More on Virginia Tech and Media Spectacle

Thanks to Ryan Thompson for calling my attention to an Open Source podcast devoted to some of the issues I raised in my post below. The show, according to the website, is devoted to exploring the following questions: "Is there anything to learn about the way we use new technologies in this first mass-murder made, as it were, for YouTube? Are mashups and tributes a form of digital catharsis, a sort of artistic safety valve? Is there a cross-over point where they become pure exploitation, or worse? And what, exactly, is new here? Besides the zeros and the ones, and the ease of dissemination and reconfiguration, is there a difference between a 19th-century suicide note and a 21st-century QuickTime movie?"

Virginia Tech and the Production of Media Spectacle

While you’ve been working on your presentations and papers I’ve been preoccupying myself with following the media and internet coverage of the killings at Virginia Tech, perusing some of the blogs and websites that have become important for us over the course of the semester, thinking some about where the study of networked public culture fits within the wider framework of cultural studies, and what the impact of the developments we’ve been studying will be on academia in general.

Regarding the Virginia Tech horrors, a couple of things. I don’t know about you, but I found myself immediately upset about NBC’s decision to publish the pictures and video they got from Seung-Hui Cho. I suppose this is marginal to our course focus and is more of a journalism, main-stream media issue, but it seemed to me the decision to publish this material was wrong on a couple of counts. First of all, the network became complicit in the killer’s desire to seek publicity, and secondly they circulated material that had to be traumatic to a large number of people in grief who were struggling to come to terms with mayhem and death in their lives—not just the direct victims and their families but all of us subjected to the slaughter. I suppose they weighed the “newsworthiness” of the material against all this and figured the one trumped the other. It struck me a bit too much as cashing in and not terribly ethical.

Thinking more dispassionately about what this incident tells us about contemporary visual culture, I suppose we have to consider how, on the one hand the communicative technology available to people about to commit a crime like Seung-Hui Cho’s may shape criminal acts in the 21st century, and how the images they produce to frame their crimes will enter public culture in multimedia fashion. It seems as if the committing of a crime may now become a media production and take upon itself all of the aspects of spectacle, but a spectacle produced by the criminal rather than just by the media. This gets back, I suppose, to the whole idea of complicity, that is, what is the extent to which the media becomes complicit in the criminal’s production of spectacle by broadcasting their show? It’s easy to just say, “well, pictures like these will just get out anyway, so why not present them in a controlled and civil way,” but I don’t know. I would have sent the whole package to the police and that would have been that. There’s some connection, it seems to me, between the publication of these pictures and those from the Abu Ghraib prison (at least in terms of the kind of visual cultural event they produced) but I want to take more time to think about that.

Another interesting story coming out of this nightmare can be found in the New York Times article by Noah Cohen about how Wikipedia contributors created “an essential news source” for the events unfolding at Virginia Tech. The “Virginia Tech Massacre” entry at Wikipedia was apparently produced by over 2,000 “reporters” cobbling together an impressive report on what happened. I recommend the article for the perspective it gives on how Wikipedia, or for that matter, the wiki format in general, can be harnessed as a site for open source reporting. This happened to a degree during the Katrina disaster at, of all places, Craigslist, but what the folks at Wikipedia produced is a big leap forward. More and more we may find Wikipedia having value as a source for (flawed, inaccurate?) news as well as for (flawed, inaccurate) historical information.

When You Need a Break from Writing Your Paper

When you need a break from writing your papers you might relax by watching cheddar cheese age at Cheddarvision.tv. Today's New York Times reports that Tom Calver, a cheese maker in England, has installed a web cam above a 44 pound hunk of aging cheese and become an instant media sensation. When you tire of watching the cheese age you can participate in the site's online forum, visit the cheese's MySpace page, and go to YouTube for a 3-month time lapse version of the video. I'm not kidding. Networked Public Cheese Making has finally arrived.

Fan & Slash Fiction

Following are some questions to consider for tomorrow night's discussion. As always, feel free to comment ahead of time or post your own questions.

Historicizing fan/slash fiction. In her essay, “Fan Fiction in a Literary Context,” Sheenagh Pugh insists on seeing fan fiction as part of a long process of borrowing and recycling in the historical production of literature. We find the same approach to historicizing fan fiction in the Wikipedia article on fan fiction. To what extent is this a valid or useful way to contextualize fan fiction, and what general issues about authorship and literary production get raised in such an approach? How does the notion of authorship that emerges here tend to coincide with poststructuralist discussions of the author (or the author function) like those in Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” or Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” Here we can also reference Jonathan Lethem’s recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “The Ecstasy of Influence.”

Fan fiction as critical commentary. Where Pugh approaches fan fiction in terms of its relationship to general literary production, Jenkins insists that fan fiction is fundamentally a form of critical commentary, that it’s related to literary interpretation and analysis. How valid do you find this argument? How does it work as a general argument, and as a legal one (in terms of how he links it to his position on “fair use”)? His discussion of fan fiction as critical commentary also deals with the relationship between fan fiction and the marketplace. What role does this discussion play in his overall argument?

Fan fiction as “Erotic Criticism.” In the last section of his essay, Jenkins cites “erotic” fan fiction as a specific example of how fan fiction performs a critical function by “providing a critique of the constructions of gender and sexuality found in the original works.” This is largely the subject Sharon Cumberland takes up in her essay, “Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture.” How clear a picture does she give us of how fan/slash fiction operates as a space for (apparently mostly women) writers to “express desire in ways that have been socially prohibited in the past” (p. 2, top)? See the quote at the end of the first section in which she writes that her “thesis is that the paradox of public access and private/anonymous identity has made it possible for women who have access to the internet to create permissive and transgressive spaces which have been, in the past, the traditional reserve of men’s magazines and men’s clubs,” something that allows “women to appropriate power over their own imaginations and bodies.” Can all this really come from writing fantasies about the sex life of Zorro as portrayed by Antonio Banderas?

Fan fiction as social networking. Another important part of Cumberland’s essay is her focus on how the combination of anonymity and public access online constructs communities of women whose particular interests “migrate” to other forms of contact (p. 1). She calls this a “displacement of affection” (p. 1). We’ll want to explore the connection between this kind of social networking and her insistence that women writing fan fiction “use cyberspace . . . to express desire in ways that have been socially prohibited in the past, and which continue to be publicly and generally taboo for women in our society” (pp. 2-3).

Fan fiction comes out of the closet. Finally, Melinda Lo’s article, while it presents an introduction to fan and slash fiction, and deals with some of the issues Cumberland raises, is most interesting for her observation that Jenkins’ “utopic” vision of fan fiction has been “complicated by an increasing convergence between mainstream or legitimate cultural producers . . . and grassroots fan-based creations including fan fiction and fan-made films” (p. 2). The (apparently defunct) “L Word” project stands as an example here. This gets us back to the whole question of the tension between bottom-up and top-down production on the internet (for more on this, see the post below this one). Lo discusses this trend on pp. 5-6, and we’ll want to talk a little bit about where it might be heading.

