Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 20

Brian Clarke on Transmedia Business Models (Part Four)

This is part four of a five part series on transmedia business models by Brian Clark: Founder/CEO, GMD Studios. The segments are based on a talk Clark gave earlier this semester as a guest speaker to my USC class on Transmedia Entertainment.

A HANDFUL OF VENTURE MODELS

by Brian Clark

In the prior installment, we looked at handful of business models that try to work for even small budget projects. This time, we're going to look at models that rely (almost) intrinsically on raising capital. These models all share at least two common features, and the key one is that the source of funding is some kind of venture capital (which means the return that investors expect is their money back and hopefully some profit for taking the risk.) If that ís a little bit of capital, these might be angel investors that resemble patrons, but if that ís a lot of capital you'íll be dealing with professional investors. The change that comes with that is the mechanism of promotion. If you've only got a little bit of capital, you'll be relying upon media you create (owned) and earn (press and social sharing), but if you've got more capital you might start buying advertising from other places.

Ticketed Events

An entire set of business models that come from performance instead of media are frequently neglected by transmedia creators: an audience paying for a ticket to attend a live communal experience, whether that ís a theater performance, a concert, a conference or a stranger experience like "Red Cloud Rising" or "Sleep No More". This is the core business model of theatrical distribution (in film), pay-per-view (in broadcast), and touring theater and bands (in music).

FUNDING: Angel capitalizers, investors and venue partners.
RETURN: Financial returns.
SUSTAINABILITY: It's all about the margins.
AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.
PROMOTION: Paid, owned and earned marketing support.

Independent music and theater artists will tell you about the entrepreneurial challenges of squeaking a margin from festivals and tours (and then remind you to buy a t-shirt on your way out), but sustainable careers can be built on these models (and the way they can work with fan incubation as a business goal between ticketed events.) Having funding is usually essential, as the expenses to put on the event get incurred before you collect the revenue back from the sales and you have to buy gas for the tour bus to the next town.

Marginable Arbitrage

In market dynamics, arbitrage is nothing more than buying low in one market to sell high in another, often by creating new value from it that others arenít optimizing. Informercial space on television networks is a good example of this (the broadcast time is cheaper for an hour than for a thirty-second ad during primetime, which is why you see hour long commercials for $19.95 products), but most of the Internet is driven by arbitrage thinking. Many online publishers, for example, get a huge chunk of their traffic from Google because of their knowledge of search engine optimization of content, but then make money off of ads served up by Google that were actually the same as the ads on the search engine page they came from: the publisher made the ads more relevant to the audience, and got paid more because of it. Will some transmedia innovator find a similar system that uses infomercial broadcast space the way online publishers use Google? An arbitrage business model might look something like:

FUNDING: Angel capitalizers, investors and venue partners.
RETURN: Financial returns from margin.
SUSTAINABILITY: Buying cheap, adding value, selling higher.
AUDIENCE: Those consuming it cheap and new fans interested in what weíve turned it into.
PROMOTION: Paid, owned and earned marketing support.

It isnít as easy as it sounds to find value in the cheap: you get two Snuggies for $24.95 plus shipping and handling because they've tested that more sales happen if they price it like that. The more neglected value you find and extract, the more you attract others to do the same (making that cheap resource less cheap) and, like the ticket sales model, as soon as you stop creating arbitrage you stop creating revenue. Conversely, I know people who do nothing but write for the Web from home and get six-digit checks every month because of their understanding of content arbitrage.

Audience Developed Products

In the same way that "fan funded" treats the renewable fan base as a replacement for investors, you could instead treat them as co-creators (and thus invested in the sustainability and promotion of the work.) Online interactive art, especially community games, are an obvious example of this (such as Top Secret Dance Off, Socks Inc. or Ze Frankís Star.me), but there are also filmmakers experimenting with crowdsourcing the shooting of features and online documentarians working to preserve history through cellphone photos or family pictures. These kinds of projects often produce business models such as:

FUNDING: Angel capitalizers, investors and the sweat equity of the audience.
RETURN: Financial returns from margin and seeing myself in the final work.
SUSTAINABILITY: New margins created by not having to raise as much funds for production.
AUDIENCE: Those most attracted to my story, and especially those co-creating it with me.
PROMOTION: Emphasize the earned and owned with fans to minimize the paid from funds.

The strength of this model (crowdsourcing of development) is also its Achilles' heel -- you need a vibrant enough community for that crowdsourcing magic to kick in, and that takes feeding and care. Where it seems to have the most predictable value is in creating longer tails of value, for example in videogames where making level editors available for Halo produced totally new fan-developed games like Portal that became products in their own right.

Infrastructure Play

If research & development models focus on creating new skillsets and proofs of concept, sometimes they are far more than that -- they become infrastructure plays. The impact of THX on audio standards in movie theaters was an infrastructure play contained inside the Star Wars business model, just as Condition One are documentarians creating licensable interactive technology to increase audience immersion. These types of business models typically look more like:

FUNDING: Angel capitalizers, investors and development partners.
RETURN: Financial returns from licensing the underlying technology developed.
SUSTAINABILITY: Revenue from the creative work is supplemented by technology licensing.
AUDIENCE: Those most attracted to my story, but also the industry that might license the tech.
PROMOTION: Owned, earned and paid for the primary creative work; business development for the licensing.

Infrastructure plays often require even deeper capital reserves than other types of models, because the core value of the sustainability argument requires scale (so, for the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, growth is more important in the short term than revenue generation.) These business models often also require "a business within the business" that focuses just on the licensing or enablement revenue streams (since those needs are often different than the actual creative implementation that generates that infrastructure).

Venture Capital

Every vibrant art form also has some kind of venture capital model, from financers of films and Broadway shows to venture capitalists in publishing and technology. Some of those communities are sophisticated enough to have created formal marketplaces for capital raising (for example, documentary film) while others have adopted venture capital models into new forms (for example, the artist granting organization Creative Capital). Venture capitalized business models often look something like:

FUNDING: Professional, sophisticated investors and investment companies.
RETURN: Financial returns from the project you are proposing.
SUSTAINABILITY: A salary or stipend and a healthy share of the profit (it is happens).
AUDIENCE: Carefully researched and justified to funders who might not be the audience.
PROMOTION: Owned, earned and paid media.

The challenge with venture capital models are primarily in the courting of capital: people can spend years trying to put together a full slate of investors to trigger the actual creative work. Many give up before succeeding, and if they do succeed, then the pressure is on to deliver not just a completed creative work but a successful creative revenue stream. This is an even harder sell with innovation (unless you can show how youíll drink someone else's milkshake) because it makes everything seem more risky and risk raises the cost of capital.

Three paragraphs per business plan is obviously skimming the surface of complex media business issues, but I'd like to extend that even further in the next installment and look at how multiple business models come together among the companies in the space (and thus potentially illuminate the kinds of innovations that will drive the next revolutions in transmedia.)

Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark

Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Three)

This is part three of a five part series by transmedia designer and theorist Brian Clark.

A HANDFUL OF BOTTOM UP MODELS

by Brian Clark

In the prior two installments, we looked at what might drive the next wave of innovation in storytelling and dissected the patronage business model that dominates the transmedia space today. In this installment and the next, I want to dive deeper into ten different alternative business models that we know work from other media movements in the hopes that they provide some inspiration to other entrepreneurial storytellers. The first handful treats funding and sustainability as the primary challenges: if you don't have access to millions of dollars, just how much capital do you really need? Do you need any at all?

No Budget

Some artists and art movements solve the business model problem by assaulting the very need for capital funding. They might treat funding as unnecessary (such as Theater of the Oppressed in the 1950s, the Dogma 95 film movement of the late 1990s or the subsequent Mumblecore movement of the early 2000s that embrace no budget as a choice) or might literally treat capital as the enemy (such as the dÈtournement of the Situationist International movement of the 1950s or modern Anonymousí physical and digital hacktivism). In the context of business models, their solutions look something like:

FUNDING: Is a distraction from making art.
RETURN: With no funders, there is no distraction of returning investment.
SUSTAINABILITY: My project is not about having a sustainable career as a creator.
AUDIENCE: A community to awaken or empower.
PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

No budget movements are a healthy part of any artistic form: things get made all the time without having business plan justifications. The Internet and digital creative trends amplifies these kinds of models disproportionately because of the constant increase in tools that decrease the costs of production towards free. Sadly, it isn't decreasing the cost of your food, rent and healthcare towards free and no budget artists typically have more traditional jobs that pay those bills -- which might be, in part, why Lars von Trier doesn't still make films under the Dogma 95 model.

Grassroots

Sometimes, not having funding isn't an active choice but is definitely a current reality. This is familiar territory to independent artists and publishers, from pulp fiction zines of the 1930s through the punk D.I.Y. ethic of the 1970s to the Internet tradition of "grassroots alternate reality games" of this century -- you embrace your limitation as a virtue and make the most of it. For this "D.I.Y. ethic" style of grassroots, the business model solve might look like:

FUNDING: Beg, borrow, and elbow grease.
RETURN: The expectation of paying them back isnít very high on either side.
SUSTAINABILITY: Iíll at least live to fight another day.
AUDIENCE: People who are looking for something different than the mainstream.
PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

Rather than being entrepreneurial, the funding in grassroots efforts is ad hoc, doesn't really set revenue goals for sustainability and leaves little funding for promotion. Sometimes, for the artists, the connection and affirmation of an audience is still enough reward to make them want to do it again.

Research & Development

Hopefully, creating always involves learning new things, but sometimes the point of making it in the first place is to learn. The R&D arms of giant companies share this business model with entrepreneurial garage tinkers and both work in prototypes and proofs-of-concept. Some creators, most notably Lance Weiler, have started talking about "story R&D" as the explicit value to their experiments -- learning how to tell stories across all these new platforms and opportunities in relatively low capital risk environments. An R&D business model solve might look like:

FUNDING: Angel capital (including my own).
RETURN: Something new that will require a new business model solve.
SUSTAINABILITY: Iím increasing my capabilities and chances for future success.
AUDIENCE: I wonít necessarily need a large one.
PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy, partnerships and guerilla tactics.

The most inherent challenge in R&D models is that you're entrepreneurially deciding to push the return on your investment and sustainability to some future date. It requires some confidence (at least on the artist's part) that those kinds of R&D results are a predictable yield and tends (by necessity) to push the work into more experimental territory (because there is very little R&D yield in doing things you already know how to do).



Fan Incubation



Most artists will tell you that a fan is more valuable than a customer -- a fan base is a renewable resource for a sustainable career. Fans buy the next album, they subscribe to the series, they evangelize their passion bring in new fans, and they camp out in lines overnight before the opening. In the past, fan development was slow (for example, the way fan correspondence saved H.P. Lovecraftís works from disappearing) or physical (like the "make record and tour college towns" model of independent musicians like John Vanderslice). The age of the Internet has revolutionized the ability for creators and fans to have rich, meaningful interactions that have led to successes like The Blair Witch Project and innovations like the distribution strategy for Four-Eyed Monsters. Whether a small indie or a big company, fan incubation business model solves look something like:



FUNDING: Angel capital and sweat equity.

