jeff watson

There are real risks in reading the present moment into historical accounts, but I couldn’t help doing just that as I read “The Amateur Operators” by Susan Douglas (one of this week’s recommended readings for Henry Jenkins’ class, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0).

For those who haven’t read the piece, the gist of it is that the period of 1906-1912 saw an explosion in amateur wireless telegraphy, with boys and young men across an increasingly urbanized America “[reclaiming] a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.” (191) Wireless kits and how-to guides (some published by the “founder of science fiction” himself, Hugo Gernsback) sold like hotcakes, and in just a few years there were several hundred thousand amateur wireless operators spread out across the country.

This hobbyist culture, at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communication — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media. Like the initial “boy wonder” practitioners of homebrew wireless telegraphy, early adopters of computational and network technology have been characterized in the popular discourse as heroes of the arcane, the possessors of secret knowledge, and even potential messiahs. But, as was the case with amateur radio operators, the culture has a tendency to swing in the opposite direction as the technologies and practices in question become more widely embraced and therefore subject to greater scrutiny (and acts of mischief). In many cases this scrutiny has led to calls — rightly or wrongly — for regulation founded on anxieties about safety, morality, and legality (compare, for example, the heirarchically-minded US Navy’s half-pragmatic, half self-righteous outrage at the “leveling effect” of amateurs sharing the airwaves with professionals to academia’s worries over the loss of control over canon or the RIAA’s efforts to distinguish “professional” content from amateur production via vehicles such as tonight’s awkward and remarkably irrelevant Grammy awards ceremony).

Inspired by Douglas, I looked up the 1907 New York Times article that she references in her text, and found in it many parallels to early descriptions of Internet enthusiasts (among many other possible analogies — for example, such fascinated exaltations of the “boy-inventor” now can be found in press coverage of Augmented Reality designers, physical computing tinkerers, Y Combinator whiz kids or certain social networking platform CEOs). Have a look for yourself — the article is here. Then have a look at this gem from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, circa 1993:

Young Peter Mansbridge’s awkward yet strangely fascinating decision to not use the word “the” in front of “Internet” notwithstanding, a final parallel with wireless telegraphy occurs to me as I write these notes. According to Douglas’ account, the wireless boom peaked quickly and came to an end as the airwaves became so crowded as to be unusable. The US Navy, among others, fought and won a battle with the amateurs, despite the latter’s claims that “the ether was neither the rightful province of the military nor a resource a private firm could appropriate and monopolize,” and that “their enthusiasm and technical spadework entitled them to a sizable portion of the territory.” (214) In the end, none of these objections mattered: the airwaves were either militarized or sold off to corporate interests, and amateur radio was relegated to shortwave only (a limitation that caused an estimated 88% drop in the number of hobbyists in the United States). In light of this, could we consider the emergence of “boy inventor” and techno-messiah characters in popular culture as harbingers of public resource conflicts to come?

This paper visualizes a sample of my own fan practices by placing them on a simple x/y grid. Based on this visualization, I draw a variety of provisional conclusions regarding a) the role of fandom in my life in general; and, b) its relationship to my artistic practice in particular. Finally, I conclude with a brief commentary on the future of fandom in the context of network culture.

The Grid

This is a blank version of the grid I created for this exercise (larger view). The horizonal axis represents the degree to which a particular practice is participatory, with the rightmost end of the axis representing a maximally-participatory level of engagement. Individual practices are positioned on this axis based on how I answer questions such as:

• Did my fandom lead me into actively engaging with an intellectual property’s (IP’s) broader fan community?
• Did my enthusiasm for a media franchise or category result in me attending conferences, connecting with others online, and participating in other events, or did I let such opportunities pass me by?
• Did I engage with the world of the IP to the point where I began to produce my own extensions to that world?
• And finally, did my fandom lead me closer to an “active” community of practice, or did I remain within the confines of a more “passive” community of spectatorship?