MySpace as a Marketing Tool (and More)

We've talked a lot over the course of the semester about the extent to which networked culture is being produced from the bottom up or manipulated from the top down, and how this tension in cultural production online will play out. This came up last week in our discussion of YouTube, which is struggling to balance user-generated content with commercial video sometimes used to market movies. We're also used to the idea that social networking sites like MySpace are now routinely used to market bands, singers, TV show, and movies. There's an article about this in today's New York Times entitled A Fictional Video on MySpace Puts a TV Show's Promotion Into Hyperspace. It's about yet another TV show that has created a MySpace site to pump up its viewership. But it adds a new wrinkle, reporting on how the show, "How I Met Your Mother," is actually moving to produce scenes for the show too racy for TV broadcast that will be posted for viewers to see on the show's MySpace site. The show's producer is quoted as saying that "we'd like to get to the point where people will know that if they hear in the naration, 'but I can't tell you that part of the story,' then they'll know they should go looking for it online." So we've got another kind of convergence apparently going on here, one in which content produced for TV and content produced for online consumption are going to become interactive. Stay tuned.

Sopranos Mashup on YouTube

Virginia Heffernan, the TV critic for THE NEW YORK TIMES, has an interesting piece in today's paper about the video, "Seven Minute Sopranos," which you can view below. The video, as you can imagine from the title, reviews the entire set of episodes in seven minutes using video clips from the shows and a voice-over narration by the creators (Paul Gulyas and Joe Sabia). Heffernan reports that, unlike Viacom, the people at HBO, and the show's creator, David Chase, seem delighted with the video and the free publicity it provides for the new season, starting Sunday. No copyright problems here. Heffernan provides background on how the video was produced and devleops a nice technical/critical analysis of the video. She insists it isn't "sycophantic." "The more you study 'Seven Minute Sopranos,' the more mischievous it seems. It’s an intensive work of the imagination." Where David Chase seems to be taking the video as a kind of homage, Heffernan suggests it may in fact be a critical send-up of the show. In this sense the video may be functioning much like Henry Jenkins insists fan fiction functions, as a form of "critical commentary" on the original.

Seven Minute Sopranos

The video discussed by Virginia Heffernan in today's NEW YORK TIMES

Digital Humanities Quarterly

Steve Jones has just called my attention to an interesting new digital academic journal aimed at the humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly is, to quote the editors, an "open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities." It is commited to:

Experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
Co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print Digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
Using open standards to deliver journal content
Developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly International character of ADHO

They plan on publishing a wide range of peer-reviewed materials, including:

Scholarly articles
Editorials and provocative opinion pieces
Experiments in interactive media
Reviews of books, web sites, new media art installations, digital humanities systems and tools
A blog with guest commentators

Thanks to Steve Jones for bringing this to our attention.

Some Transitional Thoughts on the Future of the Book

One thing I’ve been thinking we should to talk about tomorrow night is how – and why – we ought to incorporate the study of “networked public culture” (especially its traffic in images and video, our current emphasis) into cultural studies as it’s traditionally conceived. This sent me back to During’s Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction because I wanted to review the section on “The Internet and Technoculture” (pp. 136-142). The first thing that struck me, of course, is how dated the discussion is. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that when the book was published in 2005 this section was dead on arrival. It contains a short paragraph on blogging, but there is nothing on social networking sites, YouTube, Flickr, or most of the issues we’ve found ourselves grappling with in this course. Grant it, these all kicked in after the book was finished, but that simply makes my point about how limited the book is as a format for scholarship on contemporary culture.

Of course this underscores one of the problems about the book or monograph we discussed last week, that in an age when electronic communication makes it so easy to disseminate research and publish our scholarship quickly the book is beginning to increasingly look like a stage coach in the age of jet travel. It seems to me this is unavoidably true for the field we’re calling “networked culture.” By its very nature this culture is changing so quickly that there is no way to write about it in book form. By the time the book came out, it would be irrelevant. The topic requires electronic publication along the lines of the Networked Public book or Gamer Theory. A book like During’s then, while it can prove valuable as a history of past practices, may be an increasingly useless vehicle for talking about vast swaths of contemporary culture and cultural theory.

One could argue that the other book we read, Convergence Culture, is in fact more timely and suggests the format of the printed book may still have some relevance. But the Jenkins book is dated, too, especially in terms of the T.V. shows and movies it discusses. I think his blog is the place to go for his best work, but then he’s got the credentials necessary to make his blog important. There’s a lesson here, perhaps, about where we might be headed in the profession of literary and cultural studies, at least for the time being as we transition: you establish yourself first through the conventional route of conference papers, published essays, and a book or two, but then when you get acknowledged prominence in your field you can move to a blog. This is what Jenkins has done, and what Michael Berube did (though he got exhausted and shut his blog down a few months ago). A Shakespeare blog run by Stephen Greenblatt or a Milton blog run by Stanley Fish, or one on the performance of gender run by Judith Butler, or Chicana/o studies by Maria Herrera-Sobek, these would all get immediate attention and become a conduit for the quick (i.e. instantaneous) dissemination of ideas. I know, this structure sounds elitist, based more on the power of reputation, perhaps, than the power (and freshness) of ideas, but I throw it out for you to kick around. Perhaps we’d be better off the other way around, with young scholars like yourselves free to publish their own ideas in blog or networked format (peer reviewed or otherwise) with an understanding that this is where the real action is taking place, where you’ll get attention, discussion, criticism, and some traction with having your ideas beginning to influence people in your field (quickly). But my main point is that as I look back at During’s section on “Technoculture” (the very title is passé, of course) it seems to me the field of contemporary cultural studies, like the field of media studies, may soon need to leave the format of the book behind.

Next Week on Networked Images

For next week's discussion I think we can concentrate our attention on the social networking of the still and video image on two sites, Flickr and YouTube. For Flickr, the Open Source podcast discussion will be central, so please give it a close listen and spend some time at Flickr (if you have the time and inclination to dig deeper, check out the comments posted on the Photography 2.0 podcast site as well). I’m particularly interested in the social/intellectual networking that develops there around groups. Try joining a few and look at the discussions as well as some of the posted images. For example, I’ve joined and am going to try to monitor the following groups (click on links to access groups):

Hardcore Street Photography
Barcelona Street Art
Graffiti Archaeology
Art & Theory Nobs
Aesthetics of Failure
Vanishing Beauty
Baudrillard's Way

There have been lots of developments at YouTube over the last few weeks. In addition to the assigned articles from the syllabus for this week, you should also take a look at a couple of articles on the recent suit Viacom has filed against YouTube: "Talking Business: Awaiting a Compromise on YouTube" (posted in syllabus material for this week), and "Viacom's Full-Court Press for Online Ads," both at The New York Times. In light of these developments, we'll want to specualte about where YouTube is headed (Is the heyday of video free-for-all over? Is the site going to be commodified and appropriated by traditionally dominant mega-entertainment groups?). See also "News Corp. and NBC in Web Deal" for another dimension of potential changes. You might also take a look at how MTV is contemplating the social-networking of TV shows as described in this article (sound interesting, or a total waste of time?).

