth century girls were apparently as willing as todays girls to mistreat their dolls, cutting their hair, driving nails into their bodies. If cultural geographers are right when they argue that childrens ability to explore and modify their environments plays a large role in their growing sense of mastery, freedom and self confidence, then the restrictions placed on girls play have a crippling effect. Conversely, this research would suggest that childrens declining access to play space would have a more dramatic impact on the culture of young boys, since girls already faced domestic confinement.
Putting Boy Culture Back in the Home Clods were handy and the air was full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid like a hail storm; and before Aunt Polly could collect her surprised faculties and sally to the rescue, six or seven clods had taken personal effect, and Tom was over the fence and gone....He presently got safely beyond the reach of capture and punishment, and hasted toward the public square of the village, where two military companies of boys had met for conflict, according to previous appointment. Tom was the general of one of these armies, Joe Harper (a bosom friend) general of the other....Toms army won a great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone. Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1961), pp.19-20. What E. Anthony Rotundo (1994) calls boy culture emerged in the context of the growing separation of the male public sphere and the female private sphere in the wake of the industrial revolution. Boys were cut off from the work life of their fathers and left under the care of their mothers. According to Rotundo, boys escaped from the home into the outdoors play space, freeing them to participate in a semi-autonomous boy culture which cast itself in opposition to maternal culture: Where womens sphere offered kindness, morality, nurture and a gentle spirit, the boys world countered with energy, self-assertion, noise, and a frequent resort to violence. The physical explosiveness and the willingness to inflect pain contrasted so sharply with the values of the home that they suggest a dialogue in actions between the values of the two spheres as if a boys aggressive impulses, so relentlessly opposed at home, sought extreme forms of release outside it; then, with stricken consciences, the boys came home for further lessons in self-restraint. (p.37) The boys took transgressing maternal prohibitions as proof they werent mamas boys. Rotundo argues that this break with the mother was a necessary step towards autonomous manhood. One of the many tragedies of our gendered-division of labor may be the ways that it links misogyny an aggressive fighting back against the mother with the process of developing self-reliance. Contrary to the Freudian concept of the oedipal complex (which focuses on boys struggles with their allpowerful fathers as the site of identity formation), becoming an adult male often means struggling with (and in many cases, actively repudiating) maternal culture. Fathers, on the other hand, offered little guidance to their sons, who, Rotundo argues, acquired masculine skills and values from other boys. By contrast, girls play culture was often interdependent with the realm of their mothers domestic activities, insuring a
smoother transition into anticipated adult roles, but allowing less autonomy. What happens when the physical spaces of 19th century boy culture are displaced by the virtual spaces of contemporary video games? Cultural geographers have long argued that television is a poor substitute for backyard play, despite its potential to present children with a greater diversity of spaces than can be found in their immediate surroundings, precisely because it is a spectatorial rather than a participatory medium. Moore (1986), however, leaves open the prospect that a more interactive digital medium might serve some of the same developmental functions as backyard play. A child playing a video game, searching for the path around obstacles, or looking for an advantage over imaginary opponents, engages in many of the same mapping activities as children searching for affordances in their real-world environments. Rotundos core claims about 19th century boy culture hold true for the video game culture of contemporary boyhood. This congruence may help us to account for the enormous popularity of these games with young boys. This fit should not be surprising when we consider that the current game genres reflect intuitive choices by men who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when suburban boy culture still reigned. (1) Nineteenth century boy culture was charactered by its independence from the realm of both mothers and fathers. It was a space where boys could develop autonomy and self confidence. Twentieth century video game culture also carves out a cultural realm for modern day children separate from the space of their parents. They often play the games in their rooms and guard their space against parental intrusion. Parents often express a distaste for the games pulpy plots and lurid images. As writers like Jon Katz (1997) and Don Tapscott (1997) note, childrens relative comfort with digital media is itself a generational marker, with adults often unable to comprehend the movement and colored shapes of the video screen. Here, however, the loss of spacial mobility is acutely felt the bookworm, the boy who spent all of his time in his room reading, had a mamas boy reputation in the old boy culture. Modern day boys have had to accommodate their domestic confinement with their definitions of masculinity, perhaps accounting, in part, for the hypermasculine and hyperviolent content of the games themselves. The game player has a fundamentally different image than the book worm. (2) In 19th century boy culture, youngsters gained recognition from their peers for their daring, often proven through stunts (such as swinging on vines, climbing trees, or leaping from rocks as they cross streams) or through pranks (such as stealing apples or doing mischief on adults.) In 20th century video game culture, children gain recognition for their daring as demonstrated in the virtual worlds of the game, overcoming obstacles, beating bosses, and mastering levels. Nineteenth century boyss trespasses on neighbors property or
confrontations with hostile shopkeepers are mirrored by the visual vocabulary of the video games which often pit smaller protagonists against the might and menace of much larger rivals. Much as cultural geographers describe the boys physical movements beyond their home bases into developing home territories, the video games allow boys to gradually develop their mastery over the entire digital terrain, securing their future access to spaces by passing goal posts or finding warp zones. (3)The central virtues of the 19th century boy culture were mastery and self-control. The boys set tasks and goals for themselves which required discipline in order to complete. Through this process of setting and meeting challenges, they acquired the virtues of manhood. The central virtues of video game culture are mastery (over the technical skills required by the games) and self-control (manual dexterity). Putting in the long hours of repetition and failure necessary to master a game also requires discipline and the ability to meet and surpass self-imposed goals. Most contemporary video games are ruthlessly goal-driven. Boys will often play the games, struggling to master a challenging level, well past the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. Children are not so much addicted to video games as they are unwilling to quit before they have met their goals, and the games seem to always set new goalposts, inviting us to best just one more level. One of the limitations of the contemporary video game is that it provides only pre-structured forms of interactivity, and in that sense, video games are more like playgrounds and city parks rather than wild-spaces. For the most part, video game players can only exploit built-in affordances and pre-programed pathways. Secret codes, Easter Eggs, and Warp zones function in digital space like secret paths do in physical space and are eagerly sought by gamers who want to go places and see things others cant find. (4) The 19th century boy culture was hierarchical with a members status dependent upon competitive activity, direct confrontation and physical challenges. The boy fought for a place in the gangs inner circle, hoping to win admiration and respect. Twentieth century video game culture can also be hierarchical with a member gaining status by being able to complete a game or log a big score. Video game masters move from house to house to demonstrate their technical competency and to teach others have to beat particularly challenging levels. The video arcade becomes a proving ground for contemporary masculinity, while many games are designed for the arcade, demanding a constant turn-over of coins for play and intensifying the action into roughly two minute increments. Often, single-player games generate digital rivals who may challenge us to beat their speeds or battle them for dominance. (5) Nineteenth century boy culture was sometimes brutally violent and physically
aggressive; children hurt each other or got hurt trying to prove their mastery and daring. Twentieth century video game culture displaces this physical violence into a symbolic realm. Rather than beating each other up behind the school, boys combat imaginary characters, finding a potentially safer outlet for their aggressive feelings. We forget how violent previous boy culture was. Rotundo (1994)writes: The prevailing ethos of the boys world not only supported the expression of impulses such as dominance and aggression (which had evident social uses), but also allowed the release of hostile, violent feelings (whose social uses were less evident). By allowing free passage to so many angry or destructive emotions, boy culture sanctioned a good deal of intentional cruelty, like the physical torture of animals and the emotional violence of bullying....If a times boys acted like a hostile pack of wolves that preyed on its own kind as well as on other species, they behaved at other times like a litter of playful pups who enjoy romping, wrestling and testing new skills. (45) Even feelings of fondness and friendship were expressed through physical means, including greeting each other with showers of brickbats and offal. Such a culture is as violent as the world depicted in contemporary video games, which have the virtue of allowing growing boys to express their aggression and rambunctiousness through indirect, rather than direct, means. (6) Nineteenth century boy culture expressed itself through scatological humor. Such bodily images (of sweat, spit, snot, shit, and blood) reflected the boys growing awareness of their bodies and signified their rejection of maternal constraints. Twentieth century video game culture has often been criticized for its dependence upon similar kinds of scatological images, with the blood and gore of games like Mortal Kombat (with its end moves of dismemberment and decapitation), providing some of the most oft-cited evidence in campaigns to reform video game content (Kinder, 1996). Arguably, these images serve the same functions for modern boys as for their 19th century counterparts allowing an exploration of what its like to live in our bodies and an expression of distance from maternal regulations. Like the earlier boy culture, this scatological imagery sometimes assumes overtly misogynistic form, directed against women as a civilizing or controlling force, staged towards womens bodies as a site of physical difference and as the objects of desire/distaste. Some early games, such as Super Metroid, rewarded player competence by forcing female characters to strip down to their underwear if the boys beat a certain score. (7) Nineteenth century boy culture depended on various forms of role-playing, often imitating the activities of adult males. Rotundo (1994) notes the popularity of games of
settlers and Indians during an age when the frontier had only recently been closed, casting boys sometimes as their settler ancestors and other times as savages. Such play mapped the competitive and combative boy culture ethos onto the adult realm, thus exaggerating the place of warfare in adult male lives. Through such play, children tested alternative social roles, examined adult ideologies, and developed a firmer sense of their own abilities and identities. Boy culture emphasized exuberant spontaneity; it allowed free rein to aggressive impulses and revealed in physical prowess and assertion. Boy culture was a world of play, a social space where one evaded the duties and restrictions of adult society...Men were quiet and sober, for theirs was a life of serious business. They had families to support, reputations to earn, responsibilities to meet. Their world was based on work, not play, and their survival in it depended on patient planning, not spontaneous impulse. To prosper, then, a man had to delay gratification and restrain desire. Of course, he also needed to be aggressive and competitive, and he needed an instinct for self-advancement. But he had to channel those assertive impulses in ways that were suitable to the abstract battles and complex issues of middle-class mens work. (55) Today, the boys are using the same technologies as their fathers, even if they are using them to pursue different fantasies. (8) In 19th century boy culture, play activities were seen as opportunities for social interactions and bonding. Boys formed strong ties which formed the basis for adult affiliations, for participation in mens civic clubs and fraternities, and for business partnerships. The track record of contemporary video game culture at providing a basis for a similar social networking is more mixed. In some cases, the games constitute both play space and playmates, reflecting the physical isolation of contemporary children from each other. In other cases, the games provide the basis for social interactions at home, at school and at the video arcades. Children talk about the games together, over the telephone or now, over the Internet, as well as in person, on the playground or at the school cafeteria. Boys compare notes, map strategies, share tips, and show off their skills, and this exchange of video game lore provides the basis for more complex social relations. Again, video games dont isolate children but they fail, at the present time, to provide the technological basis for overcoming other social and cultural factors, such as working parents who are unable to bring children to each others houses or enlarged school districts which make it harder to get together. Far from a corruption of the culture of childhood, video games show strong continuities to the boyhood play fondly remembered by previous generations. There is a significant difference, however. The 19th century boy culture enjoyed such freedom and autonomy precisely because their activities were staged within a larger expanse of space, because boys could occupy an environment largely unsupervised by adults. Nineteenth century boys sought indirect means of breaking with their mothers, escaping to spaces that were outside their control, engaging in secret activities they knew would have met parental disapproval. The mothers, on the other hand, rarely had to confront the nature of this boy culture and often didnt even know that it existed.