The vertical axis of the grid maps the degree to which a particular fan practice is “comprehensive,” and addresses the following kinds of questions:

• Did my commitment to the IP or category make me want to accumulate everything that I could get my hands on related to that franchise or practice?
• Did I become an obsessive collector of related information and media, or was I content to merely sample smaller portions of the world of the IP?
• Did I gravitate toward an “expert” level of knowledge? Or was I happy to remain on the surface in terms of my apprehension of the totality of the world of the IP?

Continue Reading

The following is an excerpt from my paper, “Alternate Reality Games and Pre-Splash Knowledge Studies: Hypothetical Worlds; A Better future.” This tongue-in-cheek science-fictional paper didn’t work out exactly the way I wished it would, but it’s funny in parts, so I’m posting it here for posterity…

Introduction

For some, the very notion of “pre-Splash Knowledge Studies” (PSKS) is an oxymoron. The academic institutions of the time were notorious for being wasteful where they should have been stingy, and stingy where there was need. Worse, restrictive copyright laws and archaic credentialing rituals sealed off important participation vectors and created an atmosphere of distrust and resentment.

Significantly, one doesn’t require the remove of time and circumstance to make this bleak assessment of the period. Thought leaders clearly understood that crucial components of the academic ideal, such as the free and universal access to knowledge, were “compromised by the current intellectual property regime,” and that the so-called ‘new media’ initiatives put forth by most institutions were “about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it” (link) And yet while this frustration was shared by many within the Humanities, few seemed to know what to do.

Part of the reason for this desperate state of affairs was a lack of examples of alternative knowledge production systems that could point the way. As one scholar noted:

[Reimagining the Academy will] involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and [require] students to build on each other’s work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goal since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like. (Confessions of an Aca/Fan, October 2008)

Indeed, despite the incredible advances in network technology and ubiquitous computing that had taken place during the early 2000s, the inherently conservative nature of degree-granting academic institutions meant that official scholarship continued to treat “digitally (re)produced research…as if it were more or less a prosthetic extension and enhancement of print.” Worse, in many cases, knowledge produced in online spaces – particularly collaboratively-produced knowledge – was often rejected altogether. So high was the anxiety about the future that many turned to denial, attempting to wish the unfolding changes out of existence by clinging to the past; in so doing, these actors did their part to set the stage for the cataclysms that accompanied the Splash. Such was the tenor of the time.

On the other hand, it has become something of a Crosbyism to simply equate all pre-Splash knowledge production practices with corporatism, neofeudalism, and rampant careerism. As broadly accurate as these clichés might be, the reality is, of course, much more nuanced. Our research has revealed numerous progressive models for the production of knowledge that were actively explored in various sectors during the decade leading up to the Splash. One such practice, namely that of “Alternate Reality Gaming”, a cross-platform recreational knowledge production activity whose popularity exploded in underground “alpha geek” culture in the years immediately preceding the Splash, has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of our node to such an extent that we have decided to dedicate our centennial activity almost exclusively to its study. By exposing this little-known genre of story and play to a wider audience, we hope to spark fresh discussion about popular conceptions of life and learning in the first decade of the 21^st century. Further, by revealing how the ARG community (among others) enacted many of the very practices that would have enabled the Humanities Academy of the time to break free of its self-imposed chains, we intend to make a larger point about the all-too-human tendency to miss the solutions to one’s problems even when they’re sitting right in front of one’s nose.

Full paper: watson-hypothetical-worlds.pdf

Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies class at USC has been a treasure-trove of readings and insights. Three recent articles covered in class — read alongside Jenkins’ own book, Convergence Culture, and his excellent MacArthur-funded New Media Literacies white paper — struck me as particularly essential for anyone who’s looking to build an understanding of what multimodal communication is and how transmedia relates to education, literacy and literature. Most of these readings can be found in various corners of the Web, but I’ve also posted them here (along with a brief gloss and anecdote) for those who are interested. They are:

• Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge), Chapter 4 “Literacy and Multimodality: A Theoretical Framework“
• Mimi Ito, “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production”
• David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, “Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children’s Media Culture,” in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University press, 2004)