Then, of course, there's the appearance of Apple TV, which is linked to iTunes. For an overview of this potentially revolutionary (or not?) device, see David Pogue's overview of how it works and what it might do.

All of this, plus some discussion of the videos we can find on the sites linked to the menu on the right, "Online Video Links," ought to keep us plenty busy.

ALERT ON INTERNET RADIO: On a totally unrelated note I want to sing the praises of Pandora Internet Radio. This site allows you to custom build as many radio stations as you like utilizing the Music Genome Project. You create a station by "seeding it" with some music you like and then it sets about "learning" more music that goes with it. The radio plays in the background on your computer, but if you plug your computer into a speaker system it plays through your stereo. I've been editing my Tex/Mex station while writing this blog entry. Talk about multi-tasking. And you can share your stations with others. Let me know if you want me to send one your way.

MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion

As a follow-up to last night's discussion about the future role digital and multimedia publication might play in our profession, I want to call your attention to the new MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure. The Executive Summary report is troubled by "the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format." The Executive Summary goes on to recommend that "the profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios," and, "Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship." Those writing the report clearly understand that the age of networked scholarship is upon us, and they are troubled by the inattention of most departments to the changes we've been discussing, and the fact that our profession has yet to start sorting out how to "count" digital publication. The full report is available on the MLA website

Networked Publics Book Introduction

Mimi Ito has just posted a draft of the Introduction to the Networked Publics book we read earlier in the semester (i.e. the "Place," "Culture" and "Politics" essays). You can download it in .pdf format at her website.

Networked Scholarship and the Social Life of Books

I don't know about you, but I’ve found the readings for Tuesday night to be particularly exciting. Of all the material we’ve studied so far, this bundle of articles and essays deals most specifically with the impact of networked public culture on the academic world in which we live and work. The transformations in the production, review, distribution and consumption of academic scholarship envisioned in these articles is rather breathtaking, but at the same time they raise a set of vexing issues and sometimes traffic in rather questionable assumptions. Following are a set of questions meant to focus our discussion both on the exciting possibilities conjured up in these essays and some of the key issues they confront us with.

The first few articles I asked you to read provide background reporting on the work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Some of this reading you’ve no doubt found repetitive, but it seems to me each short article contributes something interesting to the overall discussion, and, collectively, the articles provide us with a good sense of what the folks at the Institute are up to. The other articles focus more on a set of specific projects that try to make some of the general concepts concrete. These will be worth some particular attention. Here’s a list of questions or topics from the articles I think are worth our kicking around.

As always, feel free to start off the discussion with a posted comment ahead of our meeting.

From “The Future of Books”:

Is the book a “timeless piece of hardware” or a “device in need of regular upgrading” (and how comfortable are we with talking about books as “hardware” and “devices”)?

How attractive are “print-on-demand” machines like the “Espresso Book Machine” or Caravan Books? Are public access Napster or iTunes-like vendors the future of publishing?

What does it mean to talk about “the social life of books?” Is this a new way of thinking about books, or a way to adapt an old concept to new technologies? How socially networked do you want your books in general, and your academic books/articles in particular?

From “The Networked Book”:

This article shifts our attention from the problem of reading on screen to the advantages and pitfalls of “networked reading.” How important is this shift in focus? How interested are you in networked reading? Do you see it as something new, or as an extension of how we already read?

Vershbow (p.2) points out that when books are produced in networked social spaces “one notion that networked writers might have to give up is closure.” What does it mean to think of writing, peer-review, and publication as a single, fluid, open-ended, indeed, possibly never-ending process? Consider the following quote from p. 3 of “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”: “What a revolutionary idea! A page or some other portion of a book is not complete unless the reader has commented on it. That means the author’s job is not only to write the book, but to engage the reader so completely that he or she joins the discussion. The reader is no longer anonymous and passive, but must step up and be counted, and the author has not successfully fulfilled his or her role unless that happens?” My question: why is this so cool?

From “The Social Life of Books”:

This article envisions the convergence of three technologies transforming the production of the book: scanning, searching, and open source wikis (p.2). Instead of thinking about Wikipedia, as we did last week, as a search tool, these people are thinking about Wikipedia as the model for a networked book. What are the possibilities and the problems here? How much sense does it make to even think about such productions as “books?” On this topic see also p. 3 of “Book 2.0.”

To what extent can the blog stand as an alternative to article and book publication (p.2, and this comes up in other articles as well)?

In the interview, Vershbow continually invokes environmental metaphors (“ecology,” “ecosystem,” “environmental,” etc.) in discussing open-source networked places. How applicable are these metaphors and how do they relate to our earlier discussion of the internet as a “place?”

Vershbow ends the discussion speculating about what kinds of books lend themselves to born-digital, networked status (“I am pretty certain,” he says, that “the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media”). Where do the humanities seem to fit in this shift? This question of course comes up in a number of the assigned pieces: to what extend does networked scholarship lend itself more to scientific than humanistic work? See, for example, p. 6 in “Book 2.0.”


From “Book 2.0”:

We should consider the questions raised by Ken Wissoker from Duke UP and others quoted on p. 7 who defend the current system. Do they make some good points, or are they just resisting the inevitable?


From “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”:

A major issue running through many of these articles has to do with the role, shape, and future of peer review in an age of networked scholarship. This gets raised in the section here entitled “Peer Review on Steroids” (5-8) and is picked up in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” as well as in “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press” and “Rethinking Scholarly Publication.” How central is peer review to the work we do, and what do you think of the ways in which the authors of these articles try to re-envision and transform the process of peer review?

“On the Importance of the Collective in Electronic Publishing,” “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press,” and "Rethinking Scholarly Communication":

It seems to me that these three articles are worth particular attention because they’re about concrete projects aimed at transforming academic publication in a networked environment. Three of these are by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (and English Professor), and two of them have to do with the symposium on forming an electronic academic press held in April, 2006. These are worth some detailed discussion. The proposals for networked publishing in the essay "Rethinking Scholarly Communication” seem to pertain mainly to writing and publishing networked scientific scholarship, but we should be able to discuss how this apparatus can be adapted for the humanities.

Cathy Davidson on Wikipedia

As a follow-up to last night's discussion of Wikipedia you might want to take a look at Cathy Davidson's short and positive piece about Wikipedia published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's called "We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" (Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20). She compares the accuracy level of Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias (and even scholarly books and articles), and points out that unlike print media, Wikipedia articles can be very quickly corrected. But beyond this, she insists we not think of Wikipedia as an "encyclopedia" at all: "Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students?" She goes on to insist that rather than ban Wikipedia from college campuses (as was recently done at Middlebury College) we ought to "make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses." She argues that "instead of resorting to the 'Delete' button for new forms of collaborative knowledge made possible by the Internet" we ought to "make the practice of research in the digital age the object of study." Provocative stuff from an important American Studies critic at Duke University.