The video game culture, on the other hand, occurs in plain sight, in the middle of the family living room, or at best, in the childrens rooms. Mothers come face to face with the messy process by which western culture turns boys into men, and it becomes the focus of open antagonisms and the subject of tremendous guilt and anxiety. Segas Lee McEnany (this volume) acknowledges that the overwhelming majority of complaints game companies receive come from mothers, and Ellen Seiter (1996) has noted that this statistic reflects the increased pressure placed on mothers to supervise and police childrens relations to popular culture. Current attempts to police video game content reflect a long history of attempts to shape and regulate childrens play culture, starting with the playground movements of progressive America and the organization of social groups for boys such as the Boy Scouts or Little League which tempered the more rough-and-tumble qualities of boy culture and channeled them into games, sports, and other adult-approved pastimes. Many of us might wish to foster a boy culture that allowed the expression of affection or the display of empowerment through nonviolent channels, that disentangled the development of personal autonomy from the fostering of misogyny, and that encouraged boys to develop a more nurturing, less domineering attitude to their social and natural environments. These worthy goals are worth pursuing. We cant simply adopt a boys will be boys attitude. However, one wonders about the consequences of such a policing action in a world that no longer offers wild outdoor spaces as a safety valve for boys to escape parental control. Perhaps, our sonsand daughters need an unpoliced space for social experimentation, a space where they can vent their frustrations and imagine alternative adult roles without inhibiting parental pressure. The problem, of course, is that unlike the 19th century boy culture, the video game culture is not a world children construct for themselves but rather a world made by adult companies and sold to children. There is no way that we can escape adult intervention in shaping childrens play environments as long as those environments are built and sold rather than discovered and appropriated. As parents, we are thus implicated in our childrens choice of play environments, whether we wish to be or not, and we need to be conducting a dialogue with our children about the qualities and values exhibited by these game worlds. One model would be for adults and children to collaborate in the design and development of video game spaces, in the process, developing a conversation about the nature and meanings of the worlds being produced. Another approach (Cassell, This Volume) would be to create tools to allow children to construct their own playspaces and then give them the space to do what they want. Right now, parents are rightly apprehensive about a playspace which is outside their own control and which is shaped according to adult specifications but without their direct input. One of the most disturbing aspects of the boy culture is its gender segregation. The 19th century boy culture played an essential role in preparing boys for entry into their future professional roles and responsibilities; some of that same training has also
become essential for girls at a time when more and more women are working outside the home. The motivating force behind the girls game movement is the idea that girls, no less than boys, need computers at an early age if they are going to be adequately prepared to get good jobs for good wages. (Jenkins and Cassell, this volume) Characteristically, the girls game movement has involved the transposition of traditional feminine play cultures into the digital realm. However, in doing so, we run the risk of preserving, rather than transforming, those aspects of traditional girl culture which kept women restricted to the domestic sphere, while denying them the spacial exploration and mastery associated with the boy culture. Girls, no less than boys, need to develop an exploratory mindset, a habit of seeking unknown spaces as opposed to settling placidly into the domestic sphere. Gendered Games/Gendered Books: Towards a Cultural Geography of Imaginary Spaces These debates about gendered play and commercial entertainment are not new, repeating (and in a curious way, reversing) the emergence of a gender-specific set of literary genres for children in the 19th century. As Elizabeth Segel (1986) notes, the earliest childrens book writers were mostly women, who saw the genre as the exercise of feminine moral influence upon childrens developing minds, and who created a literature that was undifferentiated according to gender but domestic in setting, heavily didactic and morally or spiritually uplifting. (171) In other words, the earliest childrens books were girls books in everything but name and this isnt surprising at a time novel reading was still heavily associated with women. The boys book emerged, in the mid-19th century, as men of action, industrialists and adventurers, wrote fictions intended to counter boys restlessness and apathy towards traditional childrens literature. The introduction of boys books reflected a desire to get boys to read. Boy book fantasies of action and adventure reflected the qualities of their pre-existing play culture, fantasies centering around the escape from domesticity and from the female domination of the domestic world. (Segel, 1986, 171) If the girls game movement has involved the rethinking of video game genres (which initially emerged in a male-dominated space) in order to make digital media more attractive to girls (and thus to encourage the development of computational skills), the boys book movement sought to remake reading (which initially emerged in a female-dominated space) to respond to male needs (and thus to encourage literacy). In both cases, the goal seems to have been to construct fantasies which reflect the gender-specific nature of childrens play and thus to motivate those left out of the desirable cultural practices to get more involved. In this next section, I will consider the continuity that exists between gender/genre configurations in childrens literature and in the digital games marketplace. Adventure Islands: Boy Space Alex looked around him. There was no place to seek cover. He was too
weak to run, even if there was. His gaze returned to the stallion, fascinated by a creature so wild and so near. Here was the wildest of all wild animals he had fought for everything he had ever needed, for food, for leadership, for life itself; it was his nature to kill or be killed. The horse reared again; then he snorted and plunged straight for the boy. (27) Walter Farley, The Black Stallion (1941) The space of the boy book is the space of adventure, risk-taking and danger, of a wild and untamed nature that must be mastered if one is to survive. The space of the boys book offers no place to seek cover, and thus encourages fight-or-flight responses. In some cases, most notably in the works of Mark Twain, the boy books represented a nostalgic documentation of 19th century boy culture, its spaces, its activities, and its values. In other cases, as in the succession of pulp adventure stories that form the background of the boys game genres, the narratives offered us a larger-than-life enactment of those values, staged in exotic rather than backyard spaces, involving broader movements through space and amplifying horseplay and risktaking into scenarios of actual combat and conquest. Boys book writers found an easy fit between the ideologies of American manifest destiny or British colonialism and the adventure stories boys preferred to read, which often took the form of quests, journeys, or adventures into untamed and uncharted regions of the world into the frontier of the American west (or in the 20th century, the final frontier of Mars and beyond), into the exotic realms of Africa, Asia, and South America. The protagonists were boys or boy-like adult males, who have none of the professional responsibilities and domestic commitments associated with adults. The heroes sought adventure by running away from home to join the circus (Toby Tyler), to sign up as cabin boy on a ship (Treasure Island), or to seek freedom by rafting down the river (Huckleberry Finn). They confronted a hostile and untamed environment (as when The Jungle Books Mowgli must battle tooth and claw with the tiger, Sheer Khan, or as when Jack Londons protagonists faced the frozen wind of the Yukon.) They were shipwrecked on islands, explored caves, searched for buried treasure, plunged harpoons into slick-skinned whales, or set out alone across the dessert, the bush or the jungle. They survived through their wits, their physical mastery, and their ability to use violent force. Each chapter offered a sensational set piece an ambush by wild Indians, an encountered with a coiled cobra, a landslide, a stampede, or a sea battle which placed the protagonist at risk and tested his skills and courage. The persistent images of bloodand-guts combat and cliff-hanging risks compelled boys to keep reading, making their blood race with promises of thrills and more thrills. This rapid pace allowed little room for moral and emotional introspection. In turn, such stories provided fantasies which boys could enact upon their own environments. Rotundo (1994) describes 19th century boys playing pirates, settlers and Indians, or Roman warriors, roles drawn from boys books. The conventions of the 19th and early 20th century boys adventure story provided the
basis for the current video game genres. The most successful console game series, such as Capcoms Mega Man or Nintendos Super Mario Brothers games, combine the iconography of multiple boys book genres. Their protagonists struggle across an astonishingly eclectic range of landscapes desserts, frozen wastelands, tropical rain forests, urban undergrounds and encounter resistance from strange hybrids (who manage to be animal, machine, and savage all rolled into one). The scroll games have built into them the constant construction of frontiers home regions which the boy player must struggle to master and push beyond, moving deeper and deeper into uncharted space. Action is relentless. The protagonist shoots fireballs, ducks and charges, slugs it out, rolls, jumps and dashes across the treacherous terrain, never certain what lurks around the next corner. If you stand still, you die. Everything you encounter is potentially hostile so shoot to kill. Errors in judgement result in the characters death and require starting all over again. Each screen overflows with dangers; each landscape is riddled with pitfalls and booby traps. One screen may require you to leap from precipice to precipice, barely missing falling into the deep chasms below. Another may require you to swing by vines across the treetops, or spelunk through an underground passageway, all the while fighting it out with the alien hordes. The games levels and worlds reflect the set-piece structure of the earlier boys books. Boys get to make lots of noise on adventure island, with the soundtrack full of pulsing music, shouts, groans, zaps, and bombblasts. Everything is streamlined: the plots and characters are reduced to genre archetypes, immediately familiar to the boy gamers, and defined more through their capacity for actions than anything else. The adventure island is the archetypal space of both the boys books and the boys games an isolated world far removed from domestic space or adult supervision, an untamed world for people who refuse to bow before the pressures of the civilizing process, a never-never-land you seek your fortune. The adventure island, in short, is a world which fully embodies the boy culture and its ethos. Secret Gardens: Girl Space If it was the key to the closed garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that she wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years. Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it every day and shut the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her own and play it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she was, but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. (71)---Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911), The Secret Garden Girl space is a space of secrets and romance, a space of ones own in a world which
offers you far too little room to explore. Ironically, girl books often open with fantasies of being alone and then require the female protagonist to sacrifice their private space in order to make room for others needs. The girls book genres were slower to evolve, often emerging through imitation of the gothics and romances preferred by adult women readers and retaining a strong aura of instruction and selfimprovement. As Segel (1986) writes: The liberation of nineteenth century boys into the book world of sailors and pirates, forest and battles, left their sisters behind in the world of childhood that is, the world of home and family. When publishers and writers saw the commercial possibilities of books for girls, it is interesting that they did not provide comparable escape reading for them (that came later, with the pulp series books) but instead developed books designed to persuade the young reader to accept the confinement and self-sacrifice inherent in the doctrine of feminine influence. This was accomplished by depicting the rewards of submission and the sacred joys of serving as the angel of the house. (171-172) If the boys book protagonist escapes all domestic responsibilities, the girls book heroine learned to temper her impulsiveness and to accept family and domestic obligations (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables) or sought to be a healing influence on a family suffering from tragedy and loss (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Segel (1986) finds the most striking difference between the two genre traditions is in the books settings: the domestic confinement of one book as against the extended voyage to exotic lands in the other. (173) Avoiding the boys books purple prose, the girls books describe naturalistic environments, similar to the realm of readers daily experience. The female protagonists take emotional, but rarely, physical risks. The tone is more apt to be confessional than confrontational. Traditional girls books, such as The Secret Garden, do encourage some forms of spatial exploration, an exploration of the hidden passages of unfamiliar houses or the rediscovery and cultivation of a deserted rose garden. Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman (1986) emphasize the role of spacial exploration in the gothic tradition, a maiden-plus-habitation formula whose influence is strongly felt on The Secret Garden. In such stories, the exploration of space leads to the uncovering of secrets, clues, and symptoms that shed light on characters motivations. Hidden rooms often contained repressed memories and sometimes entombed relatives. The castle, Holland and Sherman (1986) note, can threaten, resist, love or confine, but in all these actions, it stands as a total environment (220) which the female protagonist can never fully escape. Holland and Sherman claim that gothic romances fulfill a fantasy of unearthing secrets about the adult world, casting the reader in a position of powerlessness and daring them to overcome their fears and confront the truth. Such a fantasy space is, of course, consistent with what we have already learned about girls domestic
confinement and greater responsibilities to their families. Purple Moons Secret Paths in the Forest fully embodies the juvenile gothic tradition while significantly enlarging the space open for girls to explore. Purple Moon removes the walls around the garden, turning it into a woodlands. Producer Brenda Laurel has emphasized girls fascination with secrets, a fascination that readily translates into a puzzle game structure, though Secret Paths pushes further than existing games to give these secrets social and psychological resonance. Based on her focus group interviews, Laurel initially sought to design a magic garden, a series of romanticized natural environments responsive to girls highly touted nurturing desires, their fondness for animals. She wanted to create a place where girls could explore, meet and take care of creatures, design and grow magical or fantastical plants. (Personal correspondence, 1997) What she found was that the girls did not feel magical animals would need their nurturing and in fact, many of the girls wanted the animals to mother them. The girls in Laurels study, however, were drawn to the idea of the secret garden or hidden forest as a girls only place for solitude and introspection. Laurel explains: Girls' first response to the place was that they would want to go there alone, to be peaceful and perhaps read or daydream. They might take a best friend, but they would never take an adult or a boy. They thought that the garden/forest would be place where they could find out things that would be important to them, and a place where they might meet a wise or magical person. Altogether their fantasies was about respite and looking within as opposed to frolicsome play. (Personal correspondence, 1997) The spaces in Purple Moons game are quiet, contemplative places, rendered in naturalistic detail but with the soft focus and warm glow of an impressionistic watercolor. The world of Secret Paths explodes with subtle and inviting colors the colors of a forest on a summer afternoon, of spring flowers and autumn leaves and shifting patterns of light, of rippling water and moonlit skies, of sand and earth. The soundtrack is equally dense and engaging, as the natural world whispers to us in the rustle of the undergrowth or sings to us in the sounds of the wind and the calls of birds. The spaces of Secret Paths are full of life, as lizards slither from rock to rock, or field mice dart for cover, yet even animals which might be frightening in other contexts (coyotes, foxes, owls) seem eager to reveal their secrets to our explorers. Jesse, one of the games protagonists, expresses a fear of the creepy nighttime woods, but the game makes the animals seem tame and the forest safe, even in the dead of night. The games puzzles reward careful exploration and observation. At one point, we must cautiously approach a timid fawn if we wish to be granted the magic jewels that are the tokens of our quest.