RETURN: A motivated audience for a forthcoming work.

SUSTAINABILITY: I'm increasing my chances for success (and return) on some other product.

AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.

PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media





This is essentially the same model I critiqued in the prior installment, but with a key difference: you've become your own patron, you've become your own client, and you're leveraging the tactical usefulness to your own potential benefit. Like the research and development model, that means you've pushed off revenue and sustainability to some future product those fans want that has its own business model as an investment in a renewable resource.



Fan Funding

Speaking of the power of fan bases, if you already have even a residual fan base, there are ways to replace funding with those fans. In the classic models, you'd call this pre-sales -- collecting money for a product you haven't made yet to fund the creation itself (often incentivized by some exclusive value add), a model quite common now in the videogame industry but also the classic underpinning of why magazines and newspapers offer annual subscriptions. The Internet's capabilities for crowdsourcing have made this an even more attractive model for independents, whether you're harnessing fans as angel capitalizers with a system like Kickstarter or selling a product that was manufactured "just in time" via a platform like Lulu. The business model might look something like:



FUNDING: From your fan base as pre-sales or angel capitalizers.

RETURN: A special copy of the work, a credit in the finished piece, etc.

SUSTAINABILITY: My fans will support me because theyíd like to see more work.

AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.

PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media.



The scale of this model is directed tied to the size of the fan base: George Lucas will always pre-sell more than you do, but a smaller group of fans could dramatically change the way a grassroots project might operate. Many creative properties (large and small) leverage this business model in serial with fan incubation -- when you're not pre-selling something, grow the overall size of the fan base as an investment in your next cycle of fan funding.

In the next installment, we'll look at another handful of models that solve from the opposite direction: maximizing revenue instead of minimizing investment.



Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark

Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Two)

This is the second in a five part series on transmedia business models written by veteran crossplatform and indie media producer Brian Clark.

DISSECTING THE "TRADITIONAL" TRANSMEDIA MODELS

by Brian Clark

Most of the money fueling innovation in transmedia storytelling falls into one of three major buckets: entertainment properties created as extended experiences around a core media product; advertising properties created to advance the marketing of a brand; and issues advancing properties created to promote a topic or perspective. In the last installment, I proposed a "business model lens" for looking at some of issues hampering innovation in the new forms of storytelling. There's no better place to start than where the money is.

The Danger of Tactical Functionality

In truth, all three of these "traditional" transmedia models actually share the same business plan solution, one that focuses on the proven usefulness of transmedia as a tactical function. Let's take a look at the five business plan statements from the point of view of an entertainment, brand or issue property:

FUNDING: From a brand / studio / granting organization.
RETURN: Measureable results against a particular goal.
SUSTAINABILITY: Tacking fees onto the funding, perhaps with a back-end percentage.
AUDIENCE: The funder will decide who the audience is based upon their goal.
PROMOTION: Through a combination of owned, earned and paid media.

So if a big brand hires you to create a transmedia marketing campaign, they are actually hiring you to use transmedia tactics to accomplish some particular goal -- perhaps to sell cars or videogames, perhaps to increase brand awareness or enhance brand perception, perhaps to generate leads or social sharing. From the funder's point of view, the cost of doing it must be justified by the results they hope will be delivered.

Big media brands work the same way as non-media brands in the current marketplace, because the budgets for those efforts are most typically from the marketing and promotions expenditures from the studio's point of view. The tactical goal might be different -- for example, film studios are often interested in "butts in seats" in the opening weekend as a marketing goal that they spend against -- but the focus on "transmedia as tactic" is identical.

Issues projects are slightly different, but share most of the same attributes. From a grantor's point of view, the results your effort could create per dollar granted is being evaluated not just against the funder's mission but also against the submissions you're competing against for that same funding. Typically, the fees tacked on are much less than with brands and entertainment projects, and grantors typically are less willing to provide fuel for paid media promotion than financers who are in the business of paid media.

The most noticeable difference between these three models is how they deal with the ownership of intellectual property. Brand marketing campaigns are nearly always a work for hire, which means you don't own the intellectual property you created because you were compensated to create it (although there are "branded entertainment" trends in those industries that are changing that). Entertainment properties tend to be similar, but as an industry they are more used to discussions regarding back-end percentages on direct revenue your work might create (and that trend towards "branded entertainment" is similarly impactful.) Issues funders are less likely to be focused on the ownership of the underlying IP, although some might put a re-compensation clause on funding that returns some small percentage of revenue back to the granting organization.

Their greatest similarity is the focus on transmedia tactical usefulness to accomplishing particular goals. Being useful brings with it baggage. There is a tendency to treat the work as disposable, like an advertisement or a poster promoting a band's gig or a banner painted for a traveling sideshow. It can be beautiful, it can be moving, it can be groundbreaking, but these aren't the way the work will be ultimately evaluated. The goal will be accomplished or it won't, but continued activities require continued funding.

Patronage as Lichen, Studio as Old Growth Forest

Since ancient times, there has always been a deep connection between the arts and systems of patronage. In the modern media age (from say 1920s onward), those patrons and sponsors have become brands and studios and corporations instead of kings and churches. Even the meaning of the phrase "sponsor" has grown in modern parlance to have both the implication of commercial ("and now a word from our sponsor") and of patronage ("a proud sponsor of the Olympics") intertwined. The advantage for the sponsors has always been the platform to advance their own ambitions.

Frequently, patronage is one of the first business models to develop in each periodic revolution in how media get delivered -- for example, the soap opera format first developed for radio that came about as branded entertainment for, you guessed it, soap manufacturers. Like lichen, it is the first part of the ecosystem that can thrive and that, in the process, lays the foundations for more complex ecosystems to develop (especially for those that are entrepreneurial in nature).

Eventually, the media becomes so successful (and mass producible as technique, like "the movie ticket") that an industry will emerge -- like in publishing, radio, film, television, etc. You could think of some of those industries as old growth forest, one of the last ecosystems to develop that requires a level of stability in the environment. Much of the revolution you see in every other media is tied to disruptions and inefficiencies in those stable business models that allow for those old growth forests, and most of that is both created and solved by entrepreneurial independents working against/with the old growth forests.

If we think that lichen is really cool and totally enough, patronage models are tremendous -- even those of us who aspire to more than that appreciate the fun of a nice big commercial innovation project. Many of my peers and I, though, hail from the more decidedly independent communities around music, film and new media. There, you work from the assumption that you'll probably never have access to the traditional system (but maybe you might) but still want to find a way to create a sustainable career making this kind of work. The transmedia movement has no traditional system to be excluded from, and the traditional system is the patronage model. What would it look like if the last hundred years of independent media business models were all research and development learning for this moment in time, before there was a real industry? In the next three installments, we'll go through ten business models that should provide inspiration for innovation.



Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark



NEXT TIME: A HAND FULL OF BOTTOM UP BUSINESS MODELS

Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part One)

This week, I am going to be sharing a series of five guest blog posts by Brian Clark which are based on a lecture which he gave to the students in the Transmedia Entertainment class I have been teaching in the USC Cinema School. If you follow transmedia closely, you probably already know who Clark is. If you don't, check out some of his astute contributions to this panel from the 2009 Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT. (There are still a few seats left at this year's event which is bring held Friday and Saturday in Cambridge).

MIT Tech TV

What I admire about Clark is that he cuts through the crap. He's got a track record as someone who has worked across the entertainment industry and knows what's involved in creating and sustaining transmedia production. He brings street cred as someone who emerged from the worlds of indie music and filmmaking and who helped to create IndieWIRE. He has the pragmatic streak of someone who runs his own business and has to pay the bills, even as he enjoys the visionary speculations that excite many of us about the new forms of creativity that are emerging at the intersections between old and new media. And he's wickedly smart.

When he spoke to my class, he brought all of that and more: this was a provocative presentation which described an array of different business models that might support the production of transmedia content as a challenge to the current economic and creative constraints which stem from the industry's reliance on promotional and advertising budgets as the primary driver of creative innovation in this space. I encouraged him to put the core ideas behind this lecture into writing and am happy to share this provocation with my readers in hopes that it will push all of us to think about what needs to be in place before our exploration of transmedia experiences can be sustainable.

INSTALLMENT #1: TRANSMEDIA BUSINESS MODELS

by Brian Clark

In September 2011, media scholar Henry Jenkins invited me to deliver a guest lecture to his transmedia class at the University of Southern California to explore with his students some of the issues raised in an epic Facebook thread my friends and I engaged in back in May called "Reclaiming Transmedia Storyteller". Henry asked me to focus on exposing his students to some of the transmedia business models "beyond the mothership franchise model" -- a dichotomy I jokingly referred to in that Facebook discussion as the "East Coast / West Coast" contrast in the transmedia community.

I spent a couple of months noodling with how to focus all of that conversation among practitioners deep in the trenches for an audience of media students. It seemed important to provide something practical, not just abstract. It seemed equally important, there in the shadow of Hollywood, to bring the perspective that I share with most of my closest cohorts that we inherited from the independent film community of the 1990s: entrepreneurial independence.

So I decided to focus my lecture on one key concept: that the next wave of innovation in transmedia storytelling is going to be about business models rather than storytelling forms. I started by dissecting the existing transmedia business models to illustrate how the three major communities of creators (media property extensions, brand marketing and issues-oriented activism) all relied, in essence, on the exact same business model -- the one derived from patronage and commissions. That provided a launching pad to talk about all of the other ways those business model challenges can be solved just based upon the examples we can find in the independent movements of the last century (focusing on eight different business model clusters).

Scott Walker did a really tremendous job of outlining the presentation at his blog, but in retrospect I probably tried to cram in way too much territory in a two-hour block. I would have liked to dwell deeper on examples of each of those independent business models and point to cases from which we could all draw inspiration. Fortunately for me, Henry was kind enough to invite me to rectify those shortcomings of my first trial run with his class with a series of guest editorials here at his blog.

THINKING OF TRANSMEDIA AS BUSINESS MODELS

During the last two decades that interactive technologies have been changing storytelling in surprising new ways, one debate has been completely settled by practitioners in the trenches: the question of form. The answer to the question, "Could you tell a story using foo and bar?" is always "yes" no matter what foo and bar are. Once you get past that novelty of form, practitioners spend a lot more time talking with each other about business models.

Let's consider the business model issue from the point of view of a creator, a storyteller, a person whose goal is to make a living making a story. From a highly reductionist point of view, we've got five key challenges to making a model that works in the modern media age:

FUNDING: Where am I going to get the money to make this?
RETURN: What do the funders expect to get back for that funding?
SUSTAINABILITY: How am I going to pay my personal bills as a storyteller?
AUDIENCE: Is there an audience for what I want to make and who are they?
PROMOTION: How will get this work out to this audience?

More traditional art forms have clearly marketed and well-worn paths of solutions through those questions, and then some kind of vibrant community choosing (or left) to find other paths because they don't have access to that "established system". They are richer artistic communities because of that-- the independent film movement exists in great part because Hollywood exists, and both are (often) richer for that, at least in a healthy art form.