Ito’s succinct article makes the case most directly: “technologies of the imagination populate even the most mundane corners of our lives,” (34) and, contrary to the fears of those who worry that new media threatens to compartmentalize and disembody, the media mix is in practice productive of a culture that is “extroverted and hypersocial, sociality augmented by a dense set of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange.” (32) Buckingham and Sefton-Green hammer the point home: skeptics ought to consider examples like the “striking contrast between the high levels of [multimodal reading, sociality and production] activity that characterize the Pokemon phenomenon and the passivity that increasingly suffuses our children’s schooling” (30); and who could disagree that banning such phenomena from the school yard would do anything other than increase their “forbidden appeal” and “prevent schools from building on the enthusiasms children possess”? (31)

Of course, we have a long way to go before these kinds of messages can establish a critical mass in institutional and creative practice. Last week, I attended an experimental literature conference and found that while many of the assembled authors and scholars were keen on experimenting with new media, few if any of them were open to a wholesale redefinition of what literature is/can be. The works presented would inevitably employ language — spoken or written — as their core expressive resource (unsurprising for a conference largely run and constituted by poets and English professors), which they would then back up with video, flash animations, sound effects, etc. The effect of this was to reduce any image, sound, interactive or procedural elements present in the works to subordinate “supporting” status, lending credence to the commonly-expressed concern that the use of new media “in” literature amounts to little more than gimmickry. As Kress argues, we need to not only shift our definition of text to include “any instance of communication in any mode or in any combination of modes, whether recorded or not,” (48), but also our concept of the role design plays in both reading and writing. “Design does not ask, ‘what was done before, how, for whom, with what?” Kress writes. Rather, Design asks, “What is needed now, in this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with these resources, and given my interests in this situation?” (49)

The easy analogy here is that of the early cinema, wherein fiction films were shot using the conventions of the proscenium drawn from the theatre. It was only after a thorough interrogation of the affordances of the camera and the film splicer that the cinema began to reveal itself as a space for artistic endeavor. That is, once filmmakers let go of the notion that the cinema should attempt to create the same experiences as earlier forms of narrative art, they found themselves liberated to discover the unique way of “speaking” that film affords. What complicates this analogy is that we now confront a dynamic multiplicity of media modes. Like Gardner’s multiply-intelligent children, not all authors are going to be able to work well across all media. But in an age of expanding definitions of words like “text,” “author,” and “reading,” creators of literature, as educators and thought leaders, need to ask themselves the questions Kress’s personified Design asks: “What is needed now…with these resources, and given my interests?” Intelligently using new media is not about adding bells and whistles or referencing the Web — rather, it’s about selecting the right mode (or modes) to express what it is you have to say.

What the heck is going on in grade school these days? I for one have no clue. I make a point of staying away from kids. They’re loud, overly inquisitive and slightly smelly. If I’m not related to a given child, I’d rather they just move along and harass someone else. That said, I’m deeply concerned about what happens to kids. I worry about education. I want Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes off the shelves at Safeway, I want Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in the Grade 10 curriculum, and I want everyone to please admit that the Scopes trial settled the issue of teaching evolution once and for all. This country — or, more broadly, this style of civilization — means a lot to me. For all its problems, humanist — dare I say social — democracy is a lot better than the other systems human beings have come up with in their short history. I like the idea that we’re supposed to get to say what we want to say and do what we want to do so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I like even more that we take care of one another and work together on collective endeavors grand and mundane. Maybe it’s because I like to think that humans are fundamentally decent social beings — or maybe it’s just because I worry about what’s going to happen to me when I’m old. Either way, kids are the lynchpin. At some point, I’m going to get tired and senile and need some help. In the meantime, I’m going to try to make things better — for me, for my elders and for the new people coming up. I think it’s in our genes to want to care for one another this way. But that’s another discussion. What’s at issue here relates more to another belief of mine, namely that crime and mendacity and betrayal and intolerance are all basically consequences of the confusion and ignorance and lack of perspective that come about as a result of bad design decisions.