Hillary '1984'

In case you haven't seen it, here's the Apple/Hillary mashup video that's the YouTube scandal du jour. It ends with an obama.com reference, but his campaign has denied producing it.

Tomorrow Night on "Digital Textuality"

For the next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing digital textuality. This week’s readings are pretty general, focusing on some key projects of public interest involving the Google Print Project, online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and the newer Scholarpedia and Citizendium, and the digitalization of the OED. Next week we’ll be focusing more specifically on the impact of digital textuality on academic writing and publishing, exploring the future of the book and of the academic journal. I’ve added a bundle of links to key sites we’ll be discussing (see “Digital Textuality” in the right-hand menu). I’m trying to get a guest to join us for part of the evening, a good friend who is the editor of a major academic journal who can share with us some of her concerns about their digitalization.

Tomorrow night I’d like us to think about the future of online research in light of the developments discussed in the articles we’ve read. What does the Google Print project as discussed by Kevin Kelly suggest about the future of reading, research, and studies in the humanities? What are the possibilities—and the drawbacks—you see in the world of scanned and connected texts he conjures up? Let’s assume those guys in China succeed in scanning every printed text. Can literary studies then proceed without books? Will the “democratic” accessibility of every text outweigh the loss of the printed book? What are the practical, legal, and economic issues that have to be dealt with here? And what about what Kelly calls “the real magic” that will occur when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before” (pp. 3-4)? In what ways can you imagine this will transform the kind of research we do? How will that research adjust to the world of links and tags Kelly discusses (4-5)? If he’s right that someday books, and the words in them, will be deeply linked, so you can click on titles in bibliographies or footnotes to access the actual book or article that’s cited, where will the primary text leave off and the secondary text begin? Are we looking at another form of convergence in which the text and its criticism become a single, fluid, ever expanding entity? If books become “liquid” (p.5) in the way Kelly envisions what are the various academic applications you can imagine? And finally, what are the implications for academic work of the shift from the “hegemony of the copy” (p.6) which we might link to Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, to the “value” of recall, annotation, personalization, editing, authenticating, display, marking, transferring, etc. Kelly associates with the post-copy age of links and tags (p.11, bottom)? Will search “change everything,” as he suggests in the final section, and if so, how?

Perhaps the scanning and linking of all books will create a virtual world that replaces the library, but for now we also need to think about the impact of wikis on research, so we’ll want to discuss a range of issues that come up in the articles on Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Citizendium (again, see the links to these sites on the blog). As teachers and researchers, how do we deal with Wikipedia? Are the more “scholarly,” “refereed” sites like Scholarpedia and Citizendium promising, or do you agree with the argument that they buy into elitism and spoil the “democratic” open-source nature of wikis? How can sites like Wikipedia sustain their open-source orientation and still be “reliable,” or is reliability here freighted with assumptions we ought to interrogate? You might check out this blog entry by Danah Boyd about Wikipedia. She’s always provocative. And finally, what’s to stop groups of scholars from creating their own, specialized wikis run by sets of scholar-constables?

Digital Video: "www.movies.now"

Just back from Barcelona and playing radical catch-up, but I see that Sunday's New York Times has a set of timely articles on the digital reproduction and distribution of films we'll certainly want to incorporate down the road in our unit on digital video. Reading them over quickly, I see that what's going on here in the world of video parallels a number of developments discussed in the digital textuality material we'll be discussing tomorrow night. A.O. Scott's article, "The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse," for example, envisions a world in which every film, like every text, is always available 24/7 for viewing, distribution, mashing-up, etc. What he envisions is something like the Google print project applied to film, but he also discusses how the online distribution of film is going to make a lot more so-called "obscure" films available for viewing.

Manohla Dargis, in "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You're Patient)", also discusses the emerging possibilities for the online distribution of independent films (once hardware and bandwith problems are solved). She talks about her experiences downloading some films and provides links to a number of emerging cinema sites (as does a third, companion article, "Little Films on Little Screens (But Both Seem Set to Grow"). She celebrates the portability digital technology provides (you can watch downloaded films on your laptop, desktop, phone, i-pod, etc.) and doesn't waste much time on nostalgia for the "big screen." There's a parallel here with the articles about digital textuality, of course, where die-hards worry about the fate of the book. Will people really read texts that aren't in book form? Will people really watch films that aren't on a big screen at the multiplex? How much pull will the old delivery systems have, or will portability trump our ingrained viewing/reading habits?

YouTube and Professional Sports Programming

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins continually returns to the question of whether or not sites like YouTube will be able to remain driven by users or will get cannibalized by big corporations who want to appropriate the site for their own uses. Evidence of the delicate dance going on between YouTube and these corporations can be found in today's New York Times article, in the sports section, about the creation of an NBA channel on YouTube. The article reports that

"The deal creates an N.B.A. channel on YouTube (a tunnel through which the league will send authorized video); sanctions fans’ uploads (while still allowing the league to reject those it wants removed); and lets users post videos that show their best moves, which will be compiled into a weekly top 10 and shown on the channel."

Note how this deal ivolves a trade-off on all sides: YouTube gets the prestige of an "NBA channel," fans get to post their own videos, but the league can regulate the content. Lose, lose, or win, win?

Discussion Questions for Jenkins, Chapters 1-3

Collectively, these chapters extend discussion of the transformation of the relationship between production, consumption, and distribution in networked public culture we encountered in the readings from last week. Perhaps the best metaphor for all of this is Pierre Levy’s metaphor of the “circuit” as outlined by Jenkins (95). According to Jenkins, Levy believes the “’distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend’” to form a “circuit” of “expression.” In TV shows like Survivor and American Idol the circuit is formed by knowledge communities that track and influence the production and consumption of shows like Survivor, and by voting that actually determines the narrative shape of American Idol. The chapter about The Matrix has more to do with the emergence of transmedia storytelling and the franchising of narrative across various media platforms. Here the circuit is between multiple, coordinated authors, on the one hand, and the participation of knowledge communities in what we might call fan culture. The underlying question in these chapters, it seems to me, has to do with what shape drama and narrative will take in a networked world in which production, consumption, and distribution become almost indistinguishable, and in which participation from the bottom up collides with the power of brands and franchises to exert power from the top down.

Some questions to think about for tomorrow night (as usual, feel free to comment on this blog ahead of time):

1. On p. 28 Jenkins references Michael Trossett on the concept of “narrative pleasure.” Is spoiling a form of narrative pleasure for spoilers, or is it aimed at ruining narrative pleasure? How much ambivalence is built into the whole business of spoiling (on both the part of the spoilers and the networks who try to manipulate them)? Is spoiling an adversarial activity or a form of participation in the show? Perhaps we can connect this discussion of narrative pleasure to the discussion of narrative in the chapter on The Matrix.