On the surface, these new forms of storytelling that span multiple modalities of media might seem to have either no well-worn path (there is no Transmediawood to prompt an indie-transmedia) or nothing but old-media paths (just reproducing the big media versus little media dichotomy of the past.) Underneath that, though, is something far more interesting -- that the well-worn path of patronage models might be what we should be reacting to, as patronage models are always just the earliest models an art movement goes through. And as we'll see in the next installment, right now is all about patronage -- and that there's a danger in just being tactically useful.



Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark

Coming Tomorrow: DISSECTING THE "TRADITIONAL" TRANSMEDIA MODELS

OurSpace: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World (Part Two)

Last time, I shared part of my contributions to the afterword for OurSpace: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World, a casebook designed to encourage students, teachers, parents, and administrators to reflect on the ethical choices they confront as participants in the new media landscape. Our Space was co-developed by Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism) and The GoodPlay Project (Harvard Graduate School of Education). You can find the full casebook here, among other places.

Today, I am going to share an example of the kinds of activities we developed for the casebook, activities we intend to be appropriated, remixed, and redeployed by educators working in a variety of different contexts. Key to our process is the idea that we need to establish a safe space for these kinds of conversations to take place, one which respects the rights of all participants. We are trying to encourage a climate of healthy skepticism, one which asks hard questions, but is always open to new discoveries. The following exercise is one we've used successfully in the afterschool program on digital citizenship which my team ran at the Robert K. Kennedy Schools in Los Angeles.

Here's part of what we provide to these educators.



Our Space, Our Guidelines

Erin Reilly, Project NML

Facilitator's Guide

Lesson Overview (Grades 6-12)

Everywhere we go--whether hanging out at the park, being a lab partner in a science class, or meeting new friends through playing the latest MMORPG (Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game) --we negotiate the implicit and sometimes explicit norms of social communities. These spaces typically don't have signposts or labels that state every guideline that we must abide in order to be part of the group--but somehow most people learn what's inappropriate to do and what to do to fit in. Through observation, talking to others in the group, and actively engaging in the group discussion or activity presented, you can learn about the expectations for appropriate conduct, and what it means to be a responsible player or citizen of the community.

Talking about often sensitive issues such as identity, privacy, trust, ownership and

authorship, and group norms can be difficult; it may take considerable work to establish and maintain a culture that enables all learners to feel safe and comfortable enough to discuss these issues. It is important to discuss the reality that, in many online and offline spaces, different participants may have motives and goals for participating that are at odds with one another. In these cases, norms and expectations may not be clear-cut. Conduct that feels comfortable and appropriate to one person may not feel so to others. This set of activities is designed to help teachers/facilitators and students create a safe space-- and a shared set of norms and guidelines--for participating in discussions about the issues raised in this casebook.

It's important to realize that norms and guidelines work together.



Norms are defined through implicit understandings, representing shared assumptions about desirable and appropriate ways of interacting. Norms help to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior within any given community.

Guidelines are explicitly defined as an indication or outline of policy or conduct. Those policies may be expressed top-down, as in many of the rules that teachers and students have to follow in the school context, or emerge bottom-up, as in the kinds of guidelines we hope will emerge through this activity.

The implicit norms of various online communities are highly flexible, reflecting the still-emerging nature of many of these contexts and practices. Yet the lack of clarity and agreement about appropriate conduct can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and misconduct. Some people defend what would be seen as antisocial actions in other contexts by appealing to the lack of rules governing interaction online. For our purposes, as we negotiate between the online world and the classroom, it is important to establish some guidelines that all participants have agreed upon--guidelines that will allow us to talk about controversial and complex issues while respecting the privacy and dignity of all participants. We need to be able to appeal to these shared principles in order to arbitrate conflicts or, ideally, to prevent antisocial conduct.

Ethical thinking skills highlighted in this lesson:

Perspective-taking--striving to understand the motives and goals of multiple stakeholders in online communities
Reflecting on one's roles and responsibilities within a community
Considering community-level consequences (benefits and harms) of different courses of action

New media literacies highlighted in this lesson:



Negotiation--the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respectingmultiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

Collective Intelligence--the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Play--the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Learning Objectives

After this lesson, students should be able to:



Identify the norms and guidelines for responsible participation that exist in various communities, both offline and online

Name distinct features of online communities that may affect the norms and guidelines needed for responsible participation

Recognize the importance of creating norms and guidelines to facilitate responsible participation in online communities

Materials Used



Anonymous suggestion box (to keep in the classroom permanently)

Video: 1969 television series DVD, Room 222 Season OneOn Disc 2, Episode: The Exchange Teacher (airdate: 12/17/1969)

Handouts:



Recommended Guidelines

WoW Guidelines

Case Study: Ning--Community of Readers

Lesson Introduction

Introduce the lesson by considering norms that have been developed for different contexts. Use one of the following activities or a combination of both.



Watch Video and Discuss

The goal of this video clip is to understand that people often enter situations with already established norms. And in doing so, it takes focused effort and group collaboration to break the pre-structured guidelines established and develop a new set of norms and guidelines more appropriate for the participating group.

Begin this lesson by watching chapter two (roughly five minutes) of 1969 television series DVD, Room 222, Disc 2, Episode: The Exchange Teacher (air date: 12/17/1969). This video introduces an exchange teacher from England visiting an American school. Of interest in the video are the reactions of other teachers to the exchange teacher's "eccentric" behavior in her interactions with students, in which she casts aside the established guidelines in the school and articulates her own expectations for students.

Questions to discuss with your students after the video could include:



In the video clip, what were the differences between norms and guidelines?

Why does a class need guidelines? Or does a class need guidelines?

What were the norms of the school before the exchange teacher arrived?

How did the exchange teacher change the norms for her classroom?

Think of your current situation/location--what might happen if the current guidelines were removed? What are some of the social norms of this space? How might you change them?

Choose an Offline Community and an Online Community and Brainstorm the norms associated with each group. Put the two lists on the board for you and your students to discuss and compare.

Sample Offline Communities:

• Park • Mall • Football game. Church. Classroom

Sample Online Communities:

•Multiplayer online games like Runescape or World of Warcraft • Social networks, like Facebook or MySpace • Fan communities, like FictionAlley.org

Questions to prompt your students could include:



What kinds of things help you feel like you are in a safe space?

What are the different ways of participating in online communities compared to offline communities?

Not everybody participates in the same ways in online communities. What are some different ways to participate? These can be positive or negative (think active nonparticipation, such as: How does a casual observer participate?).

Share with students Will Wright's pyramid of participation when posing this question. Will Wright is a game designer who helped to develop such popular titles as The Sims, SimCity, and Spore. His games rely heavily on the participation of their players. This pyramid illustrates a number of key principles about participatory culture:

1. Participants make different kinds of contributions, with the most labor-intensive activities performed by a much smaller subset of the community than those activities that require more casual commitments;

2. The contributions of participants build upon one another. People who download content, for example, are depending on those who produce or distribute that content, and those who produce the content are hoping to have a receptive audience for the things they make--and are relying on toolmakers to give them the affordances they need to be able to make the content they want. Wright's pyramid thus allows us to talk about what each member contributes and what each member draws from a participatory culture.

When we think about "ethical participation," we often talk about the "public good"--ways to participate that benefit the community as a whole. What are some types of participation that fit the public-good model of participation? For example: How does tagging a media clip relate to participation? NOTE: Consider sharing with students NML's Learning Library challenge "An Introduction to Tagging"

In speaking of ethical issues in this casebook, we refer particularly to the responsibilities and obligations that accompany specific roles in society--for example, the roles of worker, citizen, and participant in a real or virtual community. Going beyond neighborhood morality, which involves the ways in which persons deal with those in their immediate vicinity, an ethical stance entails the capacity to think abstractly; and going beyond the assertion of rights, an ethical stance foregrounds those responsibilities that one should assume, even when--indeed, especially when--they go against one's own self interest.

Are there ways to participate in this community that support others' participation? What types of participation hinder this goal?

How would the exchange teacher in "Room 222" fair in the different spaces you've brainstormed?

Now compare the different spaces you've listed:



Can you act the same way in each space? What would happen if you did?

How do you account for the differences in expectations of participation in these two communities?

Activity #1: Analysis of Guidelines

Introduction: The goal of this activity is to begin considering guidelines for your class by assessing existing guidelines for participation created by other groups. Students will consider examples from both offline and online communities, exploring similarities and differences, and discuss the extent to which guidelines should differ in online versus offline environments.

Assessing guidelines created and used by other groups is a good start, but every social group is different and therefore it is best to establish your own set of guidelines that work for your group's values and goals.

For further reasoning on this, read the attached Case Study: Ning--Community of Readers with your students. Ning is an innovative and easy-to-use technology platform for people to join and create new social networks for their interests and passions and meet new people around the things they care about most in their life. Ning--Community of Readers is a Ning social network established by Project New Media Literacies to pilot test the Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture.

Share the attached guidelines and analyze the similarities and differences between the guidelines used by an after-school program and guidelines created for an online community.

Questions to prompt your students could include:



Comparing the two sets of guidelines, are there things you don't like? And if so, how might you want your guidelines to be different?

Why can't offline guidelines be used for online spaces?

What differences do you see between the offline guidelines and the online guidelines? What sorts of things appear in the online guidelines that aren't a part of offline guidelines?

Are there characteristics of online spaces that require developing new norms and guidelines? What sorts of things happen in online communities that require creating new guidelines and norms?

Besides the two sets of guidelines provided, can you think of other guidelines (whether offline or online) that might be good to add to this list?

Activity #2: Ombudsman, Take it Away!

Introduction: The goal of this activity is to choose one of your students to be an ombudsman and, using the new media literacy, collective intelligence, to establish a set of norms and guidelines for your group's learning environment.

By choosing an ombudsman--someone who will act as mediator, help to resolve any conflicts and ensure that all voices in the group are heard--your group will develop its own set of guidelines for creating a safe learning environment for discussing sensitive issues raised by participation in online learning and play spaces . We each have different backgrounds, experiences and expertises to bring to the conversation. We each deserve to be heard. And we need a set of guidelines, which ensures that everyone will be able to say what's on their mind and not feel at risk from other students' responses.

This space does not have to have the "look and feel" of our normal class. It's a space for us to come together equally in order to discuss issues that are still being worked out by society and to try out some activities. We are going to use the new media literacy, collective intelligence, to pool our knowledge and choose and create new rituals and guidelines for how we will act when we are doing activities on ethics.

Instructions:



Choose one of your students to be the first ombudsman--this person will facilitate today's class and ensure that everyone's voice is heard.

Have the students collaboratively work to jot down norms that they would want in establishing this safe space.

To ensure that everyone has a voice, encourage students to write their ideas on paper anonymously and put them into a suggestion box. There is no limit on how many suggestions you can put into the box.

After all suggestions are in, have the ombudsman make a list of norms by reading through all suggestions in the box. By designating a student as the ombudsman, the teacher/facilitator becomes a participant in the activity and helps to set in motion a new set of norms for how the teacher/facilitator and students will interact during the ethics exercises.