Yes, I just said that all the evils of the world are there because of poorly thought-out design. And no, I’m not going to qualify that statement with any provisos or back away from it in any way. For the purposes of this text, you, the reader, can assume that I am going to keep on believing this theory until I’m old and grey and in need of the medical care that I’m probably not going to have. So settle in and run with it for a while — at the very least, it’ll be worth a chin-stroking laugh or two.

The theory goes like this. Back in the day when it was just caves and fires and ochre painting, “design” as we know it had a fairly minimal impact on human life in comparison to, say, saber-toothed tigers, disease, interspecies warfare, starvation and so on. At some point in our very early pre-human history, we made a kind of genetic deal with the devil. This deal stipulated that, in exchange for mitigating and even overcoming the often nightmarish realities of animal life on planet Earth via the use of larger forebrains and therefore tools and language and metaphor, we would spend eternity struggling (recursively(ad(infinitum))) to understand and mitigate and overcome the emergent anti-human effects of our technic. What we didn’t and couldn’t know was that we were and are and always will be a part of something larger, and that the dividends of peace and longevity and health we stood to receive as a result of our embrace of toolmaking were a pittance in comparison to the benefit that would be reaped by the tools themselves — namely that they came to exist at all and that their existence demanded the coming-into-being of more tools. Such is the material destiny of the Earth, the machine and the post-human. This is our inheritance. And this is why design is so fucking important.

Our present situation is one wherein we find ourselves at the mercy of a very different kind of ecosystem than the one our forebearers encountered when they descended from the trees. For us — and I mean all of us, not just the West or the “technologically-advanced” countries — we must contend daily with the emergent properties of a designed world that are just as mercurial and deadly as the snakes, tigers and disease of the “natural” world. That is: good intentions pave the road to hell. The aggregate of our design decisions, imbricated in time and space, give rise to all manner of horrors. Consider the canonical example of Christianity (and yes, I know this is broad and something of a cliche, but still–). Here we find many different designed systems interacting and overlapping: words designed to heal and comfort get repurposed and redesigned by agents who believe that order and control are moral imperatives in a world teetering on the brink of chaos; this repurposing — both by design and by accident — divides and antagonizes people along ethnic and religious lines; conflicts emerge wherein both sides feel they have the moral upper hand; and who among us well-meaning beings wants to stop a fight if we know that what we’re fighting for is right? Out of this feedback loop emerges Crusades and Inquisitions and witch-burnings and the vast unknowable network of misunderstandings and confusions and inherited ignorances that, within our increasingly elaborate design ecosystem, serve as the powder for so many terrible explosions.

Which brings me back to grade school. In places where such things exist, we must confront once again the fundamental paradox of our existence as designers: designing a curriculum enables us to mitigate some of the problems we face today (most of which are the result of earlier design decisions) by equipping children with the conceptual and practical tools they will need to prosper in the world; but in so doing, we will by necessity be creating new design artifacts — texts, systems of thought, problem-solving approaches, visions of the world — which will inevitably interact with the larger design ecosystem in unpredictable ways and will (equally inevitably) produce fresh and potentially more complex problem sets which we will have to face tomorrow. Hence my earlier suggestion that technology is a deal with the devil and we are already in Hell. So, what to do?

Let it be said that I’m not capable of answering this question. I don’t think anybody is. It’s turtles all the way down. But it’s not in my (or our) nature to give up (and what the hell else are we supposed to do anyway in our short time on this isolated outpost?). What I’m good at is reframing things, creating thought-games and provoking inquiry. I’ve tried to do that here, but it feels like it’s not enough. I need something tangible — a lattice on which to hang all this optimistic pessimism. So I’ve gone to the source. I’ve spoken to a child.