2. To what extent do the Survivor spoilers, in terms of their embodiment of “collective intelligence” and “knowledge communities” (27) constitute subcultures or undergrounds in terms of our discussion from last time? What do their activities, and the way they’re used by the network, suggest about the fate of networked culture as a location for underground or subversive activity? On p. 64 Jenkins claims that American Idol presents us with a “fantasy of empowerment” based on the idea you get to decide who wins. To what extent is our sense of empowerment in networked culture a fantasy?

3. Both Survivor and American Idol are examples of so-called “reality television.” What is reality television and how do you account for its emergence and popularity? What social, cultural, and political changes help explain its emergence? How is the interactive element of these “reality” shows connected, if at all, to interactive cultural experiences online?

4. Jenkins presents The Matrix as a transmedia form of “storytelling” and as a “franchise.” What is “transmedia story telling” and what does it mean to call it a “franchise” and its various elements “products?” (See pp. 94-6). Does transmedia storytelling further the commodification of art? Are we moving into an age of franchised narrative in which narrative pleasure is inextricably connected to marketing?

5. On p. 96 Jenkins draws an implicit distinction between our fascination with how The Matrix (and, by extension, the other shows he’s discussed) operates technically and culturally, and whether it’s “any good” in aesthetic terms. This opens up a whole can of worms worth discussing, i.e. do interactive, networked, transmedia forms of narrative have aesthetic merit, or is this the right question to be asking. Does the shift toward interactivity, knowledge communities, and collaboration represent the development of new and more compelling narrative forms, or the dumbing down of those forms for the sake of interactivity? Will we soon be able to speak of the “narrative industry” as Horkheimer and Adorno could speak of the culture industry? For more on the topic of narrative see in particular pp. 118-19. Where is narrative headed, according to Jenkins?

From Networks to Networks: MTV in the Age of YouTube

Networks used to be built, owned, and controlled by media conglomerates and were synonymous with single brands: ABC, NBC, CBS, then later, PBS, MTV, HBO and Showtime. These networks produced shows and viewers consumed them. It was really as simple as that. Some, like Nickelodeon and MTV, became branded as networks appealing to a particular demographic. In the 80s and early 90s, for example, Nickelodeon was the primary single destination for kids, as MTV was for teenagers.

All this has changed with the rise of networked culture. In the world of networked culture networks aren’t built and owned by mega corporations but are developed by tech savvy young people like those who started MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, networks that aren’t commercial but social. And the network doesn’t just consist of one of these sites but is made up of all of them. We put together our own networks on sites like Facebook and through the browser bookmarks we collect. When I look at the tabs running along the top of my browser I see “My Sites” which contains all of the sites I’ve created and those I subscribe to (from Blogspot to Netflix to Flickr and YouTube). I see a “News” tab, a “Shop” tab, an “Entertainment” tab, a “Travel” tab, a “Politics” tab, a “Blogs” tab, and so on. These tabs, collectively, constitute my network. It’s a network I’ve constructed and control. It connects me to other users who share my interests and keeps me up-to-date and entertained in the ways I want.

This transformation from a world of corporate networks to user networks is characteristic of the world of convergence Henry Jenkins writes about in Convergence Culture. The nature of the changes he’s writing about are dramatized in an article in today’s business section of New York Times about how, in a multi-device, multi-platform, multi-channel world of online convergence 16-year olds have stopped flocking to the MTV network and have started building and programming their own networks. As a result, the article reports, MTV “has suffered a decline in ratings and cultural cachet.” MTV was a brand with an edge until “competition for its core demographic started coming from all fronts, from video games and social-networking Web sites to amateur clips on YouTube.” Now “consumers come up with their own reality narratives” and have, in effect, taken over the means of production. And the old networks are struggling to respond along the lines outlined by Jenkins. The article quotes Christina Norman, MTV’s president, as saying that “It’s true that our viewers are telling us that they want an experience beyond linear television . . . MTV has a history surrounding the consumer with both long-form and interstitial content, and I think we can deliver on a two-way relationship with our audience.”

How far behind the times can you get? As Jenkins makes clear, shows like “Survivor” and “American Idol” have been delivering on this two-way relationship for a long time, and one wonders why it took MTV so long to figure out it had to catch up. Interactive programming is clearly the wave of the future for television, but is it a future already killed off by online networks? Check out the article.

More on Obama and Facebook

Today's Washington Post contains an article on the proliferation of Facebook pages dedicated to mobilizing support for Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. The article exemplifies some of the possibilities discussed in the "Networked Democracy" essay we read. There is also some discussion of what I think is the more interesting story, the appropriation by Obama's site of the MySpace/Facebook social networking format. It remains to be seen whether this device will translate into something that really propels his candidacy, but it's certainly something worth keeping an eye on.

MySpace and Identity Production

Dana Boyd has what looks like an interesting essay on how MySpace functions as a site for identity formation. Boyd is an interesting digital culture critic. I heard her on a program on Open Source a few months ago. If you want to check out her work take a look at her extensive writings on her blog, apophenia. She has a Best of Apophenia page that collects her writing under a set of pretty interesting subject headings. Worth a look.

Networked Publics Conclusion Now Online

Kazys Varnelis, one of the co-authors of the essay "Networked Place," has published a concluding chapter to the Networked Publics book. You can find it on his website, which is full of interesting essays, including one about the Prada store in Los Angeles. I haven't read either of these pieces yet but will try to do so during the break.

A Few Questions for Tuesday Night

Place Essay

How well does the spatial metaphor work for talking about the web? Does it make sense to talk about networks as places?

The “Networked Place” essay links networks to Habermas’ notion of the “public sphere.” To what degree does the web function as a public sphere? Who has access to it? Is it class or culture bound in any way? The “Networked Democracy” authors claim the web provides “broad availability” as a place for deliberation. Is this really correct? To what extent do “the digital divide” and cultural differences related to online practices qualify these claims?

To what degree does the network get characterized as a “place” for identity formation? What are some examples?

Culture Essay

This essay focuses on the converging relationship online between cultural consumption and cultural production, with a particular focus on music. What are the key aesthetic, ethical, and legal issues that come up here and how do we begin to sort them out?

How can we link Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of the “aura” to this discussion of cultural production? What happens to “originality” and “authenticity” in the kind of work discussed here (DJ Dangermouse, Deconstructing Beck)?

Why do the authors see mashups and remixing as “post pomo” (p.2)? Couldn’t a case be made that remixes and mashups simply build on and extend forms of creativity central to postmodernism or even modernism? (Think “The Waste Land” or Ulysses, for example).

Jenkins on Convergence Culture

Jenkins points out (p. 13) that media critics call the tools we use to access content “delivery technology.” What are the implications of thinking of the book as a “delivery technology?”