Have the ombudsman moderate a discussion on defining a list of guidelines to support establishing the norms requested by the group.

Through a voting session, have the ombudsman narrow down the list of guidelines to no fewer than three and no more than five. Conduct the voting with a show of hands. Students can raise their hands five times. The ombudsman needs to add up the total on each vote and determine which on the list rise to the top as the most important.

The ombudsman should write the final list on the board to get initial reactions/feedback from the group.

NOTE: In the dynamic we hope to see played out in these lessons, the expertise of both teachers/facilitators and students are "co-configured," meaning you and your students have different expertise to share when reflecting on digital media practices. We hope you work to hear one another's voices and opinions without bias. Encourage your group to return to this opening activity anytime they feel that new classroom norms have developed or that old norms have changed so that your classroom's list of Guidelines can be updated accordingly.

Concluding Takeaways

This lesson is designed to introduce ways of thinking about the need for establishing norms and guidelines that will facilitate a safe space where everyone feels comfortable discussing the sensitive issues that arise when adding digital realms to the everyday world. Because the focus of this casebook is digital media and ethics, it is possible that students will have had experiences that teachers have not themselves encountered. Allowing facilitation by students designated as ombudsman provides a space in which teachers and students bring their different perspectives and expertise to the table. The guidelines help to establish norms that support all players in the classroom to dynamically learn from one another.

Assessment

Through participation in class activities and discussions and/or answers to optional assessment questions, students should demonstrate they can:



Identify the norms and guidelines for responsible participation that exist in various communities, both offline and online

Name distinct features of online communities that may affect the norms and guidelines needed for responsible participation

Recognize the importance of creating norms and guidelines to facilitate responsible participation in online communities

Assessment Questions (Optional)

Think of a group--either online or offline--you belong to (or used to belong to) that is either particularly good or particularly bad at encouraging responsible participation. Explain the norms and guidelines of the group (if they exist) and how they affect the way people participate in the group.
Think of an online community/context in which you participate. What are the norms and guidelines for participation? How are they similar to and different from the offline communities/contexts in which you participate?


PARTICIPATION: OUR SPACE, OUR GUIDELINES
Recommended Guidelines


Respect--Give undivided attention to the person who has the floor (permission to speak).
Confidentiality--What we share in this group will remain in this group.
Openness--We will be as open and honest as possible without disclosing others' (families', neighbors', or friends') personal or private issues. It is okay to discuss situations, but we won't use names or other identifiers. For example, we won't say, "My older brother ..." Instead, we will say, "I know someone who ..."
Right to pass--It is always okay to pass (meaning "I'd rather not" or "I don't want to answer").
Nonjudgmental approach--We can disagree with another person's point of view withoutputting that person down.
Taking care to claim our opinions--We will speak our opinions using the first person and avoid using "you." For example, " I think that kindness is important." Not, " You are just mean."
Sensitivity to diversity--We will remember that people in the group may differ in cultural background, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity or gender expression, and will be careful about making insensitive or careless remarks.
Anonymity--It is okay to ask any question by using the suggestion box. Acceptance--It is okay to feel uncomfortable; adults feel uncomfortable, too, when they talk about sensitive and personal topics, such as sexuality.
Have a good time--It is okay to have a good time. Creating a safe space is about coming together as a community, being mutually supportive, and enjoying each other's qualities.

Adapted from Guide to Implementing TAP: A Peer Education Program to Prevent HIV and STI (2nd edition), © 2002, Advocates for Youth, Washington, DC.

World of Warcraft (WoW) Guidelines

This is an excerpt taken from the WoW Guidelines to illustrate guidelines for an online community. For the full set of guidelines.

Welcome to the World of Warcraft discussion forums! These forums are here to provide you with a friendly environment where you can discuss ideas, give game play advice, role-play, and converse about any other aspects of World of Warcraft with other players. Community forums are at their best when participants treat their fellow posters with respect and courtesy. Therefore, we ask that you conduct yourself in a civilized manner when participating in these forums.

The guidelines listed below explain what behavior is expected of you and what behavior you can expect from other community members. Note that the following guidelines are not exhaustive, and may not address all manner of offensive behavior. Your access to these forums is a "privilege," and not a "right."

Racial/Ethnic

This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images that



Promote racial/ethnic hatred

Are recognized as a racial/ethnic slur

Allude to a symbol of racial/ethnic hatred

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:



Be temporarily banned from the World of Warcraft forums

Be given a final warning; any further Code of Conduct violations may result in permanent ban from the forums

Real-Life Threats

This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images that:



Refer to violence in any capacity that is not directly related to the game world

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:



Be temporarily banned from the World of Warcraft forums

Be given a final warning; any further Code of Conduct violations may result in a permanent ban from the forums

Distribution of Real-Life Personal Information

This category includes:



Releasing any real-life information about other players or Blizzard Entertainment employees

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:

Be permanently banned from the World of Warcraft forums

Posting Cheats, Hacks, Trojan Horses, or Malicious Programs

This category includes:



Posting links to cheats, hacks, or malicious viruses / programs

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:



Be permanently banned from the World of Warcraft forums

Inappropriate language

This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images that:



Are a mildly inappropriate reference to human anatomy or bodily functions

Are otherwise considered objectionable

Bypass the Mature Language filter

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:



be given a temporary ban from the World of Warcraft forums, depending upon severity





Harassing or Defamatory

This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images that:



Insultingly refer to other characters, players, Blizzard employees, or groups of people

Result in ongoing harassment to other characters, players, Blizzard employees, or groups of people

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:



Be given a temporary ban from the World of Warcraft forums, depending upon severity

Harassment takes many forms, and is not necessarily limited to the type of language used, but the intent. Repeatedly targeting a specific player with harassment can lead to more severe action. The idea behind this is to prevent any one player from consistently being uncomfortable in the World of Warcraft forums.



Major Religions or Religious Figures

This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images that:



Negatively portray major religions or religious figures

If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:

Be given a temporary ban from the World of Warcraft forums, depending upon severity

Spamming and Trolling

This category includes:



Excessively communicating the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure gibberish Creating threads for the sole purpose of causing unrest on the forums

Causing disturbances in forum threads, such as picking fights, making off-topic posts that ruin the thread, insulting other posters

Making non-constructive posts

Abusing the Reported Post feature by sending false alarms or nonsensical messages

If a player is found to have been spamming or trolling, he/she will:



Be given a temporary or permanent ban from the World of Warcraft forums, depending upon severity

The bottom line is that we want World of Warcraft to be a fun and safe environment for all players. World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, and the key words are "Massively Multiplayer." In playing this game and posting on its forums, you will encounter thousands of other players who share different experiences and come from vastly different backgrounds. While certain language and images may not be offensive to you, consider the fact that that same language and images may have a completely different effect on someone else. We've done everything we can to make this

Ning Community of Readers: Example Case

A conversation with Aurora High School teacher, Rebecca Rupert, discussing her and her students' process for developing community guidelines.

Rebecca Rupert writes:

We started with the following guidelines that were written by teacher Ann Smith from Arapahoe, Colorado.

In your discussion, be sure:

1. Your posts (or comments) are well written. This includes not only good content, but--because these are school-related--also follows writing conventions including spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

2. Your posts (or comments) are responsive. They respond to other people's ideas--whether it is a post by a teacher, a comment by a student, or an idea elsewhere on the Internet. The power of online communication tools is in their connectedness--they are connected to a larger community of ideas. Participate in that community.

3. Your posts (or comments) include textual references to support your opinions. Adding quotes or links to other works strengthens your response.

4. You participate frequently. To be part of the dialogue, you have to participate fully and consistently.

5. You are respectful of others. It's okay to disagree; it's not okay to be disagreeable. Be respectful of others and their opinions, and be civil when you disagree.

She used the guidelines for students as they participated in a Socratic seminar blogging session. She notes, "I first used the guidelines for an online chat with my students, and it became immediately clear that students were not following any of them (it was a disaster), so we spent time looking closely at each guideline, re-writing them, and adding them to the list. We came up with our own set of guidelines, and they were posted in the room for a time. As I remember, my students' guidelines were very similar, just written in different language.

OurSpace: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World (Part One)

Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation. The casebook is available for free online and you can access it here, on the Project New Media Literacies team website, among other places.

Our Space was co-developed by Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism) and The GoodPlay Project (Harvard Graduate School of Education). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking, and conduct, among young people when they exercise their new media skills. We recently released the finished product to the world, after many years of hashing through these complex issues together, and we are eager to get response from other educators who are interested in applying some of these activities in their own contexts. Today, I am going to share my own reflections about the project, which are part of a joint afterword which I wrote in conversation with Howard Gardner, the leader of the GoodPlay project. You can read that full exchange here. Next time, I will share one of our initial activities --- "Our Space, Our Guidelines" -- which is intended to help teachers develop a safe space through which students can engage in conversations about ethical issues.

Excerpt from How We Got Here:

Peter, a typical American teenager, lives in a major metropolitan area in North America. The product of a broken home, he currently is under the supervision of his aunt and uncle. Peter considers himself to be a master of the Web, able to move rapidly from site to site and applying his emerging skills to promote social justice. Peter has engaged with typical identity play, adopting a flamboyant alter ego, an avatar that allows him to do and say things he would be hesitant to do otherwise. Peter belongs to a social network with kids from a nearby private academy who share his perception of being different from others around them. Peter uses Flickr to publish his photographs, some of which have been published professionally by the local newspaper under a Creative Commons attribution; the editor has been so impressed by Peter's work that he now lets him work freelance. Peter often interacts with adults who share his geeky interests online. Peter uses his computer to monitor suspicious activities in his community and is able to use a range of mobile technologies to respond anytime, anywhere to issues that concern him. He uses Twitter to maintain constant contact with his girlfriend, Mary Jane, who often has to stay after school to rehearse for drama productions.

Peter and his other friends are part of a generation that has embraced the expanded capacities of new media to more actively participate in their society. Peter doesn't like to consider himself a hero, but he has made a difference in the lives of the people around him. Indeed, Peter's Uncle Ben has told him that he enjoys the kind of power and knowledge that previous generations could only imagine but warns him that "with great power comes great responsibility." Peter knows less than he thinks he does, but more than the adults around him realize. While he makes mistakes, some of them costly, he is generally ready to confront the responsibilities thrust upon him by his circumstances.

Alert readers will have already recognized that Peter Parker is the protagonist of Marvel comics long- standing Spider-Man franchise. I've treated his story as if it were a case study from our research to make a point. Most of us already accept the idea--at least through fiction--that young people might be able to assume greater responsibilities than previous generations, that they might learn ways to use their emerging "powers" responsibly and ethically, and that the value of doing so may outweigh the risks or challenges. Within the pages of a comic book, things, such as identity play, which sometimes worry adults, are much more normative, much as they are for the young people who have grown up defining their identities in relation to the online world. And there, we come to accept the value of young people "geeking out," rehearsing and deploying their skills within communities defined more through their shared interests than through fixed relations between adults and youth, and we come to recognize that young people may take on their own "missions" that motivate their learning and shape their understanding of their place in society.