Lila is a bright, thoughtful and frankly hilarious 8 year-old attending Pine Hill Public School in Toronto. She’s also my god-daughter, meaning I think she’s none other than the smartest, coolest and most fun kid in the world. That said, I think Lila is having a pretty normal childhood for a girl of her generation, class and geographic provenance. Pine Hill is a typical urban school. Class size is large — Lila says that there are 32 kids in her class, making for a chaotic and often impersonal learning environment — and funding is limited. When I spoke to Lila last week, I asked her questions about her learning experiences at school and at home. I wanted to know about how different types of design affected her growth as a human being. In particular, I wanted to understand the roles various forms of technology — computers, interactive media, social media, and so on — play in her childhood. What I learned surprised me. I expected to find that Lila was living in a very different educational environment than the one I lived in during my childhood; instead, I discovered a few strong differences and a whole lot of similarities. After conducting the interview, I walked away realizing that school systems — even ones in supposedly progressive districts like Pine Hill — are still only at the very beginning of redesigning the way they work to adjust to the changes in the broader communications and technology landscape. This reinforces the sense of risk/opportunity that pervades much of the literature on this subject, and raises a few key questions that I will try to articulate below.

“This is great, I can get out of homework,” was Lila’s initial response when I asked her if she would be willing to answer a few questions about computers, school and games (ironically, the discussion we were about to have was homework, my homework, for Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies graduate seminar at USC). The first question I asked was about how Lila uses computers at school. Here’s what she said:

The only time we use computers at school is when we have computer class. We learn about how computers are made and, like, how to work computers, like how to turn it on and off, searching, Google. But it’s a bit boring because I already know about all this stuff. So we’ve haven’t really learned anything new. But we get to play games sometimes, so it’s okay.

I suppose it’s only natural that schools continue in their 80s/90s mentality of separate-classes-for-separate-activities, but the notion that schools still have a cordoned-off “Computers” class came as a surprise. As I hinted above, Lila is a smart kid; I would not hesistate to describe her as an exceptionally fast learner. That said, she is far from privileged. She is the only child of a working single parent, and while she definitely gets enough to eat and is lucky enough to have access to a computer at home, she can hardly be described as well-off. In the context of Pine Hill, a relatively affluent area in Toronto, Lila’s mom is probably at the low end of the scale when it comes to wages. If basic computer usage is a familiar thing to someone like Lila, I would suggest that most of the other kids in her class have also been exposed to the fundamentals of Google searching and turning computers on and off. Indeed, when I asked Lila about this, she said “everyone knows how to use computers already.”

Of course, Lila’s got a great mom who spends a lot of time with her teaching her how to safely and wisely use the Web. Not all kids are so lucky. After a certain point, money doesn’t matter nearly as much as attention. At home, Lila’s experience of computers is much different than what she encounters at school. Under the supervision of her mother, Lila gets to do a variety of things online. “I mostly like to go on Google Images and search for panda bears and cute little dogs,” she told me. “Sometimes if a friend comes over we’ll play a two-player game or look at things on YouTube.” But, significantly, it’s not a free-for-all: “My mom won’t let me use Facebook, and I can only watch things on YouTube if they’re appropriate.” (I asked her what she meant by appropriate and she said that “my mom decides what that is.”) Clearly (and much to my satisfaction as a godfather), this is an engaged parent. Equally as clearly, the contrast between Lila’s at-home computer usage and her school Computers class couldn’t be stronger.

When I asked Lila what she thought computers were good for, I got another little nugget of insight into how she navigates between the design ecologies of home and school. While the school-based “official” computer learning is very focused on the computers themselves — teaching technical info like how they work and how to make them do things — there is a lot of lateral/unintentionally-situated computer use in Lila’s educational experience that occurs as a kind of emergent property of her traditional classes.

[Computers] are really good for homework — if you have to search something, it’s like, easy. It tells you lots of facts and clues. Like my mom showed me Wikipedia and I once had this assignment about Ireland, and it gave me all these facts about potatoes and everything… And then I found some videos on YouTube to show. [The Web] really made it easy to do the research and make my project.