The guidebook urges us to be unhurried and gentle with the easily startled deer. Our goal is less to master nature than to understand how we might live in harmony with it. We learn to mimic its patterns, to observe the notes (produced by singing cactus) that make a lizards head bob with approval and then to copy them ourselves, to position spiders on a web so that they may harmonize rather than create discord. And, in some cases, we are rewarded for feeding and caring for the animals. In The Secret Garden (1911), Mary Lennox is led by a robin to the branches that mask the entrance to the forgotten rose garden: Mary had stepped close to the robin, and suddenly the gusts of wind swung aside some loose ivy trails, and more suddenly still she jumped toward it and caught it in her hand. This she did because she had seen something under it a round knob which had been covered by the leaves hanging over it....The robin kept singing and twittering away and tilting his head on one side, as if he were as excited as she was. (80) Such animal guides abound in Secret Paths: the curser is shaped like a lady-bug during our explorations and like a butterfly when we want to venture beyond the current screen. Animals show us the way, if we only take the time to look and listen. Unlike twitch-and-shoot boys games, Secret Paths encourages us to stroke and caress the screen with our curser, clicking only when we know where secret treasures might be hidden. A magic book tells us: As I patiently traveled along [through the paths], I found that everything was enchanted! The trees, flowers and animals, the sun, sky and stars all had magical properties! The more closely I listened and the more carefully I explored, the more was revealed to me. Natures rhythms are gradual and recurring, a continual process of birth, growth, and transformation. Laurel explains: We made the "game" intentionally slow - a girl can move down the paths at whatever pace, stop and play with puzzles or stones, or hang out in the tree house with or without the other characters. I think that this slowness is really a kind of refuge for the girls. The game is much slower than television, for example. One of the issues that girls have raised with us in our most recent survey of their concerns is the problem of feeling too busy. I think that "Secret Paths" provides an antidote to that feeling from the surprising source of the computer. (Personal correspondence, 1997) Frances Hodgson Burnetts Secret Garden (1911) is a place of healing and the book links Marys restoration of the forgotten rose garden with her repairing a family torn apart by tragedy, restoring a sickly boy to health, and coming to grips with her mothers death: So long as Mistress Marys mind was full of disagreeable thoughts
about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determined not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child.... When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children...with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day....there was no room for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired. (294) Purple Moons Secret Paths has also been designed as a healing place, where girls are encouraged to explore with your heart and answer their emotional dilemmas. As the magical book explains, You will never be alone here, for this is a place where girls come to share and to seek help from one another. At the games opening, we draw together a group of female friends in the treehouse, where each confesses their secrets and tells of their worries and sufferings. Miko speaks of the pressure to always be the best and the alienation she feels from the other children; Dana recounts her rage over losing a soccer companionship; Minn describes her humiliation because her immigrant grandmother has refused to assimilate new world customs. Some of them have lost parents, others face scary situations or emotional slights that cripple their confidence. Their answers lie along the secret paths through the forrest, where the adventurers can find hidden magical stones that embody social, psychological, or emotional strengths. Along the way, the girls secrets are literally embedded within the landscape, so that clicking on our environment may call forth memories or confessions. If we are successful in finding all of the hidden stones, they magically form a necklace and when given to the right girl, they allow us to hear a comforting or clarifying story. Such narratives teach girls how to find emotional resources within themselves and how to observe and respond to others often unarticulated needs. Solving puzzles in the physical environment helps us to address problems in our social environment. Secret Paths is what Brenda Laurel calls a friendship adventure, allowing young girls rehearse their coping skills and try alternative social strategies. The Play Town: Another Space for Girls? Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town.See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it..... Then when you know who lives there, you make up what they do. For instance, Mr. Charles Hanley runs the filling station on the corner...Harriet got very businesslike. She stood up, then got on her knees in the soft September mud so she could lean over the little valley made between the two big roots of the tree. She referred to her notebook every now and then, but for the most part she stared intently at the mossy lowlands which made her town. (3-5) Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (1964) Harriet the Spy opens with a description of another form of spatial play for girls Harriets town, a microworld she maps onto the familiar contours of her own backyard and uses to think through the complex social relations she observes in her community. Harriet controls the inhabitants of this town, shaping their actions to her
desires: In this town, everybody goes to bed at nine-thirty.(4) Not unlike a soap opera, her stories depend on juxtapositions of radically different forms of human experience: Now, this night, as Mr. Hanley is just about to close up, a long, big old black car drives up and in it there are all these men with guns....At this same minute Mrs. Harrisons baby is born. (6) Her fascination with mapping and controlling the physical space of the town makes her game a pre-digital prototype for Sim City and other simulation games. However, compared to Harriets vivid interest in the distinct personalities and particular experiences of her townspeople, Sim City seems alienated and abstract. Sim Citys classifications of land use into residential, commercial, and industrial push us well beyond the scale of everyday life and in so doing, strips the landscape of its potential as a stage for childrens fantasies. Sim City offers us another form of power the power to play God, to design our physical environment, to sculp the landscape or call down natural disasters (Friedman, 1995), but not the power to imaginatively transform our social environment. Sim City embraces stock themes from boys play, such as building forts, shaping earth with toy trucks, or damming creeks, playing them out on a much larger scale. For Harriet, the mapping of the space was only the first step in preparing the ground for a rich saga of life and death, joy and sorrow, and those of the elements that are totally lacking in most existing simulation games. As Fitzhughs novel continues, Harriets interests shift from the imaginary events of her simulated town and into real world spaces. She spies on peoples private social interactions, staging more and more daring investigations, trying to understand what motivates adult actions, and writing her evaluations and interpretations of their lives in her notebook. Harriets adventures take her well beyond the constricted space of her own home. She breaks and enters houses and takes rides on dumbwaiters, sneaks through back allies and peeps into windows. She barely avoids getting caught. Harriets adventures occur in public space (not the private space of the secret garden), a populated environment (not the natural worlds visited in Secret Paths). Yet, her adventures are not so much direct struggles with opposing forces (as might be found in a boys book adventure) as covert operations to ferret out knowledge of social relations. The games of Theresa Duncan (Chop Suey, Smarty, Zero Zero) offer a digital version of Harriets Town. Players can explore suburban and urban spaces and pry into bedroom closets in search of the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life. Duncan (this volume) specifically cites Harriet the Spy as an influence, hoping that her games will grant young girls a sense of inquisitiveness and wonder. Chop Suey and Smarty take place in small Midwestern towns, a working class world of diners, hardware stores, and beauty parlors. Zero Zero draws us further from home into fin de siecle Paris, a world of bakeries, wax museums, and catacombs. These spaces are rendered in a distinctive style somewhere between the primitiveness of Grandma Moses and the colorful postmodernism of Pee-Wees Playhouse. Far removed from the romantic imagery of Secret Paths, these worlds overflow with city sounds the clopping of
horse hooves on cobblestones, barking dogs, clanging church bells in Zero Zero and the narrator seems fascinated with the smoke stacks and signs which clutter this manmade environment . As the narrator in Zero Zero rhapsodizes, smoke curled black and feathery like a horses tale from a thousand chimney pots in this world before popsicles and paperbacks. While the social order has been tamed, posing few dangers, Duncan has not rid these worlds of their more disreputable elements. The guy in the candy shop in Chop Suey has covered his body with tattoos. The Frenchmen in Zero Zero are suitably bored, ill-tempered, and insulting; even flowers hurl abuse at us. The man in the antlered hat sings rowdy songs about bones and guts when we visit the catacombs, and the women puff on cigarettes, wear too much make-up, flash their cleavage, and hint about illicit rendezvous. Duncan (this volume) suggests: There's a sense of bittersweet experience in Chop Suey, where not everyone has had a perfect life but they're all happy people. Vera has three ex-husbands all named Bob....Vera has problems, but she's also filled with love. And she's just a very vibrant, alive person, and that's why she fascinates the little girls. Duncan rejects our tendency to project this fantasy of purity and innocence onto children, suggesting that all this niceness deprives children of the richness of their lives and does not help them come to grips with their complicated feelings towards the people in their lives. Duncans protagonists, June Bug (Chop Suey), Pinkee LeBrun (Zero Zero), are smart, curious girls, who want to know more than they have been told. Daring Pinkee scampers along the roofs of Paris and pops down chimneys or steps boldly through the doors of shops, questioning adults about their visions for the new century. Yet, she is also interested in smaller, more intimate questions, such as the identity of the secret admirer who writes love poems to Bon Bon, the singer at the Follies. Clues unearthed in one location may shed light on mysteries posed elsewhere, allowing Duncan to suggest something of the interconnectedness of life within a close community. Often, as in Harriet, the goal is less to evaluate these people than to understand what makes them tick. In that sense, the game fosters the character-centered reading practices which Segel (1986) associates with the girls book genres, reading practices which thrive on gossip and speculation. Duncans games have no great plot to propel them. Duncan (this volume) said, Chop Suey works the way that real life does: all these things happen to you, but there's no magical event, like there is sometimes in books, that transforms you. Lazy curiosity invites us to explore the contents of each shop, to flip through the fashion magazines in Bon Bons dressing room, to view the early trick films playing at Cinema Egypt or to watch the cheeses in the window of Quel Fromage which are, for reasons of their own, staging the major turning points of the French revolution. (She also cites inspiration
from the more surreal adventures of Alice in Wonderland!) The interfaces are flexible, allowing us to visit any location when we want without having to fight our way through levels or work past puzzling obstacles. Zero Zero and Duncans other games take particular pleasure in anarchistic imagery, in ways we can disrupt and destabilize the environment, showering the bakers angry faces with white clouds of flour, ripping off the table clothes, or shaking up soda bottles so they will spurt their corks. Often, there is something vaguely naughty about the game activities, as when a visit to Poire the fashion designer has us matching different pairs of underwear. In that sense, Duncans stories preserve the mischievous and sometimes anti-social character of Harriets antics and the transformative humor of Lewis Carroll, encouraging the young gamers to take more risks and to try things that might not ordinarily meet their parents approval. Pinkees first actions as a baby are to rip the pink ribbons from her hair! Duncan likes her characters free and unladylike. In keeping with the pedagogic legacy of the girls book tradition, Zero Zero promises us an introduction to French history, culture, and language, Smarty a mixture of spelling and spells, math and Martians, grammar and glamour, but Duncans approach is sassy and irreverent. The waxwork of Louis XIV sticks out its tongue at us, while Joan DArc is rendered in marshmallow, altogether better suited for toasting. The breads and cakes in the bakery are shaped like the faces of French philosophers and spout incomprehensible arguments. Pinkees quest for knowledge about the coming century can not be reduced to an approved curriculum, but rather expresses a unrestrained fascination with the stories, good, bad, happy or sad, that people tell each other about their lives. Harriet the Spy is ambivalent about its protagonists escapades: her misadventures are clearly excite the books female readers, but the character herself is socially ostracized and disciplined, forced to more appropriately channel her creativity and curiosity. Pinkee suffers no such punishment, ending up the game watching the fireworks that mark the change of the centuries, taking pleasure in the knowledge that she will be a central part of the changes that are coming: tonight belongs to Bon Bon but the future belongs to Pinkee. Conclusion: Towards a Gender-Neutral Play space? Brenda Laurel and Theresa Duncan offer two very different conceptions of a digital play space for girls one pastoral, the other urban; one based on the ideal of living in harmony with nature, the other based on an anarchistic pleasure in disrupting the stable order of everyday life and making the familiar strange. Yet, in many ways, the two games embrace remarkable similar ideals play spaces for girls adopt a slower pace, are less filled with dangers, invite gradual investigation and discovery, foster an awareness of social relations and a search for secrets, center around emotional relations between characters. Both allow the exploration of physical environments, but are really about the interior worlds of feelings and fears. Laurel and Duncan make an important