The Spider-Man comics even allow us to see Peter and his friends at Xavier Academy (The X-Men) make and learn from mistakes, often as part of a supportive social network which is there to pick up the pieces and offer valuable advice on the next steps in their personal journey. And it's a good thing that the Avengers, the predominantly adult organization of superheroes to which Spider-Man belongs, are not age-conscious, since one longtime member, Thor, is a five-hundred-plus-year-old immortal god and compared to him, all of us are "immature." Many of us grew up reading such stories, though we often forget them when we are confronting the messy business of helping adolescents acquire and master adult responsibilities.

For me, this project started with the recognition that there was a whole generation of youth who, like Peter, are deploying new media technologies and the processes associated with them to develop a clearer understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Many of these youth are becoming media makers, expressing their emerging understanding of the world through fan fiction, game mods, mp3 downloads, websites, YouTube videos, social-network profiles, Flickr photographs, and a wealth of other grassroots production practices. As they do so, some, though not all of them, are stepping into the support systems around what we call participatory culture. They are using these technologies to construct their identities, to make sense of their social networks, and to gain respect from adults who share their goals and backgrounds. Some of them are joining online communities that, at their best, meet their needs, but in other cases, fail them. Despite a tendency to talk of "digital natives," these young people are not born understanding how to navigate cyberspace and they don't always know the right thing to do as they confront situations that were not part of the childhood worlds of their parents or educators. Yes, they have acquired great power, yet they--and the adults around them--don't know how to exercise responsibility in this unfamiliar environment.

Those of us on the Project New Media Literacies (NML) team felt that it was too easy to talk about "media effects," as if these young people were simply victims of these new technologies, or to identify risks without recognizing the many potential benefits of teens' online lives. As a society, we have spent too much time focused on what media are doing to young people and not enough time asking what young people are doing with media. We need to embrace an approach based on media ethics, one that empowers young people to take greater responsibility for their own actions and holds them accountable for the choices they make as media producers or as members of online communities....

The pronouns surrounding these digital practices suggest an uncertainty about the balance between individual and collective experience in the online world. Consider, for example, the "you" in YouTube. In English, "you" can be both singular and multiple, blurring distinctions that are carved into other languages. So when we talk about YouTube, do we see it as a space of personal or individualized expression, or do we see it as a space for shared, networked communications? What about the "my" in Myspace, given the fact that our personal sites are simply portals into a much more fully integrated social network that links us, directly or indirectly, to every other user of the site? We've chosen to call this guide "Our Space" to emphasize the social dimensions of participatory culture: "Our" suggests a shared ownership and responsibility over what happens in the online world. Ideally, transforming the pronoun here encourages us to recognize that our individual choices have social consequences, that what we do online may impact others, and as such, online sites should be sites of ethical reflection....

Our conversations with the GoodPlay Project have been generative for all involved, bringing a much broader array of experiences and expertise to the table than either team could have mustered on its own. Howard and I came to this project with different disciplinary backgrounds, different intellectual commitments, and different experiences with digital media and popular culture. These differences were reflected as well in the graduate students and researchers who worked on our respective teams. We have not always agreed and, indeed, we've sometimes had heated disagreements. Bringing these teams together has meant that in any given conversation, there was a healthy skepticism displayed towards all claims, allowing for a finished product that reflects both the risks and the benefits of the online world, explores both the decisions of individual agents and their larger socio-cultural context, balances traditional and emerging pedagogical practices, and can be deployed in a school that has one laptop per child and one that has no laptops at all. We hope that educators will not simply embrace those materials that match their preconceptions but rather will integrate the disagreements and debates around new media into their pedagogy. None of us know where all of this is going, so it is far too soon to adopt fixed positions.

Not every activity proposed here will work in every educational context. We are trusting educators to make their own decisions about which activities to deploy and how to adapt them or adjust them to local particulars. But we hope that educators will seek the same balanced perspective that has emerged through our multi-year conversations together--not giving themselves over to fear of the new media landscape, but always taking a skeptical, though not cynical, perspective....

While the activities we've developed often expose students and their teachers to new tools and technologies, our real emphasis is on helping all involved to explore some of the emerging cultural practices that have grown up around new media platforms. Even those students who have rich and remarkable online lives may be too narrow in their exploration of the online world, while we imagine that future generations will need to acquire skills in navigating and negotiating across multiple communities, each with its own norms, practices, and traditions, and each posing its own standards and expectations. At the same time, because our emphasis is on skills and competencies, rather than on technologies, we have sought low-tech activities that might help those who have limited digital access to acquire habits of mind that will enable a fuller transition into cyberspace when and if the opportunity presents itself. Many of the skills we identify are not new; many have long been part of the educational process; but they have acquired new importance and new meaning in response to shifts in our information infrastructure.

These emerging skills are unevenly distributed across the culture, making it difficult to create a "one- size-fits-all" intervention that will serve the needs of these diverse constituencies. NML, thus, has developed a more modular approach: one that provides scaffolding for new teachers and inexperienced students but also serves the needs of more experienced participants. We see educators as important partners who are themselves appropriating and remixing our content on the ground and often on the fly. We want teachers to apply their own knowledge and experience to flesh out our activities. As we've seen our materials brought into school and after-school programs, they are deployed most effectively when teachers trust young people to make meaningful choices and value their own insights. Wherever possible, we want our activities to be open-ended and flexible. And wherever possible, we want students and teachers to go to the actual sites where cultural change is occurring rather than simulating these practices in the classroom.

In my book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Jenkins, 2006), I warn about some of the challenges of bringing participatory culture into formal education:

"It is not clear that the successes of affinity spaces can be duplicated by simply incorporating similar activities into the classroom. Schools impose a fixed leadership hierarchy (including very different roles for adults and teens).... Schools have less flexibility to support writers at different stages of their development. Even the most progressive schools set limits on what students can write compared to the freedom they enjoy on their own."

And indeed, NML's field testing of our materials has shown just how realistic many of these concerns are. The fixed power relations between students and teachers sometimes ensures the imparting of knowledge across the generations, but may also constrain youth from seeking meaningful advice about ethical dilemmas they encounter from adults around them. By comparison, young people and adults who share the same interests are meeting online, often collaborating on projects together, in ways that respect and value what each participant has to contribute. Teachers in the classroom struggle with how to preserve their own expertise without recognizing that young people also may know things that need to be brought to the table. Popular culture often embraces values at odds with those of the schoolhouse, and students and teachers need to negotiate a set of guidelines about appropriate or inappropriate use of those materials in the classroom.

In the digital age, classrooms are no longer isolated environments, cut off from the surrounding society, but rather nodes in a complex learning network. Our materials exploit the porousness of this new learning ecology, expanding the range of opportunities schools have historically offered their students, connecting learners to larger knowledge communities, and encouraging young people to voice their perspectives and share their creations with a larger public. As we prepare young people for a world that is more and more defined around collaboration and collective problem solving, we must help them acquire the social skills necessary to meaningfully contribute to a network of other learners. In a world where people who pool their knowledge and share their expertise can solve more complex problems than those working alone, we need to offer our students more difficult questions and give them an opportunity to confront them together.

Too often, educators are adopting positions that close off the exploration of the new media, rather than encouraging young people to acquire the skills needed to meaningfully participate, and fostering an ethical perspective that allows them to deploy their resources responsibly and safely. The activities included in this casebook adopt a different perspective, suggesting ways that teachers and young people might engage with Facebook and MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Second Life and World of Warcraft. Without such training, young people are being left to deal with these new environments on their own. Some of them are being left out or left at risk as a consequence. Some teachers are advocating "just say no" to Wikipedia, for example, rather than helping young people understand the processes and norms through which Wikipedians evaluate and assess the reliability of information they are providing. Some schools are shutting out YouTube rather than helping young people to reflect on their roles as the

producers and distributors of media content. Some educational programs stress the rights of copyright holders but do not expose students to the fundamentals of fair use or to the emerging practices around Creative Commons licensing. And many adults worry about issues of personal privacy without understanding why young people might also place a value in sharing their personal experiences and insights within their extended social networks.

All of these, and many other issues, have been debated back and forth by the two teams in the course of developing this casebook. We know that different teachers will take different perspectives on these cultural, ideological, and pedagogical concerns. We've tried to design these materials in such a way that they can be taken in many different directions and still convey some fundamental ethical concepts that will help young people chart a meaningful course for themselves as media producers and members of online communities.

David Buckingham has suggested the value of approaching young people's use of technology in terms of their "beings" (respecting who and what they are now) rather than their "becomings" (seeing their present state as some stepping stone to their adult identities). While some of our activities confront the long-term consequences of their decisions, we also are trying to take seriously the activities that young people are already engaging with and the ethical issues they are already confronting in their day-to-day interactions with online communities.

We also know that young people are not the only ones who will be learning as they work through these units: Many adults still know little about these emerging social communities and cultural practices; most are uncertain about what parts of our existing ethical toolkit still apply in these unfamiliar situations. We hope that educators will use these materials to test and strengthen their own conceptual frameworks, remaining open to new possibilities, even as they hold tight to long-standing values and standards. As educators, we are obligated to act through reason and not out of fear; that responsibility requires us to continually ask questions of ourselves and of our students. We are teaching them not to be too trustful of the information they read on Wikipedia; perhaps we also should learn not to trust sensational news stories that provoke moral panic about young people's digital lives.

Like Spider-Man, you have been given both great power and great responsibility. What are you going to do with it?

When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part Two)

There's a recurring focus here on the influence of technology on the creative process, though the picture we get seems somewhat inconsistent -- sometimes limited means and low tech generate creative strategies, while other times artists embrace the emergent properties of new media. How would you describe the relationship between artistic experimentation and technological innovation?

Well you know sometimes I'm a skeptic about the promise of technological innovation leading to artistic breakthroughs. We used to talk about the 80-20 rule in movies and music. 80% of the business would be done by 20% of the content. Professor Christian Sandvig showed me some data last week that on You Tube maybe 3% of the content gets 90% of the views. And most of that content is music videos from major artists. Now I realize that You Tube allows any filmmaker to get their work seen and I'm not interested in going back to the days of the early 1970's. If I had been unable to sell Mean Streets to one of the majors in 1974, it would have literally disappeared. There were no "indie" distributors of any consequence.

The other side of this relates to some work we have been doing with T Bone Burnett on the future of the music business. Bone makes the point that the digital revolution has actually taken us backwards in the quality of the sound we listen to. In other words, that vinyl album of Jimi Hendrix--Are You Experienced, was much fuller and warmer than listening to the MP3 with a pair of ear buds.

The other part of the work is figuring out how the musicians get paid as well as the songwriters do. When you go into a Gap store, you are paying for the music they stream in the store. The same with restaurants or bars or elevators. But that money only goes to the music publishers, so all my friends who were songwriters in the 1960's are doing quite well and all who were just drummers or singers are poor as church mice.

So while the digital revolution is certainly democratizing the distribution of media, we need to understand that there are winners and losers. Just look at the relative fortunes of Google and The New York Times. Has Google built a $30 billion ad business on the back of other company's content? Maybe?