Here we see an exemplar of one of the reasons why many educators espouse an inter-/trans-/post-disciplinary approach to integrating new media literacies into school curricula. Lila’s Social Studies class assignment — to research a country and prepare a short report and poster about that country for presentation to the class — was something she probably could have done with books found in her school library. But because her mother had taken the time to show her how to use, reshape and, as it happens, critically evaluate the materials on Wikipedia, Lila developed/expanded some essential new media literacies such as appropriation (meaningfully sampling and remixing media content), transmedia navigation (the ability to follow stories/information across multiple modalities), and distributed cognition (the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities).

In Lila’s case, we see a student who is developing new media literacies through the tandem (but not necessarily coordinated) efforts of a school on the one hand and a parent on the other. Sadly, without the solid parenting that Lila is receiving, these literacies would probably remain underdeveloped, at least as far as the Third Grade goes. At Pine Hill, computers are kept off to the side rather than integrated in a meaningful way as augmentations to existing learning structures. Funding shortfalls, the limitations of teacher expertise and Toronto’s massive population probably account for a lot of this structural problem. As Lila herself notes:

Usually i’m frustrated because there’s like 32 kids in my class. I do better doing my work at home because my mom helps me a lot and we have the computer. It’s hard to get the teacher’s attention. I never get time to finish my work at school. I think i actually would get more work done even if my mom didn’t help me. There are less distractions, less talking, I can actually concentrate. It’s mental at school…

That said, I have trouble laying all the blame here on the economic and political situation within which Pine Hill Public School operates. I asked Lila if her teachers in Social Studies or Math or Science ever used computers in class. She said that they did, but that it was mostly to “show us stuff, like diagrams and things,” much like teachers in my day would use an overhead projector. She told me that there was little to no advice given about how to, say, use the Web to learn more about a science issue or evaluate the veracity of a Wikipedia article about Ireland. The fact that, according to Lila, not very much of that kind of teaching was taking place, suggests to me a fundamental design flaw in the curriculum at Pine Hill — and perhaps in the Greater Toronto Area school system in general. Not every kid has a generous and capable mom like Lila does. A system that relies on such moms does so at its own peril.

Without an integrated approach to new media literacies, schools run the risk of exacerbating the “participation gap” as certain students excel thanks to their parents’ efforts to instill in them basic new media literacies, while others fall behind and aside, lacking the tools necessary to function in the present technological ecosystem. Once again, we find ourselves in a moment where the design decisions of today contain the potential for both enormous reward and extreme danger. We must accept that whatever solutions we find to the perplexing and paradoxical question of “what to do?”, particular with regard to education, will always be provisional. But perhaps this is the larger message implicit in these kinds of discussions — ours is a dynamic self-reflexive world, one wherein everything we create in turn creates us; to resist this dynamism is to deny a fundamental fact of our existence — and denial, as we have seen time and again, has no place in the teaching of the young.

Reading a novel is an intense experience. Even lowly grocery store thrillers are complex and multimodal textual-linguistic collaborations between authors, readers, and culture. That is, novels are awesome. Reading them is never going to be a thing of the past. This much, I believe, is obvious.

What’s less obvious is understanding how ubiquitous computing and social media affect the ways new readers interact with novels and other long-form texts. Does the shifting vernacular of online discourse degrade general literacy? Is the Web somehow to blame for shortening attention spans? Does social media threaten to eliminate common cultural touchstones by fragmenting readers into ultra-personalized affinity groups?

The debate is passionate and charged. Articulate advocates abound, from technologists who cite social justice and political engagement as urgent reasons for integrating new media literacies into school curricula, to traditionalists who argue that instantaneous access to information and the casual, fragmented and unfocused nature of online writing present mortal threats to book culture. There are rejoinders to every argument, and there isn’t anywhere near enough room in this space to begin to cover it all. Nevertheless, like a lot of arguments, much of what is interesting here has less to do with particular advocacy positions than it does with coming to an understanding as to the origin, meaning and trajectory of the debate itself.