contribution when they propose new and different models for how digital media may be used. The current capabilities of our video and computer game technologies reflect the priorities of an earlier generation of game makers and their conception of the boys market. Their assumptions about what kinds of digital play spaces were desirable defined how the bytes would be allocated, valuing rapid response time over the memory necessary to construct more complex and compelling characters. Laurel and Duncan shift the focus prioritizing character relations and friendship adventures. In doing so, they are expanding what computers can do and what roles they can play in our lives. On the other hand, in our desire to open digital technologies as an alternative play space for girls, we must guard against simply duplicating in the new medium the gender-specific genres of childrens literature. The segregation of childrens reading into boy book and girl book genres, Segel (1986) argues, encouraged the development of gender-specific reading strategies with boys reading for plot and girls reading for character relationship. Such differences, Segel suggests, taught children to replicate the separation between a male public sphere of risk taking and a female domestic sphere of care taking. As Segel (1986) notes, the classification of childrens literature into boys books and girls books extracted a heavy cost in feminine self-esteem, restricting girls imaginative experience to what adults perceived as its proper place. Boys developed a sense of autonomy and mastery both from their reading and from their play. Girls learned to fetter their imaginations, just as they restricted their movements into real world spaces. At the same time, this genre division also limited boys psychological and emotional development, insuring a focus on goal-oriented, utilitarian, and violent plots. Too much interest in social and emotional life was a vulnerability in a world where competition left little room to be lead by your heart. We need to design digital play spaces which allow girls to do something more than stitch doll clothes, mother nature, or heal their friends sufferings or boys to do something more than battle it out with the barbarian hordes. Segels analysis of gender and childhood reading suggests two ways of moving beyond the gender-segregation of our virtual landscape. First, as Segel (1986) suggests, the designation of books for boys and girls did not preclude (though certainly discouraged) reading across gender lines: Though girls when they reached that certain age could be prevented from joining boys games and lively exploits, it was harder to keep them from accompanying their brothers on vicarious adventures through the reading of boys books. (175) Reading boys books gave girls (admittedly limited) access to the boy culture and its values. Segel finds evidence of such gender-crossing in the 19th century, though girls were actively discouraged from reading boys books because their contents were thought too lurid and unwholesome. At other times, educational authorities encouraged the assignment of boys books in public schools since girls could read and enjoy them, while there was much greater stigma attached to boys reading girls books. The growing visibility of the quake girls, female gamers
who compete in traditional male fighting and action/adventure games (Jenkins and Cassell, this volume), suggests that there has always been a healthy degree of crossover interest in the games market and that many girls enjoy playing with power. Girls may compete more directly and aggressively with boys in the video game arena than would ever have been possible in the real-world of backyard play, since differences in actual size, strength, and agility have no effect on the outcome of the game. And they can return from combat without the ripped clothes or black eyes that told parents they had done something unladylike. Unfortunately, much as girls who read boys books were likely to encounter the misogynistic themes that mark boys fantasies of separation from their mothers, girls who play boys games find the games constructions of female sexuality and power are designed to gratify preadolescent males, not to empower girls. Girl gamers are aggressively campaigning to have their tastes and interests factored into the development of action games. We need to open up more space for girls to join or play alongside the traditional boy culture down by the river, in the old vacant lot, within the bamboo forest. Girls need to learn how to explore unsafe and unfriendly spaces. Girls need to experience the complete freedom of movement promised by the boys games, if not all the time, then at least some of the time, if they are going to develop the self confidence and competitiveness demanded of contemporary professional women. Girls need to learn how to, in the words of a contemporary best-seller, run with the wolves and not just follow the butterflies along the Secret Paths. Girls need to be able to play games where Barbie gets to kick some butt. However, this focus on creating action games for girls still represents only part of the answer, for as Segel (1986) notes, the gender segregation of childrens literature was almost as damaging for boys as it was for girls: In a society where many men and women are alienated from members of the other sex, one wonders whether males might be more comfortable with and understanding of womens needs and perspectives if they had imaginatively shared female experiences through books, beginning in childhood. (183) Boys may need to play in secret gardens or toy towns just as much as girls need to explore adventure islands. In the literary realm, Segel points towards books, such as Little House on the Prairie or Wrinkle in Time, which fuse the boys and girl genres, rewarding both a traditionally masculine interest in plot action and a traditionally feminine interest in character relations. Sega Saturns Nights into Dreams represents a similar fusion of the boys and girls game genres. Much as in Secret Paths, our movement through the game space is framed as an attempt to resolve the characters emotional problems. In the frame stories that open the game, we enter the mindscape of the two protagonists as they toss and turn in their sleep. Claris, the female protagonist, hopes to gain recognition on the stage as a singer, but has nightmares of being rejected and ridiculed. Elliot, the male character, has fantasies of scoring big on the basketball court yet fears being bullied by bigger and more aggressive players. They run away from their problems, only to find
themselves in Nightopia, where they must save the dream world from the evil schemes of Wileman the Wicked and his monstrous minions. In the dreamworld, both Claris and Elliot may assume the identity of Nights, an androgynous harlequin figure, who can fly through the air, transcending all the problems below. Nights complex mythology has players gathering glowing orbs which represent different forms of energy needed to confront Claris and Elliots problems purity (white), wisdom (green), hope (yellow), intelligence (blue) and bravery (red) a structure that recalls the magic stones in Secret Paths through the Forest. The tone of this game is aptly captured by one Internet game critic, Big Mitch (n.d.): The whole experience of Nights is in soaring, tumbling, and freewheeling through colorful landscapes, swooping here and there, and just losing yourself in the moment. This is not a game you set out to win; the fun is in the journey rather than the destination. Big Mitchs response suggests a recognition of the fundamentally different qualities of this game its focus on psychological issues as much as upon action and conflict, its fascination with aimless exploration rather than goal-driven narrative, its movement between a realistic world of everyday problems and a fantasy realm of great adventure, its mixture of the speed and mobility associated with the boys platform games with the lush natural landscapes and the sculpted soundtracks associated with the girls games. Spring Valley is a sparkling world of rainbows and waterfalls and Emerald Green forests. Other levels allow us to splash through cascading fountains or sail past icy mountains and frozen wonderlands or bounce on pillows and off the walls of the surreal Soft Museum or swim through aquatic tunnels. The games 3-D design allows an exhilarating freedom of movement, enhanced by design features such as wind resistance which give players a stronger than average sense of embodiment. Nights into Dreams retains some of the dangerous and risky elements associated with the boys games. There are spooky places in this game, including nightmare worlds full of day-glo serpents and winged beasties, and there are enemies we must battle, yet there is also a sense of unconstrained adventure, floating through the clouds. Our primary enemy is time, the alarm clock which will awaken us from our dreams. Even when we confront monsters, they dont fire upon us; we must simply avoid flying directly into their sharp teeth if we want to master them. When we lose Nights magical, gender-bending garb, we turn back into boys and girls and must hoof it as pedestrians across the rugged terrain below, a situation which makes it far less likely we will achieve our goals. To be gendered is to be constrained; to escape gender is to escape gravity and to fly above it all. Sociologist Barrie Thorne (1993) has discussed the forms of borderwork which occurs when boys and girls occupy the same play spaces: The spatial separation of boys and girls [on the same playground] constitutes a kind of boundary, perhaps felt most strongly by individuals who want to join an activity controlled by the other gender. (64-65) Boys and girls are brought together in the same space, but they repeatedly enact the separation and opposition between the two play cultures. In real
world play, this borderwork takes the form of chases and contests on the one hand and cooties or other pollution taboos on the other. When borderwork occurs, gender distinctions become extremely rigid and nothing passes between the two spheres. Something similar occurs in many of the books which Segel identifies as gender neutral male and female reading interests co-exist, side by side, like children sharing a playground, and yet they remain resolutely separate and the writers, if anything, exaggerate gender differences in order to proclaim their dual address. Wendy and the lost boys both travel to Never-Never-Land but Wendy plays house and the lost boys play Indians or pirates. The little house and theprairie exist side by side in Laura Wilders novels, but the mother remains trapped inside the house, while Pa ventures into the frontier. The moments when the line between the little house and the prairie are crossed, such as a scene where a native American penetrates into Ma Wilders parlor, become moments of intense anxiety. Only Laura can follow her pa across the threshold of the little house and onto the prairie and her adventurous spirit is often presented as an unfeminine trait she is likely to outgrow as she gets older. As we develop digital playspaces for boys and girls, we need to make sure this same pattern isnt repeated, that we do not create blue and pink ghettos inside the playspace. On the one hand, the opening sequences of Nights into Dreams, which frame Elliot and Claris as possessing fundamentally different dreams (sports for boys and musical performance for girls, graffiti-laden inner city basketball courts for boys and pastoral gardens for girls), perform this kind of borderwork, defining the proper place for each gender. On the other hand, the androgenous Nights embodies a fantasy of transcending gender and thus achieving the freedom and mobility to fly above it all. To win the game, the player must become both the male and the female protagonists and they must join forces for the final level. The penalty for failure in this world is to be trapped on the ground and to be fixed into a single gender. Thorne finds that aggressive borderwork is more likely to occur when children are forced together by adults than when they find themselves interacting more spontaneously, more likely to occur in prestructured institutional settings like the schoolyard than in the informal settings of the subdivisions and apartment complexes. All of this suggests that our fantasy of designing games which will provide common play spaces for girls and boys may be an illusive one, one as full of complications and challenges on its own terms as creating a girls only space or encouraging girls to venture into traditional male turf. We are not yet sure what such a gender neutral space will look like. Creating such a space would mean redesigning not only the nature of computer games but also the nature of society. The danger may be that in such a space, gender differences are going to be more acutely felt, as boys and girls will be repelled from each other rather than drawn together. There are reasons why this is a place where neither the feminist entrepreneurs nor the boys game companies are ready to go, yet as the girls market is secured, the challenge must be to find a way to move beyond our existing categories and to once again invent new kinds of virtual play spaces.
HENRY JENKINS
Digital Renaissance
Convergence? I Diverge.
hats all this talk about media convergence, this dumb industry idea that all media will meld into one, and well get all of our news and entertainment through one box? Few contemporary terms generate more buzzand less honey. Consider this column a primer on the real media convergence, because its on the verge of transforming our culture as profoundly as the Renaissance did. Media convergence is an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences; its not an end state. There will never be one black box controlling all media. Rather, thanks to the proliferation of channels and the increasingly ubiquitous nature of computing and communications, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere, and we will use all kinds of media in relation to one another. We will develop new skills for managing information, new structures for transmitting information across channels, and new creative genres that exploit the potentials of those emerging information structures. History teaches us that old media never die. And before you say, What about the eight-track, lets distinguish among media, genres and delivery technologies. Recorded sound is a medium. Radio drama is a genre. CDs, MP3 files and eight-track cassettes are delivery technologies. Genres and delivery technologies come and go, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment system. A mediums content may shift, its audience may change and its social status may rise or fall, but once a medium establishes itself it continues to be part of the media ecosystem. No one medium is going to win the battle for our ears and eyeballs. Part of the confusion about media convergence stems from the fact that when people talk about it, theyre actu-
ally describing at least five processes: Technological Convergence: What Nicholas Negroponte labeled the transformation of atoms to bits, the digitization of all media content. When words, images and sounds are transformed into digital information, we expand the potential relationships between them and enable them to flow across platforms. Economic Convergence: The horizontal integration of the entertainment
telling, the development of content across multiple channels. As producers more fully exploit organic convergence, storytellers will use each channel to communicate different kinds and levels of narrative information, using each medium to do what it does best. Global Convergence: The cultural hybridity that results from the international circulation of media content. In music, the world-music movement
No single medium is going to win the battle for our ears and eyeballs. And when will we get all of our media funnelled to us through one box? Never.