A central concern here is the ways that these artists have dealt with issues of democracy and racial equality. What roles do you think the arts have played in shaping the public's perception of and acceptance of an increasingly multicultural society?

I think the "modern arts" have done more to shape a multicultural society than almost any other force. I say "modern", in the sense that in 19th Century America, the most popular kind of public entertainment was the minstrel show.

So the modern art of jazz changes that completely. Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong bring this incredibly original music to a white audience that had entertained itself by watching white men do blackface routines of the most grotesque caricatures. When Benny Goodman played at Carnegie Hall with a black piano player, Teddy Wilson, in the early forties it was considered incredibly daring. So we have come a long way and the artists have been the ones to push the edge of the envelope. Even as late as 1957, right wing writers were railing against rock and roll because they thought that if a young white kid loved Chuck Berry, it would inevitably lead to "race mixing". And of course that was true.

You describe throughout how crisis in capitalism provoke great art. What does this suggest about our current moment? Will the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements be equally generative? Why or why not?

I think the jury is out on this question. Certainly the artist's role in the "Great Refusal" that Marcuse describes, does not seem to be present right now. There is no Woody Guthrie or Joan Baez singing to either OWS or the Tea Party. The crisis of capitalism that was the great depression certainly generated a lot of art because the government thought it was just as important to keep artists off the unemployment line as auto workers. So the WPA in the 1930's funded cats like Jackson Pollack and Orson Welles. They sent Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange out into the deepest pockets of rural poverty to take photographs that inspire us still today. I think if Obama proposed a Federal Arts program like that of the 1930's he would be probably decried as an chardonnay drinking elitist and denounced by both the radio talk show hosts and the House Republicans. Certainly you see the meager amounts of money provided to the NEA and NEH being cut back each year. The City of Paris spends more money supporting artists than our Federal government.

The second part of the current disconnect stems from the weird balance between the current anger and the utopian optimism of many of the Vanguard movements I wrote about in Outlaw Blues. As someone pointed out Martin Luther King's most famous speech was "I have a dream", not "I have a nightmare". It's very hard to sustain a social movement just on anger, which is why the Tea Party movement has probably already peaked. As for Occupy Wall Street, my sense is they really believe in direct democracy. When I visited the New York encampment, it was organized like a late 1960's commune. Now the history of communes in America, which I talk about in the book, has been a real struggle to demonstrate (in Martin Duberman's words) "that individual development and group membership are complimentary not contradictory goals". That is really hard if you are living and working with the same people 24/7 like at OWS or in a commune in the wilds of New Mexico. But it's not so hard to reconcile these two forces, as you and I know, around the groups we support in our academic lives like Project New Media Literacy or the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Near the end of the book, you shared some insights into the impact of Steve Jobs on American culture. Is Jobs a friend or a foe to the tradition you are describing across this book?

Steve Jobs was a hero to me because he somehow was able to bring Art and Science together in a way that I strive for. He was versed in the humanities and was curious about technology. Its clear to me that Wozniak was the coder and Jobs was the marketer at the beginning of Apple. When I hear educators talking about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), it drives me crazy. Our schools are art and humanities starved as it is and they think the solution is teaching MORE STEM.

As Steve Jobs pointed out to Walter Isaccson in the new biography, if he had never taken calligraphy at Reed College, the attention to font, which distinguished the early Mac, would have never happened. We are good in the country at building objects of desire---I Pads, Scorsese movies, Springsteen songs, Harley motorcycles. I'm not sure our comparative advantage over India and China is STEM. Its what Steve Jobs did, which was STEAM---Art plus technology. I think that is the vision that shapes almost everything we are doing at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. If somehow we can blend the humanities and engineering in one lab, we will have succeeded. We certainly feel our early efforts to team communications scholars from Annenberg with engineers from Viterbi have been rather successful.

What are you able to accomplish by publishing this book electronically, which would be hard if not impossible to achieve through print?

When I first got the I Pad, I instantly knew it would make a new kind of book possible. Outlaw Blues has over 100 embedded videos that are an integral part of the text. I don't think the story would have been half as interesting if I had not had the videos. I could describe the scene at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan first went electric, but you would never understand it as well as being able to see the video of that moment.

What is so cool is that this circles back to this relationship between art and technology. In doing the film research, I realized an explosion of video source material right after World War II. So the 16 MM optical sound film was really perfected by Kodak in 1935, but it was World War II that the war cameramen embraced it because the cameras were so much lighter to carry around while dodging bullets in battle. After the war, a whole new documentary style using light weight cameras begins, and with it the ability to record on film almost everything. So Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment" gets extended to the "decisive 5 minutes"---the length of an early reel of 16 MM film.

You have been working with T. Bone Burnett on a project concerning the Future of Music. What can you tell us about this project?

T-Bone and I are both concerned about two problems in the contemporary music business. The first is sound. The current MP3 track, heard through ear buds on your I Phone is a pale approximation of what the musician heard when he finished the mix in the recording studio. The basis for the MP3 was invented in the Bell Labs in 1979! Remember the early modems in the 1980's were 24 KBPS, so you needed to strip out a huge number of frequencies to compress a music file to travel over a 24 K modem. But today we have 10 MBPS wireless bandwidth with 4 G. Why should we be confined to this shitty audio codec?

The second part is to figure out how to get musicians paid for recordings. As I said before, the songwriters get paid for every stream:in a bar, restaurant, clothing store, elevator, internet radio station, etc. But the musicians don't get a cent and must rely only on CD sales and I Tunes downloads. As long as most of the world thinks its cool to listen to pirated content, then the musicians don't earn a dime. Some of my students say, "well the musicians make their money from touring, the records are just a portion for their concerts." So you are telling me that Aretha Franklin, having made some of the great music of the 60's and 70's has to continue to tour, just to survive? That doesn't seem fair when millions of people are listening to "Respect" this year.

The best solution we've come up with is a broadband access license of a couple of dollars on top of your broadband bill which goes into a general copyright fund and is paid out to artists based on how many of their songs were listened to illegally per month around the world. A company called Big Champagne already has the data by crawling the web. It wouldn't be hard and it would generate about $2 billion per month for content creators.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

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When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part One)

My new USC colleague, Jonathan Taplin, is like the cool older cousin that everyone of my generation always wished they had. He was at Woodstock and was hanging out with Bob Dylan and his mob at the Newport Folk Festival the day Dylan went electric. He organized The Concert for Bangladesh and produced Mean Streets. He went on tour with The Band and he was behind the scenes helping to negotiate the deal which saved the Disney Corporation. Now, he's best buddies with T. Bone Barnett and he's the founder of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

And he lived to tell the tale. In fact, his new book, Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, recounts these and many other events which changed popular culture (especially popular music). His memory is vivid, his attention to detail is sharp, and his writing is compelling.

But, Outlaw Blues is more than simply Taplin's memoirs, fascinating though it is to read these stories. Taplin sees the big picture, and he uses the book to document what he calls the "American Vanguard", which he traces back to Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain (suggesting that these "dead white guys" were as lively and controversial in their own times as Eric Clapton was in his.) He writes about Louis Armstrong, Upton Sinclair, Orson Welles, Jackson Pollack and Edward R. Murrow, with the same vivid attention to details and personality as he describes what happened when Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock or discusses a young Martin Scorsese's uncomfortable reactions tof Hollywood hedonism.

His account connects these phenomenal artistic accomplishments to issues of technological innovation, shifting business models, and above all, the dramatic social, political, and cultural debates of the period. Before everything is said and done, Outlaw Blues ends up being the hidden history of America from the mid-19th into the early 21st century, one full of lessons for those who are trying to make sense of the media changes that are helping to define our present moment.

But, Outlaw Blues is still more than that, because it is the first publication of a new Annenberg Innovation Lab initiative which is seeking to re-imagine the affordances of the book. Most existing ebooks slavishly and mechanically reproduce printed books and utterly fail to take advantage of the properties of this emerging platform. So, when they made the Kindle version of Convergence Culture, my publishers had trouble reproducing the sidebars, which are a central feature of the book, and were designed to approximate the juxtapositions we associate with the web. But the Annenberg Innovation Lab believes that ebooks can be media rich and interactive, even participatory, experiences. But, they can achieve that goal only if they are "born digital," only if they are designed for this platform from the get-go.

Outlaw Blues, thus, included hundreds of clips, allowing us to see parts of the musical performances the book describes, and thanks to Taplin's behind-the-scene's perspectives, watch them with new eyes, because we have a clearer sense of what the people on stage are thinking. And the musical bits exist alongside bits of interviews, documentaries, and other key media texts of the period. Here's where you go to learn more about this "innovative" project.

In this interview, I asked Taplin to focus on some of the larger themes -- about the nature of creativity and popular culture, about art and politics, about technological change and personal expression -- which run through the book.

Throughout Outlaw Blues, you describe the "American Vanguard." What do you see as the characteristics of this tradition? What roles did it play in shaping American Arts and Letters?

I guess I prefer the term "vanguard" to French "Avant Garde", but I think they have the same intent. Webster's defines it as "An intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts". Emerson returned from Europe in 1837 and said that we had had quit our "extreme Eurocentrism" and celebrate a unique American culture. Almost from the beginning, that literature found itself in cultural and political opposition to the establishment. Whether it was Emerson's break with Protestant theology or Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, where he took on both slavery and imperialism; the Vanguard was ahead of even the most progressive politician in America. And I think this tradition continued up through Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger---all the way to Bob Dylan's famous song "Oxford Town", with these lyrics:

Oxford Town in the afternoon/ Ev'rybody singin' a sorrowful tune/
Two men died 'neath the Mississippi moon/Somebody better investigate soon

But beyond the political, I think the more important element was their role in experimentation. Two trumpet players, Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong basically invented the idea of improvisation and the solo in jazz. Jackson Pollack helped invent the language of abstract expressionism. Orson Welles reinvented both the radio drama (with War of the Worlds) and the motion picture (with Citizen Kane). So somehow the combination of experimentation and willingness to stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom are the defining characteristics of the American Vanguard.

You often define the "American Vanguard" is opposition to the commercial culture of the same period, yet many of those you discuss -- from Louis Armstrong to Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis -- are among the most popular artists of all time. So, what relationship are you positing between being an "outlaw" artists and the commercial marketplace?

The funny thing is that when Bob Dylan started making records, Frankie Avalon and Fabian were on top of the hit parade. When Elvis first started making records, Frank Sinatra, who was the king of pop music in 1955 said that rock and roll, "is sung, played and written by cretinous goons." The difference between what we think of as mainstream culture and what the kids were liking has of course been with us for a long time.

When Mezz Mesrow and Eddie Condon, two white kids from the suburbs went down to a black club in Chicago in 1935 to see Louis Armstrong, they were both pissing off their parents and potentially the patrons of the club. The fact is that youth culture did not became the dominant commercial culture until the mid 1960's. Mitch Miller and his Orchestra were the largest selling act for Columbia Records in 1963. So in a sense the Vanguard musical artists changed the nature of commercial culture. As Andy Warhol pointed out, what was weird about the 1960's was not that artists became more commercial, but rather that commercial culture became more artistic.