Jenkins cautions against reducing “media change” to technological change because that “strips aside” something “cultural” (15, top). What’s he getting at here?

A major issue that circulates through a number of the essays has to do with the tension between the web as a user-driven medium that generates content from the bottom up and as a medium large corporations want to appropriate and control for their own purposes. Jenkins treats this as a kind of paradox on pp. 17-19. To what degree is networked public culture susceptible to appropriation and control by corporations that dominate traditional cultural forms? This could be connected to the question raised on the bottom of p. 1 of the networked democracy essay: Is the internet “convivial?” Does it empower people and make the medium difficult for elites to control, or not?

Democracy Essay

The political remixes discussed in the essay (pp. 15-16) are entertaining, but do they really have any real political force or power?

The authors claim the web provides “broad availability” as a place for deliberation. Is this really correct? To what extent do “the digital divide” and cultural differences related to online practices qualify these claims?

Networked Presidential Campaigns

Take a look at this video Barack Obama sent round today to people who signed up on his website. It provides a sneak preview of his announcement tomorrow that he'll be running for President. Listen carefully to his description the role his website will play in the campaign, especially the way his people will apparently be adopting social networking as a format for linking up and mobilizing supporters . This is all connected to the discussion in one of the essays we'll be talking about on Tuesday, "Democratic Deliberation and Mobilization on the Internet." This isn't meant to be an endorsement of Obama's candidacy, of course. What's interesting here is how his campaign is going to mashup myspace social networking and the power of individual blogs. Have a listen. If you want to see the reformatted website with the networking capabilities Obama describes it's now up and running.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Check out this fabulous video introduction to what we'll be covering the rest of the semester, all packed into a tight 2 1/2 minutes. Thanks to Steve Jones for sending it our way.

Back to the Future

Click on this image and read the caption. Too cool. Just e-mailed to me and I'm told it's in image from a 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine. I'm missing that steering wheel on my Macbook!

Convergence in the Technoculture Industry

Two side-by-side articles in this morning's New York Times caught my eye. The first, "A New Boss at NBC, and Even Newer Issues," is about the challenge Jeff Zucker will face as he takes over NBC in dealing with the digital revolution that is moving much TV content online to sites like YouTube. The second is about a deal Wal-Mart has made with all six major Hollywood studios to begin selling downloadable movies online. The convergence of these two articles on the front page of the business section dramatizes how shifting systems for delivering televsion and film programs are disrupting traditional business models. This is a classic contemporary example of conversion, where two media that decades earlier converged in our living rooms -- TV and film -- are now converging online. This isn't just business news, of course, since the changes discussed in the two articles are bound to have a long-term impact both on how we experience visual entertainment and the aesthetic forms that entertainment takes.

If you don't have a New York Times subscription you'll find links to both articles at the top of the News section of the course website.

Plans for Tuesday Night's Class

We’ll spend the first half of our time on Parts 5 and 6. They deal broadly with how cultural studies critics theorize personal and cultural identity (for purposes of our discussion I think it makes sense to approach sexuality, gender, and the concept of “queer” as identity categories along with race and multiculturalism). The theoretical approach here is generally poststructuralist and narrowly deconstructive, i.e. essentialist or foundationalist conceptions of identity, race, culture, gender, and sexual orientation have given way in our own time to social constructionist models based on a deconstruction of the nature/culture binary. Much of this may be familiar from introductory or advanced level theory courses you’ve already had (our Introduction to Graduate Studies, for example), but we will certainly spend some time dealing with questions you’ve got about 1) the theoretical concepts During reviews in these sections, and 2) how the topics he covers translate into major issues of practical interest to cultural studies critics. If you want to post questions here that would be great.

After the break we’ll spend the remainder of our time on Parts 7 and 4, in that order. Part 7 discusses the general interest in “popular culture” among cultural studies critics, and Part 4 deals with specific examples of popular forms of interest to cultural studies critics—TV, music, and “technoculture” (the list is by no means exhaustive, of course). These two sections, taken together, make for a nice transition to our study of popular culture in the form of networked public culture. As such, it seems to me we’ll want to orient our discussion of these sections around how the landscape of popular culture has changed in the few years since During wrote his book. How has TV changed, and to what extent is it marked by its convergence with the web? With regard to music, building on the foundation During reviews, how would we want to approach the study of music given developments related to its online use During doesn’t discuss? And finally, his section on “technoculture” is a brief, early sketch of the terrain we’re about to cover. We should try to talk briefly about some of the key developments that have transpired since the publication of his book as a way to begin to frame some of the topics we’ll be covering the rest of the semester.

Feel free to post questions – and suggestions about specifics you’d like to see us cover – by using the comments feature here. I’m outta here for the Super Bowl.

The Racial Politics of Being "Articulate"

Another news story this week bears on our discussion Tuesday night of race and idenity, of course, and that's Sen. Joseph Biden's remark that in Barack Obama we finally have an "articulate" (not to mention "clean") African American leader. There is an intelligent discussion of this incident in today's NEW YORK TIMES.

Is Obama Black? Race, Identity, and Multiculturalism

A number of the issues Simon During explores in his discussions of race, identity, and multiculturalism surface in an interesting article in today's New York Times entitled "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted." The article details the perception among a lot of African American voters that Obama somehow "isn't black" because his father was African, his mother was white, he grew up with white grandparents in Hawaii, and lived for a time in Indonesia. One person interviewed for the article even questions whether Obama is American. It seems that Obama's attraction as someone who embodies "multiculturalism" is off-set among many black voters by a wariness about his status as an "African American." If "African American" is something like a biological category, it certainly seems Obama is African American. But people interviewed in the article implicitly see "African American," or "black" as a cultural category. I think it would be helpful to reference this article and the issues it raises as we discuss During's chapters on identity, race, and multiculturalism. Feel free to comment on the article here if you'd like.

Simon During's CULTURAL STUDIES, Parts 1-3: Notes for Tuesday Night's Discussion

Simon During covers a lot of territory in his critical introduction to cultural studies, and we’ll need to make some choices about what we’re going to cover. I’m certainly open to your own suggestions, so please feel free to use the comments feature here to pose questions or issues you’d like to see us cover. Following are some basic topics I think we should discuss.

1. How does “culture” emerge as an object of study in the opening chapters of his book, and how does it compare to the definitions we discussed last time? How does During himself define “culture,” and are there problems you see with his definition? See in particular the opening discussion of “culture today” on pp 6-7, and the concept of “enterprise culture” he sketches out on pp. 14-17. See also the link between culture and “everyday life” discussed on pp. 28-29. It might make sense to consider the section on “Time” in the context of discussing how culture gets conceptualized in the book. See in particular his discussion of the “contemporary” as a concept and the treatment of postmodernism that follows (pp. 61-68). To what extent does the concept of “culture” in the book get connected to the contemporary and the postmodern? How does the whole idea that the practice of cultural studies is characterized by “engagement” (p. 1) and that cultural studies is inherently political (38-43) impact the way we conceptualize culture as an object of knowledge? See in particular the issue raised on p. 43 – if questions about class and capitalism dominate a politicized cultural studies practice, what happens to the analysis of identities?