industry. A company like AOL Time Warner now controls interests in film, television, books, games, the Web, music, real estate and countless other sectors. The result has been the restructuring of cultural production around synergies, and thus the transmedia exploitation of branded properties Pokmon, Harry Potter, Tomb Raider, Star Wars. Social or Organic Convergence: Consumers multitasking strategies for navigating the new information environment. Organic convergence is what occurs when a high schooler is watching baseball on a big-screen television, listening to techno on the stereo, wordprocessing a paper and writing e-mail to his friends. It may occur inside or outside the box, but ultimately, it occurs within the users cranium. Cultural Convergence: The explosion of new forms of creativity at the intersections of various media technologies, industries and consumers. Media convergence fosters a new participatory folk culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate content. Shrewd companies tap this culture to foster consumer loyalty and generate low-cost content. Media convergence also encourages transmedia storyproduces some of the most interesting contemporary sounds, and in cinema, the global circulation of Asian popular cinema profoundly shapes Hollywood entertainment. These new forms reflect the experience of being a citizen of the global village. Much as the historical Renaissance emerged when Europe responded to the invention and dispersion of movable type, these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissancea period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives. The first Renaissance was a period of political and social instability, and the old monastic order crumbled. Today, media convergence is sparking a range of social, political, economic and legal disputes because of the conflicting goals of consumers, producers and gatekeepers. These contradictory forces are pushing both toward cultural diversity and toward homogenization, toward commercialization and toward grassroots cultural production. The digital renaissance will be the best of times and the worst of times, but a new cultural order will emerge from it. Stay tuned.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW June 2001
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Media and Imagination:

A Short History of American Science Fiction
by Henry Jenkins 853 words posted: july 7, 1997
Science fiction, sometimes called "speculative

fiction," has long provided "thought experiments" which imagine alternative worlds where current developments -- social, political, scientific, technological, cultural -- are pushed to their logical extremes. In some cases, these visions of the future embrace the dominant American ideology of technological utopianism -- that is, the belief that technological advances (especially in communication and transportation) will dramatically improve human social and cultural relations. Other writers have offered more pessimistic and apocalyptic visions, linking advanced technologies with concentrations of political power, coercive mechanisms of social control, or weapons of mass destruction. Science fiction writers have rarely sought to "predict" the future in a literal sense. Rather, they have used their imagined futures to question, challenge, and comment on changes they observe or intuit in contemporary society. One notable exception: Arthur C. Clarke, recognized as a significant influence on the development of global communications satellites. As a genre, science fiction has provided a space for popular debates about change, including increasingly changes in our media culture. Science fiction writer Alan E. Norse explains, "The science fiction reader is encouraged by his reading not to fear or dread change, but rather to accept it as a fresh and exciting challenge. After all, science
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fiction seems to say, the winds of change -- however violent they may seem -- are of man's making in the first place, and it should be within man's power to temper them." Norse argues, provocatively, that science fiction readers may be better able to adjust to "future shock" because they have worked through alternative futures in their imaginations and have come to accept that change is part of all human societies.
From the start, the American science fiction

tradition has been linked to the increasingly visible role of communications media in our national culture. The technological utopians, a group of late 19th-century social reformers who wrote utopian fictions about future societies, often saw improvements in communication as vitally linked to the restructuring of the social order. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887), for example, included speculations about credit cards and broadcasting. Hugo Gernsback, founder of the American science fiction tradition, was himself a key figure in promoting radio as a socially transforming technology, and the earliest American science fiction appeared alongside articles on amateur radio and popular science. The writers who contributed to Gernback's magazine Amazing Stories were technophiles, translating the ideals of the technological utopians into colorful entertainment. The Gernsbackian tradition reached its zenith at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where corporations and governments sought to construct their own visions of "the world of tomorrow," based on technological utopian ideologies. It is no coincidence that the first public display of television
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in the United States occurred at the 1939 Fair, in the context of this highly publicized attempt to translate the visions of science fiction into reality. The World's Fair moved science fiction's speculations about the future out of the pages of the pulps and into broader national consciousness, where it would remain for the remainder of the 20th century.
The representations of technology, science, and

media in American science fiction grew darker in the wake of the Second World War. Science fiction of the 1950s, including works by Henry Kuttner, Cordwaner Smith, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, offered satirical perspectives on the rise of television and advertising. Not unlike the radical cultural critics of the Frankfort School, these writers were disturbed by the ways in which the mediated culture of the post-War era seemed to encourage mass conformity and blind consumption. Yet at the same time, such fiction also envisions characters that use new media to resist dominant social institutions and to challenge state and corporate power -- themes that will find their fullest expression in the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s. Other science fiction writers have examined the place of surveillance technologies and information management in the modern political and economic bureaucracy. The 1960s saw the broadening of science fiction to embrace new social and political visions and to reach new constituencies. Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler embraced science fiction themes and imagery as part of their attempt to anticipate change in our technological environment. Their theoretical works were read alongside science fiction written by and for novels the counter-culture and helped to shape the images of mediated culture that ran through the genre. This
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period also saw the increased participation of women as both readers and writers of science fiction, resulting in alternative visions of utopian futures, grounded in transforming social relations rather than changing technologies and in alternative conceptions of media. Some of this fiction deployed a feminist critique of the media's exploitation of women's bodies and emotions. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1989) and subsequent "cyberpunk" short stories and novels have dealt with the "digital revolution," the expanding roles of multinational corporations, the proliferation of alternative subcultures, and the centrality of information management to modern life. Gibson coined the term, "cyberspace," and his conceptions of virtual reality have influenced the development of digital media. Some science fiction writers, such as Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card, and Vernor Vinge, have published powerful critical essays on real-world media in addition to their speculative fiction about the future of media.
Rev 1.0 WebPosted: zachary strider mcgregor-dorsey Back to Science Fiction Top Page
Science Fiction-Media in Transition
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Media and Imagination

Written and Edited by Henry Jenkins How writers of science fiction understand and imagine modern media is the defining theme of a series of readings and discussions begun in 1997 by the Media in Transition Project. Most programs pair a distinguished senior figure with a younger writer. After their readings, the invited writers speak briefly about the notion of "media in transition" and participate in a question-and-answer session with the audience. Transcripts of the series have been posted. They are a record of the thoughts and responses of some of the best living sf writers. 2000

Nalo Hopinkson/Connie Willis Ben Bova Greg Bear/Gregory Benford Fall 1998-Spring 1999
Hal Clement/Jeffrey Carver Pat Cadigan Michael Resnick/Alexander Jablokov Neil Gaiman/Craig Shaw Gardner Fall 1997- Spring 1998
Octavia Butler/Samuel Delany J. Michael Straczynski/Alexander Jablokov
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Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Frederick Pohl/James Patrick Kelly Joe Haldeman/Gregory Benford Orson Scott Card/Allen Steele Ellen Kushner/Sarah Zettel
To create a context for the series, Henry Jenkins has written a series of critical essays and author profiles specifically for this site. The essays encourage us to read science fiction as a mode of "vernacular theory," aiming to make current debates about new media accessible to a popular audience. These essays also explain why our chosen writers are particularly relevant to the larger theme of "Media in Transition." The central essay, "Media and Imagination: A Brief History of American Science Fiction," sketches the evolution of the genre and tries to clarify the important connections between science fiction and our culture's shifting ideas about the role of media technologies in everyday life.
Author Profiles Gregory Benford Octavia Butler Orson Scott Card Joe Haldeman James Patrick Kelly Ellen Kushner Frederick Pohl Allen Steele Sarah Zettel Author Statements Octavia Butler
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The following interview with Henry Jenkins (co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT) and danah boyd (PhD student at the School of Information, University Discussions
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create profiles and link to others (friends) within the system. The profile serves as an individuals digital representation (similar to homepages) of their tastes, fashion, and identity. In crafting this profile, individuals upload photos, indicate interests, list favorite musicians and describe themselves textually and through associated media. The social network feature allows participants to link themselves to others within the system, revealing their affiliations and peer group. These sites also allow friends to comment on each others profiles. Structurally, social network sites are a cross between a yearbook and a community website. These sites also provide numerous communication tools. Both have a messaging system similar to email; MySpace also has a bulletin board where people can post messages that all friends can read and a blogging service where people can post entries for either friends or the public at large. When youth login, their first task is typically to check messages in order to see who has written them. While email
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is still used to communicate with adults and authorities, MySpace is the primary asynchronous communication tool for teens. After checking personal messages, youth check friend additions, bulletin board posts, event announcements and new blog posts by friends. They visit their friends pages to see new photos or check out each others comments. The vast majority of social network site use amongst youth does not involve surfing to strangers profiles, but engaging more locally with known friends and acquaintances. MySpace has over 78 million registered accounts while Facebook has approximately 8 million. While over 85% of college students participate on Facebook if it exists on their campus, MySpace is a cultural requirement for American high school students. Or, as one teenager said, If youre not on MySpace, you dont exist. Not all MySpace users are teenagers, but most American teenagers have accounts on MySpace. These sites play a key role in youth culture because they give youth a space to hang out amongst friends and peers, share cultural artifacts (like links to funny websites, comments about TV shows) and work out an image of how they see themselves.