What motivated you to write Outlaw Blues through a combination of memoir and historical perspectives? What relationship are you positing in this way between what happened in the late 20th century and the broader history of popular culture?

I had been studying what the Austrian economist Schumpeter called "Long Waves"---the notion that history and economics move in 60 year cycles. This was all part of his theory of creative destruction. So I definitely felt like I had been lucky enough to live and work in one of those periods of creative revolution from 1963-1982 and so I was curious about those other periods when Vanguard artists were really altering the cultural dialogue.

So I started with the Transcendentalists in the 1830's and then sixty years later there was Twain, the invention of cinema and radio, the phonograph record, Buddy Bolden, jazz. And then sixty years later were the beats and bebop, leading to the sixties cultural explosion. I'm not saying the Long Wave is a perfect way to look at cultural history, but these upheavals do tend to come in waves.

So from that basis I tried to put the book together. I didn't want it to be a memoir, per se, but I knew my own personal experiences with some of the important artists of the late 20th century could add to the story.

In that sense, Dylan is really carrying on a poetic tradition from T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, who so radically changed the nature of narrative poetry in the early part of the Century. I had studied poetry at Princeton with Walton Litz, a truly inspirational teacher and he gave me such an appreciation for Auden and Eliot that I felt that somehow I could carry my own students back to an appreciation of that work. After all, the poetic tradition of hip hop has roots that could even be traced back to Gertrude Stein and Dada. It's just that a lot of kids don't have much sense of where their culture came from. It's like Jay Z and Tupac are in a "folk" tradition, just like Robert Johnson was. They are just taking from the past and reinterpreting it.

Your chapters are structured around a series of moments or scenes where a number of artists, often working in different media, seemed to thrive. What do these scenes have in common? What factors contribute to the emergence of these kinds of creative moments?

This is such a fascinating topic. Jacques Barzun has a wonderful theory about the Renaissance. You had all of these amazing artists living literally down the street from each other in Florence. They went to each other's studios and probably drank together in the evenings. So they were both rivals and friends and that rivalry pushed them to experiment more. The physical proximity---the scene---was critical.

I certainly witnessed the same thing with The Band, Dylan, Clapton and Van Morrison. They hung out together and they pushed each other to really excel. My reading tells me the same thing was going on in Paris in the 1920's and certainly in New York in the 1940's when both Abstract Expressionism and Bebop were being birthed in very close quarters. In fact I could name the bars, Mintons for the jazz scene and the Cedar Tavern for the artists. This leads me to wonder if all these notions of virtual communities can have the same creative juice as the physical presence of jamming at 2 AM in Harlem.

So if the first factor is the competitive scene, then the second factor is a general sense that the "canon" of the moment is moribund. The only reason Marty Scorsese, Terry Malick, George Lucas and Bob Rafaelson got to make their first films in the early 1970's was that the Hollywood system, that had been turning out failing movies like Hello Dolly and The Molly McGuires, was bankrupt. The studios had no money, so they were open to this new generation of film school brats that were willing to work for peanuts and make films for $500,000.

I think a lot of what you write about and study---the rise of Transmedia---comes out of this same kind of Interregnum. As Gramsci said, "The old is dying and the new cannot be born." Much of the underpinning of the music, TV and Film businesses are being destroyed by the digital revolution. The DVD sell through business that created 55% of movie revenues is dying. The album, which allowed music companies to sell you 12 songs when you only wanted one, has been unbundled. TiVo completely is undercutting the advertising revenue of TV.

What we need to see is if new scenes will arise to reinvent these businesses. I guess that is part of our task at the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

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"The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged": The Visual Culture of the Occupy Movement

Since September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement has produced an overwhelming array of visuals, offering a significant lens on the movement itself, its ties to history, its divergent voices, perspectives and styles, as well as its multiple distribution channels from mainstream outlets to social media. Despite the criticism from experts who do not necessarily see much potential in Occupy's "brand," the visual aspects of the protest clearly have impact and traction. Although it would be impossible to fully assess this rich visual output, this blog post attempts to understand its emergent themes as well as the potential uses and value attached to visual commentary and protest.

Throughout history, visual culture has played an important role in protest and social change. Although "high" art had long been used to venerate political figures as well as members of the upper classes, with the revolutionary tides of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America, we see a shift and an increase in pictorial depictions of political resistance. These historical examples demonstrate the way visual culture has been fundamental to the politics of protest. They serve as witness and document. They can incite and instigate action.

Thus begins a rich, compelling, and timely post over at the blog maintained by the USC Civic Paths Research Group. Dr. Alison Trope, Clinical Associate Professor, and Lana Swartz, PhD Student, both in USC Annenberg, have assembled an amazing archive of images drawn primarily from the Occupy rallies from around the country and across the globe.

As this opening suggests, their primary emphasis is on visual media -- the signs, costumes, spectacles, which have been deployed to define the terms of the debate. Given the visual rich nature of their post, I can't cross-post it here, so I can only send you there to examine it more closely. But, believe me, it is worth hitting the link...

The Civic Paths team has been studying alternative forms of activism, especially those which involve the intersection between popular culture, participatory culture, and youth, for more than two years. We are affiliated with a research hub focused on Youth and Participatory Politics funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mills College's Joe Kahne. Our own involvement stems from my long-standing interest in fan activism, the theme of a special issue our group is editing for Transformative Works and Culture, which will come out early next year. But, our interest has grown far beyond this.

Our current case studies include work on the young activists who are working to pass the Dream Act to give greater educational and citizenship rights to undocumented youth (Arely Zimmerman), research on youth involvement in Libertarian politics (Liana Thompson), research on Nerdfighters, the Harry Potter Alliance, and Imagine Better (Neta Kingler-Vilenchik), and research into Muslim-American politics post-911 (Sangita Shreshtova). Along the way, though, we have also been looking closely at a broader range of case studies -- from Racebenders to labor organizing in Madison, Wisconsin. This site looks at some of our preliminary examples, which helped pave the way for our current research. Altogether, we have nearly 20 PhD and Masters students contributing to this research, many of whom have posted some preliminary insights through the Civic Paths blog, so if you come to visit the Occupy archive, stay around and check out some of their other contributions.

I was lucky enough to have been able to pay a visit to Washington Square, the home of Occupy Wall Street, a few weeks ago, when I was in New York for the Mobility Shifts conference. An army of people in Zombie costumes, many of them from Zombiecon, a horror fan convention, had arrived at the Park just a few minutes before I did, and they were mingling with folks dressed up like characters from Game of Thrones and carrying signs warning that "the Winter is Coming." Elderly tourists were stopping them and seeking to better understand why they were dressed the ways they were and how they were connected with the Occupy moment, resulting in a series of exchanges which would further spread awareness of the protest. And that's part of the point.

Occupy is not so much a movement, at least not as we've traditionally defined political movements, as it is a provocation. If the mainstream media has difficulty identifying its goals, it may be because its central goal is to provoke discussion, to get people talking about things which our political leadership has refused to address for several decades now -- the profound shifts in economic wealth which have created conditions of gross inequality in opportunity, the role of what Sarah Palin has called "crony capitalism" (and which is really an indication of the role of capital in shaping our political process), and especially the degree to which economic policies under both Republican and Democratic presidents have been written with more regard for Wall Street than Main Street.

The values that Occupy represents are shared by the vast majority of Americans, if recent surveys are any indication, yet they are rarely expressed by mainstream political leaders or the mass media. So, part of the point of these protests is to provide what Stephen Duncombe might call an "ethical spectacle" as a means of focusing attention. And the old women who are asking Zombies questions are part of that process, no doubt sharing what they saw with their friends back home, and thus providing yet another chance to talk about what's been going on here.

The blurring between fan and activist that I observed demonstrates a different relationship between popular culture and politics than we saw in previous protest movements. The Popular Front in the 1930s sought to influence the development of popular culture, giving rise to Aaron Copeland, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and many others, whose work shaped our current image bank of what democracy looks like. The protest movements of the 1960s sought to tap into the language of popular culture -- especially those of rock and comics -- to create an alternative culture, one which was implicitly and often explicitly critical of corporately-owned media and which sought to express the worldview of a younger generation. The protest movements of the early 1990s embraced a DIY aesthetic, giving rise to the Indie-Media movement, and helping to fuel talk of a digital revolution which might democratize access to the channels of communication.

The Occupy movement, by contrast, has lay claim to the iconography of popular culture as a set of cultural resources through which to express their collective identities and frame their critiques. Thus, we see a much more playful style of activism, one which owes much to the traditions of fan culture, one which assumes that images and stories from superhero comics or cult television series are shared by many of the participants (and will be understood by a larger public which has not yet joined the protests). So, they are dressing up, designing signs which re-ascribe meanings to familiar characters, creating their own videos, and sending them out into the world, where they will be seen by many who are not going to go to Washington Square, Los Angeles City Hall, or any other site of occupation.

This is protest media designed to spread through social networks -- one which has the homemade qualities of the DIY movements of the past (thus, as Trope and Swartz note, the cardboard signs), the high tech qualities of digital activism, and the playful engagement of fan activism, all rolled into one heady combination. These tactics are not without their contradictions -- Trope and Swartz note that the Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and now symbols of the Anonymous movement, are based on IP owned by Warner Communications who profits for everyone sold in this country.

But, it does seem to reflect the way we are conducting politics in the early 21st century. We saw some of these same images "test marketed" as it were during the pro-labor protests in Madison, as Jonathan Gray noted a while back, and we are seeing these tactics play out on an even bigger stage with Occupy.

There are many other aspects of the Occupy movement we recognize from our ongoing research. More and more contemporary political movements are decentralized, claiming loose affiliations with each other, yet playing out on very local levels, often with significant differences between the various chapters. This approach has proven highly effective for the Dream Activists, for example, where the struggle shifted from Federal to State and Local levels when Congress failed to pass the national Dream Act. These activists have tapped into social networking tools in order to be able to quickly learn from each other, allowing images, messages, and tactics to evolve rapidly. If traditional immigrant rights groups tended to observe ethnic, racial, and national boundaries, these young people have formed coalitions across different immigrant populations, and something similar is going on with Occupy, where many different ideological interests are organizing around the shared frame which Occupy offers.

These groups are refusing to create a simple unified message of the kind that are familiar from "disciplined," hierarchical, and established political movements. Rather, they seek to multiply the messages and to expand the range of different media framings so that they may speak to a broader range of different participants. No one piece of media reaches everyone; rather, media is produced quickly and cheaply and spread widely so that each piece of media produced may speak to a different set of followers.

As Sasha Costanza-Chock, a recent transplant from USC to MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, wrote in his thesis about the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Movement:

Effective transmedia organizers are shifting from speaking for movements to speaking with them. Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of movement communicators from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix and circulation of rich media texts through networked movement formations. Those movement formations that embrace the decentralization of the movement voice can reap great rewards, while those that attempt to maintain top down control of movement communication practices risk losing credibility.