2. The question of how culture is constituted as an object of knowledge is closely related to its status as a field of study and its relationship to disciplinarity. During devotes a good bit of space to this topic, raising some important issues we should discuss. Some questions to consider: What are the main disciplinary roots of cultural studies? Is cultural studies really linked as closely as During insists it is to literary studies (see pp. 30-31)? If cultural studies conceives of itself as a critical or even a subversive practice, then what relationship should it have to the traditional disciplines and the university structures they underwrite? See the discussion of this topic on pp. 10-11.

3. We should also discuss the debate about agency that emerges in these chapters. To put it bluntly, is culture a sphere of domination or liberation? This question gets raised in the section on everyday life (p. 29) and again on pp. 32 and 33 with regard to Althusser and postmarxism. How can we connect this debate to the essay on the culture industry by Horkheimer and Adorno?

4. Finally, During frames his whole discussion of contemporary cultural studies around an analysis of globalization and the insistence that culture is now a global affair. This is his opening point on pp. 5-7, and the whole section entitled “Space” is actually about globalization. Some questions we’ll want to explore: How does During define globalization (see especially 83-5). What does he mean by “vernacular globalization” and “popular cosmopolitanism,” sketched out on p. 86-7? We’ll certainly want to conclude by discussing his treatment of globalization and culture on pp. 92-5.

Throughout our discussion we should try to ask ourselves where the study of networked public culture fits into the frameworks he introduces. Does he pay attention to this aspect of culture, or does it seem like something that emerges after the book is written? This is something we'll pick up with next week in his section on "Media Studies" with its subsection on the internet and "technoculture."

Notes on Arnold, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Williams

The four essays I’ve asked you to read for this week are classics in the history of cultural studies in the West, indispensable for a beginning understanding of how culture has been defined since Arnold’s landmark argument that under modernity his particular notion of culture must stand as a bulwark against the vulgarities of machinery, democratic reform, and what came to be called popular culture. You’ll see that Arnold wants to have it both ways—culture is conceived both as instrumental in terms of achieving social good and yet it transcends the social in its guise as a timeless and universal embodiment of perfection, sweetness, and light, “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” This contradiction infects the theoretical logic of his own work, for he wants to present culture in Culture and Anarchy as a fixed, transcendental, and distinterested category existing above the fray of social and political argument, yet his theory of culture is nothing if not an interested, calculated, politically instrumental intervention in the social upheaval of his own time.

Since our particular interest in this course is on the relationship between literature and technology, we’ll want to pay particular attention to how Arnold works out his theory of culture – and his arguments about its function – by posing culture as an antidote to machinery, the mechanical, and technology. Arnold’s position has been labeled “conservative” because his theory of culture develops as a response to liberal reform, but also because, like Eliot’s in the 20th-century, it evolves in the context of a critique of modernity. Arnold’s fear of modernity is tied up with his anxiety about mechanization, but also with his concern about the masses and about the evolution of what later critics like Horkheimer and Adorno will call mass culture (the link, of course, between "mechanization" and "massification" is that Arnold sees the behavior of the masses as itself mechanical).

Arnold’s fear about the fate of culture in an age of machinery and the development of mass culture is mirrored in the Frankfurt School criticism of Benjamin (pron. Ben-jah-mean), Horkheimer, and Adorno. Benjamin’s famous essay deals with the impact of mechanization on cultural production and distribution, and we can read it as an extension of Arnold’s earlier anxiety about how culture can survive in an age of increasing mechanization. Benjamin’s concept of the aura neatly meshes with the concept of culture we get in Arnold, characterized as it is by unique genius and originality, so we need to see the mechanical reproduction Benjamin writes about threatening the cultural object as Arnold conceived it. The world of mechanical reproduction Benjamin documents is a realization of Arnold’s worst fears; the demise of the aura would have Arnold turning in his grave.

While Benjamin is clearly intrigued by the possibilities of mechanical reproduction Horkheimer and Adorno are appalled by it. Although they write as Marxist critics, watch for how their essay can actually be read as an elaborate extension of Arnold’s argument (they're as disturbed as he was in the 19th-century by the forces of "liberalism" and the rise of mass culture in the 20th-century). They also defend a notion of the aesthetic that isn’t that far from Arnold’s, and their fears about mechanization in all its forms and the transformation of culture into an industry can be read as extensions of Arnold’s, but couched in Marxist language, Nietzschean aphorism, and a breathtaking cynicism about contemporary culture (circa 1944) and the ability of the consumer to wrest free of its grip. They might seem paranoid, but keep in mind they're writing having lived through Hitler's cultural and political regime.

Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno were all associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, a group of Marxist intellectuals who thrived in the years leading up to the hegemony of Hitler’s Third Reich. They dispersed with Hitler’s ascendancy, with Benjamin committing suicide as he tried to flee Germany and Adorno and Habermas ending up in California. For a quick overview of the Frankfurt School you can consult the Wikipedia entry and the online sources listed there. And of course, the library is full of work on this important movement.

Our interest in Raymond Williams’ entries will primarily be in tracing how they’re influenced by the Marxism of the Frankfurt School critics, and how his notion of culture as the “whole way of life of a people” stands as an absolute reversal of Arnold’s. Williams, a Marxist intellectual associated with the “New Left,” was instrumental in founding the Birmingham Centre for the study of contemporary culture, which we’ll read about in more detail when we get to Simon During’s book.

Please feel free to comment on this entry as a way to get discussion going for Tuesday night's discussion.

What's This Course About, Anyway?

First of all, this isn’t a “tech” course. We aren’t’ going to be learning HTML, producing websites, or doing a lot of overtly technological exercises. Our focus is going to be on “culture.” But we are going to be looking carefully at the impact of technology on culture, at the relationship between changing technologies and changing modes of cultural production and cultural experience. The arts – and culture – have always been connected to technology (paint brushes, pencils, printing presses, typewriters are all forms of technology), so the link itself between technology and culture isn't a new thing. But the overt connection between culture and technology has accelerated dramatically over the whole course of the 20th-century, especially in the last five years when new online digital technologies have begun to redefine culture, cultural production, and the nature of cultural experience. So, while the relationship between culture and technology is an old one, we’re living in a time when that relationship has become pronounced, when computer based technology has begun to radically transform where we experience culture, how cultural forms are produced, how they circulate, and who produces them. Indeed, the formerly clear lines between production, distribution, and consumption have broken down and will continue to do so. This is dramatized in disparate ways by such forms as fan fiction, mashups (formerly audio but now, with YouTube, video as well), and user-produced news, but it can also be observed in how social networking and peer-to-peer filesharing sites (from MySpace to Flickr) allow the consumer to produce, distribute, recycle, and transform cultural objects. The consumption of culture on these sites is hard to distinguish from its production.