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They also serve as digital publics, substituting for the types of publics that most adults took for granted growing up, but are now inaccessible for many young people neighborhood basketball courts, malls, parks, etc. Youth are trying to map out a public youth territory for themselves, removed from adult culture. They are doing so online because their mobility and control over physical space is heavily curtailed and monitored. Q: What is the controversy over MySpace? Is it that site in particular or as a genre of web-based-socialnetworks? danah: Like previous digital publics (blogs, discussion boards, chatrooms, newsgroups), MySpace is very open anyone can join, participate and communicate with others. While MySpace allows 14 and 15 year old users to restrict who can see their page and contact them, most users opt to make their profiles public. The primary concern is that this openness puts youth at risk, making them particularly vulnerable to predators and pedophiles. Henry: More broadly, there are concerns about what aspects of their lives teens reveal through their online profiles. Adults are confronting images of underage drinking or sex,
discussions of drug use, and signs of bullying and other abusive behavior. In some cases, teens and adults have developed different notions of privacy: young people feel more comfortable sharing aspects of their lives (for example, their sexual identities) that previous generations would have kept secret. In some cases, teens do not fully understand the risks of making certain information public. In many cases, schools are being forced to respond to real world problems which only came to their attention because this information was so publicly accessible on the web. Schools are uncertain what level of responsibility they should have over what their students do online some are worried about what they are doing on library computers and others seek to extend their supervision into what teens are doing on their own time and off school grounds. Much of the controversy has come not as a result of anything new that MySpace and the other social software sites contribute to teen culture but simply from the fact that adults can no longer hide their eyes to aspects of youth culture in America that have been there all along. All of this is coming to head with the proposal of new federal legislation
which would require all schools and libraries which receive federal funds to restrict access to these digital tools and online communities. Q: What is the direction of your current research on new media, and how does it relate to the controversy? danah: For my doctoral dissertation, I am investigating why and how youth are engaging in digital publics like MySpace, how this affects identity development and how youth socialization has changed over the last century. This work is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation to help understand the nature of informal learning. Understanding why moral panics emerge when youth socialize is central to my research. Henry: I am currently finishing up a white paper, commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation, which seeks to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need in order to become full participants in the cultural, political, economic, and social life of the 21st century. In doing this research, we are reviewing the current state of educational research surrounding participatory culture and examining how teachers are currently deploying these technologies through schools. We want in the long term to develop
new curricular materials which help parents and teachers build a more constructive relationship with new media. I also have a new book coming out this summer, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which provides some frameworks for thinking about the new forms of participatory culture which are emerging in the digital era. Q: What do 'social networking software programs' provide participants? What's their down side? danah: By giving youth access to a public of their peers, MySpace provides a fertile ground for identity development and cultural integration. As youth transition from childhood, they seek out public environments to make sense of culture, social status and how they fit into the world. Interacting with strangers helps them understand who they are and communities of interest allow them to explore ideas and values. Although youth are able to socialize privately with one another in the homes of friends, most are not allowed to spend time hanging out in public, unaccompanied by parents or adults. They view MySpace as a place where they can be who they are, joke around with friends and make certain to stay
in the loop about everything that is going on around them. While integrating into cultural life is a critical process that takes place during these years, the actual process is not always smooth or pleasant. Bullying, sexual teasing, and other peer-to-peer harassment are rampant amongst teenagers, as these are frequently the tools through which youth learn to make meaning of popularity, social status, roles, and cultural norms. MySpace did not create teenage bullying but it has made it more visible to many adults, although it is not clear that the embarrassment online is any more damaging to the young victims than offline. Regardless of medium, the humiliation occurs when the entire school or social community knows of the attack; MySpace and other online mediums may help spread rumors faster, but they have always spread in the halls of schools pretty quickly. No one of any age enjoys being the target of public tormenting, but new media is not to blame for peer-to-peer harassment simply because it makes it more visible to outsiders. In fact, in many ways, this visibility provides a window through which teen mentors can help combat this issue. Q: What skills do students/children
learn in working in social networks? How does these contribute (or not) to their development? Henry: As a society, we are at a moment of transition when the most important social relationships may no longer be restricted to those we conduct face to face with people in our own immediate surroundings but may also include a large number of relationships which are conducted over vast geographic distances. Over the past decade or so, we have been learning how to live in communities which are grassroots but not necessarily geographically local. We are learning how to interact across multiple communities and negotiate with diverse norms. These networking skills are increasingly important to all aspects of our lives. Social networking services are more and more being deployed as professional tools, extending the sets of contacts that people can tap in their work lives. It is thus not surprising that such tools are also part of the social lives of our teens. Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks. Our schools so far do a rather poor job of helping teens acquire the skills they need in order to participate within that
information society. For starters, most adult jobs today involve a high degree of collaboration, yet we still focus our schools on training autonomous learners. Rather than shutting kids off from social network tools, we should be teaching them how to exploit their potentials and mitigate their risks. Q: What educational use might/does MySpace or other social network software have? Henry: Much of the current policy debate around MySpace assumes that the activities there are at best frivolous and at worst dangerous to the teens who participate. Yet, a growing number of teachers around the country are discovering that these technologies have real pedagogical value. Teachers are beginning to use blogs for knowledge sharing in schools; they use mailing lists to communicate expectations about homework with students and parents. They are discovering that students take their assignments more seriously and write better if they are producing work which will reach a larger public rather than simply sit on the teacher's desk. Teachers are linking together classrooms around the country and around the world, getting kids from different cultural backgrounds to share
aspects of their everyday experience with each other and thus learn to communicate across differences. Social networking sites generate a great amount of statistical data about their users which can be used as raw materials for projects in social studies or math classes. Student-made videos are used for class projects, which get shared through free public sites like YouTube; students, in turn, get feedback on their work from broader audiences and begin to develop connections with other young artists which can push them to the next level. Classes are taping podcasts of lectures at other educational institutions, making the best speakers in the world available to students at the most remote locations. Students are doing their own research and contributing to sites like Wikipedia. Teachers are discovering that the design of web pages or personal profiles may function like autobiographical essays, encouraging adolescents to reflect more deeply on their own lives and identities and to exert more control over their self presentation. Many of these activities would be threatened by the proposed federal legislation which would restrict access to these sites via public schools or library terminals.
Q: What is the essence of the proposed legislation? If passed, how would it affect students? Teachers? Librarians? Parents? danah: Recent federal legislation, Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) would require schools and libraries that receive federal aid to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms. The proposed law would extend current regulations that require all federally funded schools and libraries to deploy internet filters. The law is so broadly defined that it would limit access to any commercial site that allows users to create a profile and communicate with strangers. This legislation is targeting MySpace, but it would also block numerous other sites, including blogging tools, mailing lists, video and podcast sites, photo sharing sites, and educational sites like NeoPets. Henry: In theory, the bill would allow schools to disable these filters for use in educationally specified contexts, yet in practice, most schools will simply lock down their computers and walk away. Teachers who wanted to exploit the educational benefits of these tools would face increased scrutiny and pressure to discontinue these practices. And students would lack the
ability to explore these resources through independent research or social activities. Teens who lack access to the Internet at home would be cut off from their extended sphere of social contacts. danah: Most major technology companies are moving in the direction of social software. They are using social features to help users find information, get recommendations, and share ideas. This would all be restricted. Even if its application were restricted solely to MySpace, this legislation assumes that nothing positive can be gained through the socialization that occurs there. For example, high school students currently contact college students through MySpace to learn about their schools and decide whether or not to apply. Henry: Suppose, for the sake of argument, that MySpace critics are correct and that MySpace is, in fact, exposing large numbers of teens to high-risk situations, then shouldn't the role of educational institutions be to help those teens understand those risks and develop strategies for dealing with them? Wouldn't we be better off having teens engage with MySpace in the context of supervision from knowledgeable and informed adults?
Historically, we taught children what to do when a stranger telephoned them when their parents are away; surely, we should be helping to teach them how to manage the presentation of their selves in digital spaces. The proposed federal legislation does nothing to help kids confront the challenges of interacting with online social communities; rather, it allows teachers and librarians to abdicate their responsibility to educate young people about what is becoming a significant aspect of their everyday lives. Our responsibilities as educators should be to bring reason to bear on situations which are wrought with ignorance and fear, not to hide our eyes from troubling aspects of teen culture. danah: Police currently patrol MySpace, just as they patrol other areas where youth hang out. Many are thankful to know where youth go online because it helps them do their job. Too often, predators know youth haunts better than police and decentralized systems make it difficult for police to do their job. Blocking known sites will encourage teens to go further underground and seek out places to socialize that adults are unaware of. This puts youth at
increased risk and means that neither educators nor law enforcement will be around to help. Q: The proposed bill appears to offer protection to minors from online predators, by limiting their mutual access. Is predation a real danger with MySpace? Are there other issues people should be aware of in weighing this legislation? danah: The media coverage of predators on MySpace implies that 1) all youth are at risk of being stalked and molested because of MySpace; 2) prohibiting youth from participating on MySpace will stop predators from attacking kids. Both are misleading; neither is true. Unfortunately, predators lurk wherever youth hang out. Since youth are on MySpace, there are bound to be predators on MySpace. Yet, predators do not use online information to abduct children; children face a much higher risk of abduction or molestation from people they already know members of their own family or friends of the family. Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we
know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services. The goal of a predator is to get a child to consent to sexual activities. Predators contact teens (online and offline) to start a conversation. Just as most teens know to say no to strange men who approach them on the street, most know to ignore strange men who approach them online. When teenagers receive solicitations from adults on MySpace, most report deleting them without question. Those who report responding often talk about looking for attention or seeking a risk. Of those who begin conversations, few report meeting these strangers. The media often reference a Crimes Against Children report that states one in five children receive a sexual solicitation online. A careful reading of this report shows that 76% of the unwanted solicitations came from fellow children. This includes unwanted date requests and sexual taunts from fellow teens. Of the adult solicitations, 96% are from people 18-25; wanted and unwanted solicitations are both included. In other words, if an 18 year old asks out a 17 year old and both consent, this would still be seen as a sexual solicitation.
Only 10% of the solicitations included a request for a physical encounter; most sexual solicitations are for cybersex. While the report shows that a large percentage of youth are faced with uncomfortable or offensive experiences online, there is no discussion of how many are faced with uncomfortable or offensive experiences at school, in the local shopping mall or through other mediated channels like telephone. Although the media has covered the potential risk extensively, few actual cases have emerged. While youth are at minimal risk, predators are regularly being lured out by law enforcement patrolling the site. Most notably, a deputy in the Department of Homeland Security was arrested for seeking sex with a minor. The fear of predators has regularly been touted as a reason to restrict youth from both physical and digital publics. Yet, as Barry Glassner notes in The Culture of Fear, predators help distract us from more statistically significant molesters. Youth are at far greater risk of abuse in their homes and in the homes of their friends than they ever are in digital or physical publics. Q: You have written before on antielectronic/anti-new media attitudes.
Where does this proposed bill fit into those? Henry: History shows us a recurring pattern surrounding the adaptation of any new communications technology. Young people are often early adopters: they are more open to new ideas and experiences; they are looking for ways to leave their mark on the world and they are seeking places where they can socially interact with minimal adult interference. Parents and teachers are often frightened by these new kinds of communication technologies which were not part of the world of their childhood: they don't really understand what their young people are doing with them and they don't know how to protect or supervise their children while they are engaged in these activities. The situation is thus ripe for moral panic. A single high profile incident some kind of tragedy or crime can spark backlash. Political leaders, seeking headlines, and journalists, seeking readers, exploit those anxieties and feed those fears. Soon, there is a call to take action "even if it is wrong," a call to action which races well ahead of any serious research or thoughtful reflection on the matters at hand. The new legislation is being embraced by
politicians in both parties eager to woo cultural conservatives and suburban voters as they enter what everyone knows is going to be a hotly contested election. Over time, as these technologies become better integrated into everyday life, as the generation which grew up with these technologies takes on adult responsibilities, things calm down again. People develop a more balanced perspective which sees both the benefits and risks associated with these activities. Rather than restrict access, we educate our young people in the safe, ethical, and creative use of these technologies. Right now, MySpace is at the most disruptive point in this cycle: people are reacting in ignorance and fear and in doing so, they increase the risks and discard the benefits of these emerging cultural practices. Q: Most people know there is a digital divide - are the issues raised by this legislation related to the widening or narrowing of the gap or to other things? Henry: Over the past decade, there has been intense public concern about the digital divide. Many of us have worked hard to insure that every kid has access to the Internet via schools
and public libraries, if not through their own homes. And these efforts have been largely successful, outside of Indian reservations and some other rural pockets, in insuring at least minimal levels of access. Now, the problem shifts from concerns about technical access to concerns about participation in the key social and cultural experiences which are defining the emerging generation's relationship to these technologies. What a kid can do at home with unlimited access is very different from what a kid can do in a public library with ten or fifteen minutes of access at a time and with no capacity to store and upload information to the web. We further handicap these children by placing filters on the Internet which restrict their access to information which is readily available to their more affluent classmates. And now this legislation would restrict their ability to participate in social networks or to belong to online communities. The result will be to further isolate children from poorer economic backgrounds, to cut kids at risk from support systems which exist within their peer culture, and to limit the social and cultural experiences of kids who are already behind in acquiring important networking skills that will