Occupy, if anything, pushes tactics of transmedia mobilization even further. Refusing to anchor a singular meaning behind the movement keeps the conversations alive, allows for more people to join and help reshape the message, enables quick and tactical responses to outside challenges, and supports creative responses from all participants. As they chanted in the 1990s, this is what democracy looks like. Or as Trope and Swartz write, "The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged."

In the case of the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, there has been a move away from single issue activism to create structures that can be quickly deployed in response to a broad range of concerns and participatory structures that allow local chapters or even individual members to identify and take action around their own issues.

All of this can be confusing to media that keeps looking for the one cause, the one message, and the one spokesperson. Such efforts also compound some of the division within academic thought, since the message of Occupy seems to come from the realm of Critical Studies and Political Economy, where-as much of the tactics and imagery reflect the domains of Cultural Studies.

All of this suggests that we need to rethink the ways we've discussed the relations between politics and culture in the past. That's a central goal of the Civic Paths research group and we invite others to join us in researching not simply the Occupy movement but the ways it illustrates the nature of political engagement in a networked culture. We'd welcome hearing about what other research groups are doing to document and analyze the Occupy protests in their local areas.

Making My Peace with The Bicycle Girl: Reflections on The Walking Dead Web Series

Earlier this semester, I was asked by Scott Walker to be the guest speaker at the Los Angeles Transmedia Meetup, an event which brought together a roomful of artists and entrepreneurs who are invested in making the concept of "transmedia entertainment" into a reality. Today, I wanted to share with you the webcast version of this exchange.

If this whets your appetite for further discussions of these issues, it's not too late to register to attend the Futures of Entertainment conference being hosted by MIT on November 11-12. I will be speaking there on a panel with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, the co-authors of our forthcoming book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society, and you can find more information here.

In my opening remarks to the Transmedia group, I responded to the news that The Walking Dead was launching some webisodes in anticipation of their Second Season. My remarks were based on a news story I had seen that morning, which contained very little information about what was planned other than the news that it would center on "Bicycle Girl," a very memorable zombie character introduced in the series's opening episode. This news seemed to me a mixed blessing and as such, offered us a way to think about when and where transmedia extensions are appropriate or desirable. The discussion was a hypothetical one, a thought experiment, not intended as a criticism of the series producers, and I can now follow it up with some thoughts about the actual execution of the webisodes.

On one level, the choice of "Bicycle Girl" as the focus is inspired. The character originates in Robert Kirkman's original graphic novel and despite appearing on only a few pages, remains a "haunting" figure. She is the first zombie we really get to know as an individual when Rick exits the hospital and his decision to, in effect, commit a mercy killing on this zombie punctures any easy divide between humans and zombies. I've long wanted to know more about this character and particularly I wanted to know whether there was any previous relationship between Rick and the human who had changed into this hideous monster. Clearly the producers also were fascinated with this figure since they devoted a video segment on The Walking Dead dvd release specifically to the making of this sequence.

I would make two claims about why she was the right starting point for a web extension:

1. She is an iconic figure. She's a character we remember. Her situation speaks to the larger themes and conflicts which structure The Walking Dead as a series. Often, transmedia extensions, for budget and contract reasons, end up working with secondary characters rather than the series leads. This is fine if the secondary characters are ones we care about, if they are ones who have a compelling role to play in the series. In fact, introducing alternative points of view on the action may be one of the most valuable contributions transmedia extensions can make. A series which did this right was The Wire, where they produced only a few highly memorable and meaningful webisodes, each focused around characters and character relationships which were meaningful and memorable in the context of the original series. Too often, producers work with who-ever is available and the results seems arbitrary and disappointing.

2. The moment is one which taps what Microsoft's Geoffrey Long would call "negative space." The original moment created a gap or hole which viewers wanted to fill in. In the most generative cases, the audience taps its own "negative capability" to flesh out what must have occurred. This is one of the core processes which generate fan fiction (in its most formalized cases) or simply conversation and speculation (in more informal cases). The challenge for the producer is that when you attempt to fill in these gaps later, once fan speculations have been entrenched, you end up working against rather than with your fan base. We often call this the Boba Fett paradox in reference to a much-beloved secondary character from Star Wars, whose on-screen execution disappointed rather than rewarded a decade or more of intense fan interest. So, to use myself as an example, I very much wanted to see a story where Rick already knew the "Bicycle Girl" and was thus touched by seeing her laying there dismembered and zombified: this is why it matters that he takes the time to go back and take her out of her misery.

Why might it not be a good idea to return to the "Bicycle Girl" story? I have been finishing up an essay which explores the ways that The Walking Dead is and is not "faithful" to the original comic book series. In doing so, I argue that fans are ready to accept expansions and elaborations, even major changes in the continuity (especially those which allow them to explore other aspects of the character conflicts) as long as they are consistent with "the rules" (to borrow from Scream) which were established by Robert Kirkman. In this case, the "rules" are explicit; they emerged over time as Kirkman engaged with his fans through the letter column in the back of the comic.

One of the core rules which Kirkman established was that we would never be given an explanation for why there are zombies and we are never going to go back and fill in the first 20 days of the zombie apocalypse. Here's one of the many times that Kirkman has explained his rationale:

As far as the explanation for the zombies go, I think that aside from the zombies being in the book, this is a fairly realistic story, and that's what makes it work. The people do real things, and it's all very down to Earth...almost normal. ANY explanation would be borderline science fiction....and it would disrupt the normalness. In my mind, the story has moved on. I'm more interested in what happens next then what happened before that caused it all.

Some in the original audience for my remarks assumed I was saying that there was a hole in Kirkman's construction that he was seeking to work around. I don't think so. I think this goes to what I call the active production of belief. I never much liked the phrase the suspension of disbelief, which seems to me far too passive to explain what happens when we consume a fiction. For me, belief is something that is achieved (not something simply accepted) and it is achieved through choices made both by the storyteller and the listener.

In this case, Kirkman's impulses as a storyteller is that any explanation for the zombies would damage the credibility of the fiction he was constructing. This is not a problem with his story: it's a challenge in working with the zombie genre more generally, one all storytellers run up against, and especially a challenge of a version which strives for emotional realism in the ways Kirkman did. Given this particular "rule," which we might see as an informal contract between the producers and consumers, fans were understandably upset when the final episodes of last season took us to the Center for Disease Control and threatened to provide a "rational explanation" for the zombie attacks -- one grounded in the idea of contagion and epidemic. So, I was also defensive at the thought of telling the "Bicycle Girl" story which would mean going back to a time prior to Rick's awakening and thus increase the likelihood of the producer's trying to explain why there are zombies.

As it turned out, I should not have worried. The producers of "Torn Apart" (as the Bicycle Girl webisode is called) were well aware of audience expectations around this issue and as a consequence, they take steps to avoid giving us anything substantive which might explain the outbreak. We get one dubious theory from a somewhat crazed neighbor that the zombie attacks might have been caused by "terrorists." We get a few snippets of news coverage before the power grid goes down and all communication gets cut off. We get the suggestions that whatever happened occurred very swiftly, allowing no time for people to prepare, and catching most of the population off-guard. None of this breaks the underlying logic of the "rule" even if it may push up against the letter.

I spent a class session in my Transmedia Storytelling seminar walking episode through episode through "Torn Apart". The initial response was that the quality was not as high as was routinely achieved on the television series: the acting was more heavy handed, the scripting and camera work more obvious in calling out certain key plot points, and there was less time to fully explore the emotional consequences of certain moments of intensified drama. As we talked as a class, though, we came to a deeper understanding of how these aspects of amplification and simplification emerged from the specifics of production for the web. There were production constraints, in terms of budget and time, which made it hard to achieve the same quality in the web productions as could be achieved on the show itself, and this becomes an issue when what happens on the web is intended to be read as "part" of the television series, a problem which transmedia producers of all kinds will need to address. We discussed the similarities and differences from how these problems are confronted by student filmmakers (at USC film school and elsewhere) and exploitation filmmakers, both of whom dealt with limited time and money, and worked within short form as opposed to long form storytelling. And we discussed the very different interpretive frames consumers bring to such work, excusing imperfections in favor of ambitions in both cases, because we understand the constraints on what could be done.

A second discussion centered around the compression which occurs here. The more closely we looked at the construction of this web series, the more impressed we were by how tightly integrated the details were. Every line, every plot point connected to something else, so that by the end, this was a very classically constructed story with many intensely melodramatic moments and with no loose ends. There are choices here the class debated, such as the decision to recenter or decenter key aspects of this story from the "Bicycle Girl" onto her ex-husband or other members of her family, or the relative arbitrariness of how the "Bicycle Girl" becomes a zombie, despite the elaborate back story with which we were presented (and whether this was consistent with the sense that anything could happen at any time that is part of the logic of The Walking Dead series as a whole.)

The short length of these segments seems to suggest a prevailing industry logic that people only want to watch things on the web which are less than five minutes long (shorter depending on which web expert you talk with) but we can start to question this logic when more and more of us are watching full episodes or feature length movies on our computers through Hulu and iTunes. In the class setting, it quickly became tiresome to have to wade through a pre-roll commercial and credits before getting into the next chunk of the story, and in this case, all of the episodes were released on the same day which means that the serial process was perhaps wasted on this content. That said, part of what we were trying to discuss in class was the twin logics of seriality, which depend on chunking (the creation of meaningful bits which cohere in any given chapter) and dispersal (the shifting of interests and attention onto what is coming next through cliff-hangers and enigmas, both of which are well illustrated in the construction of this particular series).

Some of the more interesting discussion centered around the placement of this episode in the overall flow of The Walking Dead series -- as a bridge between the first and second series. I often hear people talk about the nonlinear quality of transmedia, saying that the parts can be consumed in any order. This is technically true in the same sense that we can read any chapter in a book in any order we want, but we often choose to read the book in a desired sequence. Or we can read any book in a series we want, but again, most readers choose to follow the author's preferred order. Transmedia (at least as Hollywood currently practices it) has to be designed so that any given extension can function as a point of entry into the series and so that only the "mothership" is essential to the experience, but that does not mean that there is not considerable thought put into the timing with which different extensions are introduced into the franchise.

In this case, there is a conscious decision to create something which refers back to the very first episode of The Walking Dead rather than following on from the end of season one, especially in the context of a series which has been sparing with flashbacks and which tends to have a strong forward momentum. We also felt that the focus here on children at risk connected very strongly to the core themes which surfaced in the opening episode of the second season, with certain moments in the webisode having direct parallels in the television episode many of us would watch shortly after.

Beyond this, there is a nice balance in the webisodes between relying on information hardcore fans have acquired through watching the series (such as what happened in Atlanta or what they know at CDC, both plot points here which were already answered in the series) and creating something which could be an "attractor," a point of entry for first time viewers which might draw them into watching the series itself.

There is a lot more that transmedia producers and consumers can learn from looking closely at this example: indeed, my hope is that we can move the conversation about transmedia from broad definitional debates to this kind of close reading, which helps us to learn what works and what doesn't in the current work being done in this space.