This is partly the result of what’s called “convergence.” We’ll read a lot more about this concept when we get to Henry Jenkins’ book, Convergence Culture. “Convergence” has to do with the extent to which formerly disparate mediums of cultural production (painting, photography, television, film, music, etc.) with their own separate platforms have converged on the web. Now a single site—your computer—can be the focal point for the convergence, and the mashing up, of old and new material produced in these various media. This is partly a situation in which cultural products converge, but it’s also a situation in which various elements of the “culture industry” (see Horkheimer and Adorno) converge to try to utilize a single platform (think record companies trying to work with online music stores like iTunes or the interest on the part of Hollywood film studios in exploiting sites like YouTube to sell their films, or the presence of mainstream news media like The New York Times or MSNBC on the web). “Convergence” has to do with the simultaneous appearance of disparate cultural forms in a single machine, but also with the linking up of various elements of the culture industry as new media companies appear and old ones try to graft onto them.

All of these changes are now BIG NEWS. Indeed, the move to prominence of what we’re calling networked public culture produced a spate of end-of-the-year articles about what happened in 2006. See, for example, the December 10 article by Jon Parles, “2006, Brought to You by You.” Parles’ point of departure is the purchase by the billionaire news magnate, Rupert Murdoch, of MySpace (talk about convergence!) and goes on to discuss how the ubiquity of “user-generated content” was the big news story of 2006. Indeed, “user-generated content” is for Parles the “the paramount cultural buzz phrase of 2006”:

"[T]his will be remembered as the year that the old-line media mogul, the online media titan and millions of individual Web users agreed: It demands attention. It’s on Web sites like YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion, PureVolume, GarageBand and Metacafe. It’s homemade art independently distributed and inventively promoted. It’s borrowed art that has been warped, wrecked, mocked and sometimes improved. It’s blogs and open-source software and collaborative wikis and personal Web pages. It’s word of mouth that can reach the entire world."

Okay, but is the user-generated material produced on these sites art? Does it constitute culture in anything like the usual sense of the word? What happens to coherence and a sense of cultural unity in a world where cultural production verges on fragmentation and chaos? Is this anarchy, or a new form of business as usual? Will user-generated cultural products challenge the primacy of traditional literature, art, and film, or are they just a fad that will burn out without having much of an effect on “real” art and culture? This course is partly about trying to at least tentatively answer some of these questions.

Time magazine got so excited about these developments that they set aside their usual approach to naming an individual "Person of the Year” and instead decided to name “You” person of the year (whether you like it or not). Of course, we may look back and see this moment as the death of networked public culture, but like Parles, the editors at Time knew a story when they saw it.

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

The Time piece tends to unabashedly celebrate what’s come to be called Web 2.0, and it’s a little embarrassing to read for people who want to take the developments they chart seriously, and to think about it critically. But the article does mark a cultural moment of obvious import, one that’s been taken very, very seriously by academics from California (the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) to Boston (The Center for Comparative Media Studies at MIT). In the readings I’ve drawn from people working in these two programs (and others) we’ll get a good idea about how networked public culture is being theorized by cultural studies and media studies academics, and how their work itself represents a convergence of media studies, popular culture studies, cultural theory, and a kind of Foucauldian attention to institutions. Indeed, some of the critics we’ll be reading (like Henry Jenkins) spend part of their time doing cultural criticism and part of their time consulting with large multinational conglomerates on how to utilize the new technologies of networked culture to sell their products, which puts a whole new spin on the concept of the public intellectual.

But what do all of these developments have to do with literary studies? To the extent literary studies have both spawned and incorporated cultural studies, the emergence of networked public culture, social networking, peer-to-peer file sharing, and user-generated cultural content is simply new grist for the mill for academic cultural studies, especially as it has paid particular attention to media studies and popular culture. If in cultural studies we’re serious about thinking theoretically and historically about how culture is conceptualized and shaped, and if we’re also serious about studying the relationship between high culture and popular culture (and serious about taking popular culture seriously) than we can’t avoid the study of networked public culture.

Beyond this, however, is the more important fact that literary and academic culture are about to be dramatically transformed by the same technologies that have begun to reshape the culture at large. Take a look at the online materials we’ll be reading in late March that have to do with Digital Textuality (March 20th) and Academic Publishing and the Future of the Book (March 27th). Peer-to-peer file sharing, user generated content, and even social networking technologies are beginning to have an impact on the production and distribution of literary work, textual knowledge, and scholarship, and this trend is bound to continue in ways we are going to want to try to envision in this course. Wikipedia, for better or worse, has transformed our students's approach to research, and it represents a technological platform that is hugely exploitable for rigorous, peer-reviewed knowledge sharing. If Wikipedia is both useful and gives you the willies, don’t worry, for the people there are at work creating an academic, peer-reviewed version called “Citizendium,” and that’s just one of a number of efforts to bring the “wiki” technology to scholarship and research. And of course the people at Google are busy trying to scan every single text they can get their hands on and put it into a virtual hyperlinked format that will transform our experience of textuality and the book. And you may never consult an OED in print form again, for the folks there are at work on a “living,” fluid online version of the venerable dictionary.

While these fledgling developments are taking place on the research end of what we scholars do, other critics are pondering the future of the book (literary and otherwise) and the nature of academic publishing. What IS the future of the book in a world in which everyone is online all the time social networking and peer-to-peer file sharing? The Time magazine article asks:

"Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do."

Our discipline depends upon people who read literature, but where will literature fit in 15, 20, or 50 years from now when the convergence model has really kicked in and digital technology rules? Will the only literature be historical? If not, what form will it take? How will literature as a vehicle for narrative hold its own not just against television and film, but against all the various technologies that entertain teenagers and young adults today? For some musings on these questions, see the essays we’ll be reading on the future of the book at Forbes.com (yes, that Forbes). And what about academic publishing? How much longer do you think academic journals will appear bound in printed pages on university library shelves, and why should they? The technology is already in place for putting standard versions of academic journals online (think Project Muse), but social network and peer-to-peer file sharing platforms represent a much more exciting model for rethinking the creation and distribution of academic scholarship. We’ll read some of the Forbes articles about the future of the book, and we’ll also read some articles like Kathleen Fitzgerald’s “On the Future of Academic Publishing” in order to think in concrete terms about the “material” culture of academic research and writing over the course of the semester.

So, there’s an overview of sorts. One challenge for us will be to figure out how the study of networked public culture relates to the larger field of cultural studies as presented by Simon During in the first book we’ll read, Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. By the end of the semester we should have a decent grasp of what networked public culture is all about -- and have made a few educated guesses about where it’s headed generally and what its impact will be on our profession. And we should have a bit of fun along the way.

Some beginning definitions:

Network

Public

Culture