shape their professional futures. All of this will compound what we are now calling the participation gap. The early discussion of the digital divide assumed that the most important concern was insuring access to information as if the web were simply a data bank. Its power comes through participation within its social networks. The authors of the law are reading MySpace and other social software exclusively in terms of their risks; they are not focusing on the opportunities they offer for education and personal growth. In protecting children from those risks, they would cut them off from those educational benefits. Q: You have said elsewhere (and several years ago) that virtual gaming experiences of today are analogous to the unfettered play in the backyards of the 1950s -- very core & essential experiences. Have social networking like MySpace or games or other new media technology become core experiences now? Henry: As I suggested above, most parents understand their children's experiences in the context of their memories of their own early years. For the baby boom generation, those defining experiences involved playing in backyards and vacant lots within
suburban neighborhoods, socializing with their friends at the local teen hangout, and participating within a social realm which was constrained by the people who went to your local school. All of that is changing. Contemporary children and youth enjoy far less physical mobility, have less time outside of adult control, and have fewer physical places to hang out with their friends. Much of this activity is being brought online. What teens are doing online is no better and no worse than what previous generations of teens did when their parents weren't looking. The difference is that as these activities are being digitized, they are also being brought into public view. Video games bring the fantasy lives of young boys into the family room and parents are shocked by what they are seeing. Social networks give adults a way to access their teens social and romantic lives and they are startled by their desire to break free from restraints or act older than their age. Parents are experiencing this as a loss of control but in fact, adults have greater control over these aspects of their children's lives than ever before. Indeed, one of the biggest risks of
these digital technologies is not the ways that they allow teens to escape adult control but rather the permanent traces left behind of their transgressive conduct. Teens used to worry about what teachers or administrators might put in their permanent records since this would impact how they were treated in the future. Yet, we are increasingly discovering that everything we do online becomes part of our public and permanent record, easily recoverable by anyone who knows how to Google, and that there is no longer any statute of limitations on our youthful indiscretions. danah: Because of mobile phones, current college students report greater ongoing communication with their parents than in previous generations. As Misa Matsuda has argued, networked technologies are allowing todays youth to maintain full-time intimate communities. While the socialization that takes place in digital publics is equivalent to that which occurs in physical publics, new media is allowing youth to be more deeply connected to their peers and their family members, providing a powerful open channel for communication and sharing. Q: The proposed bill is a political response to a social/technological
development - could you offer a political framework for considering MySpace and laws to limit access to it? Henry: Right now, MySpace and the other social network tools are being read as threats to the civic order, as encouraging anti-social behaviors. But we can easily turn this around and see them as the training ground for future citizens and political leaders. Young people are assuming public roles at earlier and earlier ages. They are interacting with larger communities of their peers and beginning to develop their own styles of leadership. Across a range of issues, young people are using social network software to identify and rally like-minded individualism, forming the basis for new forms of digital activism. Current research shows that teens who participate in massively multiplayer games develop a much stronger ability to work in teams, a greater understanding of how and when to take appropriate risks, an ability to rapidly process complex bodies of information, and so forth. At the same time, these teens are facing an array of ethical challenges which are badly understood by the adults around them. They have nowhere to turn for advice on how to confront some of the choices
they make as participants within these communities. Part of the work we will be doing for the MacArthur Foundation involves the development of an ethics casebook which will help parents, teachers, and students work through some of these issues and make sensible decisions about how they conduct their online lives. We see this kind of pedagogical intervention as far more valuable than locking down all public computers and then sending kids out to deal with these issues on their own. Q: What suggestions do you have for parents or other adults eager to learn more about MySpace and to understand what's going on with it, kids and political reactions? Henry: Parents face serious challenges in helping their children negotiate through these new online environments. They receive very little advice about how to build a constructive relationship with media within their families or how to help their offspring make ethical choices as participants in these online worlds. As a culture, we have deeply conflicted assumptions about adolescence which functions as a period of transition: Most of us recognize that teens need to take on a greater degree of
autonomy as they prepare for adult lives, even as they still need some degree of adult supervision to help them make sane and safe decisions; we simply disagree about the relative balance of freedom and autonomy that teens should receive. We respect the fact that the decisions families make about media reflect some of their most deeply held values; different families have different concerns and make different decisions. For that reason, we think decisions about youth access to digital technologies should be made in the context of individual families and not form the basis of one-size-fits-all federal legislation. Recognizing that different parents will approach these issues in different ways, we would still offer the following as our governing philosophy for dealing with MySpace and other social software. 1. Communication with your daughter or son is key. Build a trusting relationship through dialogue. It is important to talk with them about your concerns; it is even more important to listen to what they have to say about their online experiences and why these sites are such an important part of their interactions with their peers. You need to recognize that some unfamiliar
experiences look scarier from the outside than they are. Take time to understand what you are seeing and what it means to participants. 2. Create an account to understand how the site works, but not to stalk your kids. They need room to explore, but if you are familiar with the media and technology that they consume, you can provide valuable guidance and suggestions. Surveillance, while possible, damages a trusting parent/ child relationship. 3. Ask your kids how they choose to represent themselves and why. Use MySpace as a resource to start a conversation about contemporary fashion, ideals, and media images. 4. Talk about private/ public issues with your kids. Help them to understand the consequences of making certain information publicly accessible. Get them to think through all of the possible audiences who might come into contact with their online information. Teens often imagine MySpace as a youth-only world. It isn't and they need to consider what the consequences would be if their grandparents, their teachers, admissions officers or a future employer read what they said about
themselves. Helping your children learn how to negotiate such public environments is a great educational opportunity. 5. Talk through what kids should do if they receive unwanted attention online or if they find themselves the victims of cyberbullying. A growing number of sites provide useful information about how to confront such problems, including Net Family News , NetSmartz and SafeTeens. The Safety Tips section of MySpace also provides information for both parents and teens, including MySpace policies. Henry and danah: We welcome further questions from parents. Our feeling is that there should be more public discussion of the opportunities and risks represented by MySpace and other social networks. Please send your questions to myspaceissues@mit. edu and we will do our best to respond.
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BigShinyThing Henry Jenkins: On Convergence Culture
BigShinyThing
Henry Jenkins: On Convergence Culture
Monday 14 August 2006
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Henry Jenkins new book tells the story of emergent participatory media. He kindly granted BigShinyThing an exclusive email interview.
For a while now, weve been paying great attention to the writings of Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. Over the last few years, hes argued that the participatory creation led by fans and gamers heralds a transformation in creative media. His new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old
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research, and was recently published to rave reviews from all sides.
What Goes On
While impatiently waiting for our copy to arrive, we caught up Class Divide Young Americans choice of with Jenkins via email to get our readers the lowdown on his MySpace or FaceBook says a persuasive arguments about fan culture, collaborative production, lot about their place in the offline world and the social networking site backlash.
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The MySpace/FaceBook
THINGS TO SEE & DO TODAY Camouflage They say: "Find out how and why a revolution in camouflage occurred during the First World War; how teams of artists and designers were employed to conceal and distort everything from soldiers to battleships and how camouflage concepts and designs have influenced contemporary art and fashion from street-style to couture." We say: "DAZZLE SHIPS! DAZZLE SHIPS!"
BST: Were still waiting for your book to turn up in the mail! Can you tell us a little about its premise?
JENKINS: We live in an age where every story, image, brand, relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible array of media channels. This convergence is shaped top-down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms by companies wishing to tap their cross-media ownership and bottom-up by decisions made in teens bedrooms as they want to consume the media they want where they want it and when they want it. Consumers are gaining a new power as they learn to operate within the knowledge cultures emerging within a networked society and as they learn to share media theyve produced with each other. Right now, they are acquiring and mastering these skills through their play with popular culture, but soon they will be applying them towards other powerful institutions. And Stuff.
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You are a fan of fans, and argue that fans have long been ahead of the convergence curve, with their understanding that the text of the stories they care about is open to engagement, involvement, transformation. Now a much wider community is participating in cultural creation. Is there an essential difference between fan-created content and other content contributions from the former audience?
Fans have been and are likely to continue to be the shock troops in this transformation of our culture highly motivated, passionately committed, and socially networked. They are early adopters of new technologies and willing to experiment with new relationships to culture. (We might also throw into this category
http://www.bigshinything.com/henry-jenkins-on-convergence-culture (1 of 8) [2007-07-29 00:59:44]
other highly motivated groups such as bloggers and gamers.) There are signs that fan culture practices and products are spreading throughout the culture. Recent statistics from the Pew Center of Internet and American Life found that more than half of teens online produce some form of media and many of them shared what they produced by others. They are part of the participatory culture I am describing. So are people who join discussion forms or sign up for RSS feeds to get more information about their favorite band or television program. As writers like Will Wright and Raph Koster have suggested, there is a pyramid of participation. Not everyone will want to spend massive amounts of time generating new content some will simply want to engage with content others have produced. Not everyone will write fan stories some may share critical responses with the authors. Not everyone will want to spoil reality television programs some will simply enjoy the new relationships to the program the spoiler community helps to create for them. But the expansion of this participatory culture changes the context in which media content gets produced and distributed and thus it impacts all of us one way or another. Given this, I would imagine fans may still enjoy a privileged status in participatory culture but more and more people will benefit from the once invisible cultural work of fans.
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As you define it, is convergence an historical event, which has already occurred, an epoch (like the Renaissance), during which we are living, or something experiential, which is happening to different groups of people at differing times, in different ways?
Thats an interesting question. In some ways, each of these would be accurate. In the book, I challenge those who think of convergence as a technological process and feel that we are a long way from integrating our communications technologies. I suggest we are already living in a convergence culture if we take advantage of the many kludged together ways that content travels across media platforms right now. But I also see convergence as an ongoing process not an endpoint so it doesnt make sense to read it as a historical event that has already occured, even if some aspects of the change have been building over an extended period of time at this point. I do think convergence is going to define our relationship to media for an extended period of time forward so it is in some ways an epoch. But I also think the transitional nature of the present moment, as well as the uneven distribution of media technologies, means that we are not all living in convergence culture in the same ways or the same degrees. If it is an epoch, then, it is one that is just beginning and the long term consequences of these shifts are going to play themselves out for years and years to come.
Rather Lovely
The Renaissance Man was a new creature, in that his identity was open to invention, construction, reassembly, interrogation. What defines the Convergence Person, if such a person exists as a type? Who exemplifies this, and why?
The Renaissance Man was someone who sought to contain within their own individual intellect as much as possible of what anyone on the planet at that time knew. Today, with the explosion of information we are all experiencing, it is simply not humanly possible to know everything. Most of us alive today know more about a broader range of topics than most of the people living in the Renaissance but we know a much smaller portion of what could be known that the idealized vision of the Renaissance Man suggests. This is where Pierre Levys notion of Collective Intelligence enters the picture. Today, we see knowledge as dispersed across social networks. Everybody knows something, nobody knows everything, and what is known by any member is accessible to the group on demand. The Convergence Person thus knows how to tap that network to get the knowledge they need and knows how to make meaningful contributions back to the group in return. The Renaissance Man was a creature of hierarchy and expertise; the Convergence Person is a creature of adhocracy and pooled information.
Do you feel that converged culture offers specific opportunities to or imposes particular obligations on the official creators of fictional worlds (open-endedness, unresolved story arcs etc)?
In the book, I offer two terms to refer to the aesthetic goals of convergence culture. First, works seek to be cultural attractors. If consumption is now social and communal, then certain works will attract together people of similar interests so that they can begin to pool knowledge together. To do that, they often must tap existing cultural references in the way that Lost or The Matrix or Harry Potter can be said to do. Second, works seek to be cultural activators. They give audiences something to do some activity, some roles and goals, some meaningful form of participation. This can be literally the case in terms of the mechanisms of participation that surround reality television or computer games. Or it can simply be the show embeds lots of secrets and thus opens itself up to a prolonged process of decryption, as seems to be the case of Lost. There are plenty of shows that achieve the first, far fewer which achieve the second. Once youve designed a cultural attractor and activator, the next step out would be to provide raw materials which fans then want to recombine in new ways and thus generate new forms of cultural expression. And the final step in this process may be to find ways to monitor and amplify the creative energies of these fan communities to sustain popular interest in your program. To achieve the first two, you need the skills and creativity of professional creators. To achieve the second two, you have to create a context where grassroots creativity is respected rather than shut down. Lost would seem to be a show which does very well by the first
two criteria: a decade ago, Lost would be a cult show like Twin Peaks was in its time. Now, it is one of the highest rated shows on American television despite the fact that, as Steven Johnson has pointed out, it is also one of the most intellectually demanding shows on American television (or more precisely because it is so demanding.) It is designed in a way to generate constant secrets which we want to uncover and thus providing fuel for the participation of large scale knowledge communities. The map which was flashed across the screen for a split second in a single episode is, as Jason Mittell has noted, emblematic of that new relationship with the consumer. As of this summer, the Lost Team has pushed this one step further by creating an alternate reality game that will generate new opportunities for participation and socialization around the series. There has been some suggestion that the Lost writers also monitor online communities and reshape the story in response to their speculations. There has so far been fewer signs of audiences recreating Lost or creating the next generation of Lost on their own. This may be because the series is so demanding and people are still so unsettled in their expectations about what is actually going on there. In that regard, Lost may generate more new culture once it is finished than it has so far. This was certainly the case with Twin Peaks which only really started to inspire fan fiction once it was off the air. It is spectacular though to recognize that Wrapped in Plastic, a fanzine produced when the show was first aired, is still being produced and read and if anything, it has more subscribers now, a decade plus later, than when the series was first broadcast. This is a classic illustration of the ways that fans can help extend the shelf life of media products.
With the advent of weightless digital media, weve anticipated some global crossover hit from somewhere other than the first world, but so far, its not happened music in particular seems to exist in tight local (spatial or cultural) ghettos of genre. Any thoughts on what it would take for a truly converged global music culture and if/when it will happen?
I think you are measuring success by the old standards looking for mega-hits whereas the greatest impact of globalization in media content so far comes on the other end of Chris Andersons long tail. Global media in the West remains niche media. Indeed, you can argue that it is the most vivid example of the potential of niche media for market success. Music is, as you note above, in general, defined right now by ever more precise niches or ghettos of genre to use your term. While music can be a shared resource within subcultural communities, there is very little music we listen to as a culture at large. The Nichification of music is suggested by something like MySpace which emerged initially as a vehicle for helping people to find music that they liked by tapping their social networks. The massification of music might be suggested by something like American Idol which has self consciously sought to generate music that will appeal across a broad demographic (though in reality, the best Idols have turned out to be second run
performers on the show who then get pulled into specialized niches once they depart it.) Right now, I see people consuming more and more media from other parts of the world global fusion music, anime and manga, Bollywood films, Latin America soaps, Nigerian horror films, etc. but in fairly localized communities of interests. We are seeing this culture brought into the western market by a mixture of Otaku (fans) and Desi (immigrants): fans seek out difference where-ever they can find it in the world; immigrants seek to maintain ties back to the mother country which they left. Both contribute to a cultural landscape where global media is more readily available. And the results can take off dramatically.
Do you think that the diversification of modes of media consumption (iPod, PVR/DVR, home cinema, mobile phone) makes for a fundamental challenge to creators of content? If so, whats the challenge, and where do you see this challenge leading?
Ok there are two potential challenges one a dead-end, the other a new possibility for gifted entertainers. The dead end is the idea of developing content that simply gets reconfigured easily across all of those platforms. This is an idea thats been kicking around for a while and this practice shows little to no appreciation of the aesthetic and social dimensions of those various media. The result will be something like the pan and scan prints of films which have been reconfigured to fit our television screens as opposed to the letterboxed prints that reflect a recognition of the aesthetic practices that shaped the original product and seek a meaningful compromise as it is moved into the new medium. To create media content that is mechanically reconfigured across all of those platforms is to produce content that really exploits the potentials of none of those media. Weve seen this in cinema where the expressive uses of cinemascope found in the 1950s when films were designed for the big screen have given way to the pretty limited use of the frame edges that characterize current filmmaking practice. However big the screen looks in the theatre, the significant action has to play out within the boxed window which will be visible on the television screen. There will of course be some content that moves easily from platform to platform but in general, I think one has to develop strategies appropriate for each space. We are already seeing that there are television series that do spectacularly well on video iPod that are not ratings champs on broadcast and other shows, sitcoms, dramatically under-perform in these new contexts. The alternative is what I am calling transmedia storytelling or more broadly transmedia entertainment. This is a system where each medium makes a distinct contribution to the media franchise, each is left to do what it does best, and the reader is able to expand on their experience of a favorite story by pulling together bits and pieces of information from various sources. I discuss this in the book in terms of The Matrix where the films,
animation, games, and comics each made unique and integral contributions to the whole. This is similar to the media mix culture that has emerged in Japan, for example. I believe that transmedia storytelling represents the most compelling way to use convergence to expand the canvas on which our most creative entertainers work.
We are convinced that the current proliferation of hardware and software is but a moment ie netflix, PVRs, chargeable film downloads, before content moves entirely online (reaches convergence). However, the media industry at large appears to be in denial about this do you agree?
I am much more interested in predicting where our culture is going than predicting where technology is going. My hunch is that we are going to see a variety of delivery mechanisms for the foreseeable future and indeed, that there will be no steady state of media convergence, no fully integrated technological infrastructure. We are seeing that divergence as demonstrated by specialized devices is part of the process by which convergence operates. I dont happen to like the idea of my cell phone as a media appliance, for example, and I find that I prefer to watch dvds on a portable dvd player rather than my laptop. These are probably idiosyncratic choices but then, the point is that every consumer wants their own unique mix of media appliances because they like certain affordances each offers in specific contexts. My hunch is that as soon as some media functions get integrated, someone else will offer a new appliance that seperates them out again for consumers who want a different relationship to media content. This goes back to what I say about convergence being a process rather than an endpoint. We are going to see ever more complicated configurations of media, ever more complex integrations of media content, but we may never reach a technological steady state. This doesnt mean that all of the stop gap measures you are referring to above are here to stay. They will only last if they are seen by consumers as serving necessary functions or if they serve a clear niche in the new media infrastructure. Nobody I suspect imagines the video iPod say is the best possible way to watch television. It simply came along at the right moment to provide an infrastructure to support television content on demand. And we will see a better solution emerge. We are already seeing Netflix and other services experiment with new ways to get movies into the hands of consumers besides mailing dvds. On the other hand, there are signs that people still want to buy books even where they can download the content for free on the web.
danah boyd and yourself seem to have become (reluctantly) the most visible defenders of young peoples rights to explore and create identity using emergent media. We remember when learning-though-doing with technology and media was at the core of education, but it seems that the young people growing up now have to reclaim reedoms that have somehow subsequently been lost without a fight any thoughts on what went wrong with the relationship between children and tools/media, and what
we grownups can do to help them maintain and/or win back their right to play (with technology, identity, etc)?
In a way, each generation of young people across history have had to fight their own battles for expressive freedom and for the right to play with technology and identity. Young people have always been on the cutting edge of media change as they search for ways to escape the surveillance of their parents and define their own space in the world. They gravitate towards the new and the shiny and they are willing to put in the time to adopt it to their needs and interests. Parents are often spooked by their relationship to these technologies that were not part of the culture of their own childhoods. They dont know how to protect their children as they go into that space and this is part of the point. All it takes is one shocking tragedy something like the Columbine shooting to turn their ignorance into fear and then it takes the mixture of moral reformers, sensationalistic media, and opportunistic politicians to turn their fear into a moral panic which results in laws and regulations that try to put the genie back in the bottle again. It can take a generation to reverse those constraints more particularly, it takes the generation which came of age with those technologies to take on adult roles as parents, teachers, lawyers, and citizens. Then, we see a reversal of course which allows us to adopt a more normalized attitude towards those technologies and practices. With Columbine and video games, we were lucky that few of the laws passed in that phase of moral panic withstood judicial review. With MySpace, we are apt to be less lucky because if DOPA passes, it will be a law that is going to be hard to challenge in courts. Technically it isnt censorship. Schools are not prohibited for allowing youth to access MySpace. They simply lose federal funding if they do so. And the Federal government can make any stipulation it wants on how it distributes its funds. The result is going to be a law which we will actively have to repel once the generation that has grown up using social network software becomes adults. This is going to be a huge step back for participatory culture and a big step back for those of us who want to see Web 2.0 applications used more fully in the classroom. What is shocking is that it is occuring with so little real public discussion because the mainstream media has done everything it can to scare people about MySpace and has little interest in reporting the truth about this story. That said, I think there was a fatal mistake in the discourse about youth and digital media in the 1990s. It became all about the digital divide which got defined in terms of access to technologies. This wasnt true of [Seymour] Papert and a few others but it became the mantra. Lets build a bridge to the 21st century. Lets wire our classroom. Well, we wired the classroom now what? We now face the participation gap the gap between those who have unlimited access to new media outside of school (and more importantly, the skills and experiences they enable) and those who have limited bandwidth, limited access, on filtered computers. We dealt with the technological challenges but not the
social and cultural challenges. And we have been held hostage by a culture war discourse that has been very effective at transforming adult ignorance into fear and backlash against those forms of cultural experience teens have found for themselves in the online world. I am very involved right now in developing the case for a very different form of media education one which grows out of a desire to enable kids to become more active participants in the participatory culture I describe in my book. Thats where Convergence Culture ends with the call for new media literacies and thats where my new book begins. We are going to be releasing a white paper later this fall that paves the way for a whole range of pedagogical activities designed to help teachers and parents better appreciate the value of gaming, social networking, fan fiction writing, and all of the other things the most digitally adept kids are doing now.
Posted by Darrell | Tags: books, co-creation, Convergence Culture, fan culture, future, games, Henry Jenkins, interview, iPod, media theory, MySpace, television, transmedia, youth
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SEE ALSO: Transmedia: The Future of Television Isn't What It Used To Be: Anyone see the season finale of Criminal Minds?... The Legend of LonelyGirl15: An online fiction with a life of its own.... Not OurSpace. TheirSpace. Elseware.: This Year's Moral Panic about young people's safety concerns social networking sites. We think parents are missing the generational sea change that really should scare them.... LICENSE: This article is provided under a Creative Commons license.
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube
Chris Williams Respond to Our Questions Main about FanLib
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media(Part One)
May 28, 2007
Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

The following is adapted from remarks I made at the International Communications Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was asked to be part of a plenary session organized by Fred Turner, "What's So Significant about Social Networking?: Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential," which also featured Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, and Tiziana Terranova. We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place of YouTube in contemporary culture. Many of these ideas will be familiar to regular readers of this blog since most of them have evolved here over the past year, but I thought you might find them interesting distilled down in this form. (For those
Convergence Culture
Buy at Amazon Buy at Powells
who may be joining us from the ICA crowd, I've included links back to the original posts from which these ideas have evolved.)
1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks -- a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power.
Fans, Bloggers and Gamers

One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf -- fake grassroots media -- through which very powerful groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past, these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass market media but now, they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html (1 of 7) [2007-09-06 05:08:26]
The Wow Climax

2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.
3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which they originated. A classic example of this might be the Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed from YouTube
4. YouTube's value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites -- with content gaining much greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace, and the like. While some people come and surf YouTube, it's real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickiness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content.)
5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples
of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn't thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen's "macaca" comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards's racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein's execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution.
6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple's "1984" advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy:
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture 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.
Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.
7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and remixes content from the mass media industry; the mass media industry monitors trends and pulls innovations back into the system, amplifying them and spreading them to other populations. Yet as they do so, they often alter the social and economic relations which fueled this cultural production in
the first place. We will see increasing debates about the relations between the gift economy of participatory culture and the commodity relations that characterize user-generated content. There is certainly a way that these sites can be seen as a way of economic exploitation as they outsource media production from highly paid and specialized creative workers to their amateur unpaid counterparts.
8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks.
9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.
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Ypulse Essentials from Ypulse Is Disney fueling the growth of tween mags? (if they've revived jump roping, it makes sense that their stable of tween stars would be a big draw to titles like J-14 and Bop. Plus tweens still love the pin-ups [I... [Read More]
Tracked on May 29, 2007 3:39 PM
The Critical Potential of Social Networking - ICA Plenary from Cairns Blog
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Tracked on May 29, 2007 9:22 PM
Comments
In regards to point 9: the popular videos on Youtube may in fact be less than diverse, but in the total body of contributions, there appears to be quite a strong international representation. As an example, a quick look at the Most Recent Uploads page this morning showed that of the 20 links on the page, 12 of them (60%) led to videos that were non-English in either spoken or written content.
I've been doing some examination of Youtube contributions for the past few months, and while unpublished, this seems ballpark-consistent with what I've been seeing throughout. This observation might also be read as support for points 1 and 2 above.
Posted by: Eric Cook | May 29, 2007 11:44 AM
An interesting question is also how 2008 presidential candidates negotiate their participation on YouTube. Clearly they cannot perform authenticity in the way other YouTube members do, by broadcasting from their bedrooms, clipping their favorite TV shows, and pajama-dancing. There seems to be an interesting contradiction between the culture of YouTube dominated by parody and spoofing, and the seriousness of the role of presidential candidates who aspire to lead the nation. So far this contradiction made it difficult for presidential candidates to fully leverage the potential of YouTube as a social medium.
Posted by: Sonja Baumer | May 31, 2007 12:14 AM
Here's an interesting bit: EU regulators apparently currently view Youtube as a medium which is not only "neither TV nor TV-like" but also apparently not "a linear or non-linear audiovisual service" and **therefore not an "audio-visual media service" altogether.**
So consequently, the likes of youtube is subject to far less EU regulation (to the chagrin of broadcasters and cable/DTH operators)
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-youtube-is-not-yet-tv-ec-says-clarifying-new-rules/
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB118004402666113909-lMyQjAxMDE3ODIwNTAyNDU0Wj.html
Posted by: Zhan | May 31, 2007 7:04 PM
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