Using Motoko Rich’s concise 2008 NYT article, Online, R U Really Reading? as a launching point, I would like to suggest that what’s really going on here is in fact less a matter of ideological dispute than a linguistic discord brought about by category confusion — a semantic landslide shaken into being by instabilities in the definitions of the words online and reading. Furthermore, I argue that as the dust settles, the definitions for these words will expand and overlap one another as they stretch to take into account the dynamism and reach of the erupting technoculture; as a result, the distinction between so-called “media literacy” and traditional capital-L Literacy will all but disappear.

Communications technology and culture produce and consume one another in a strange co-evolutionary symbiosis. Chicken-and-egg problems confront analysis at every turn. Did the Web create Web culture, or did Web culture create the Web? While these kinds of questions might have had more ready answers in the early days of the web, the relationship between tech development and online culture has become increasingly tangled and recursive. The era of pervasive social media is upon us, and this is changing the way we must think about online communications, shifting away from a purely instrumental static linked documents view to the new and radically-unfamiliar-to-print-culture Web 2.0 perspective of dynamically linked concepts and actors. Cyberspace turned out to be much broader and deeper than even its most prescient early advocates had predicted — broad, because the Web is more than just an information space to be navigated through, but is also (most crucially) a multipurpose, multi-faceted hyperspace of conversation, socialization and collaboration; and deep because the Web’s tangle of dendrites now extend well beyond computer screens and into our embodied existences via the mobile devices and other near-ubiquitous network portals that proliferate in our lives.

This deep intermixing of social activity and technology requires us to re-examine what we mean when we speak of being “online.” What does it mean to say I am “online” when I am effectively always online? Where is the border between the Real and the Virtual when one exists in both places at once? Much of my own research involves exploring ways that mobile and ubiquitous computing can add layers of story, interaction and play to physical environments. Thinking of network technology/network culture in this manner — as a pervasive, spatially- and temporally-distributed non-platform-specific layer instead of a constrained single-platform activity — effectively expands the definition of the word online to include a vast array of mediated communicative acts.

Such an expansion problematizes critiques of new media culture that seek to cast online activities as being somehow in opposition to, or competition with, older modes of learning, play and communication. Rich cites Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, as an example of this kind of us-versus-the-machine characterization. And while Carr certainly makes some valid points about all the bad, bad things the Internet can do, he largely comes off as a finger-wagging grump. Carr’s confession that he “now [finds] it difficult to read long books” is particularly telling. Why does the author feel so down on himself for discovering that he is more interested and engaged by online conversation than he is by books? Maybe the reality is that Mr. Carr is in fact more fully in the world than ever before and simply doesn’t have the time or motivation to read books the way he once did, choosing instead to expend his imaginative capital meticulously researching and crafting angry, hyperbolic attacks on Web 2.0.

Mr. Carr’s argument is typical of critics who cleave to restrictive definitions of what it means to read and be online. Dana Gioia of the National Endowment for the Arts repeats a popular sentiment when he writes “electronic media…provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.” The basic argument here is that books engender crucial linear reading and thinking skills that simply are not called upon in ephemeral and fragmented online reading contexts. This, to me, is something of a tautology (e.g., wood-chopping skills can only be acquired with an axe in hand; but that doesn’t necessarily put the kindling pile in conflict with the Kindle). Assumptions in both directions seem unexamined: anyone who’s taken a decent undergraduate English course knows that novels aren’t actually linear; that they engage with the world around them; and that reading them depends on an active imaginative collaboration between the author and the reader. Similarly, reading online is, like everything else in our temporality, productive of fundamentally linear texts. Even the most random walk through the Web assembles ideas and data feeds into a linear sequence — chapter one, I click on this, I read that; chapter two, I write this, I click on that, I read this…

Despite these and other debates about the putative advantages and disadvantages of certain kinds of literacy, it’s pretty clear that the process of collapsing the boundaries between online and offline reading is well underway. Like Nicholas Carr, I too have experienced a decrease in the number of novels and long-form texts that I read, a decrease that has been inversely proportional to the amount and range of my online reading practices. One could take Mr. Carr’s bait and argue that, because of this change, I actually read much more widely, am exposed to an exponentially larger array of texts via recommendation engines and social networking applications, and that my ability to discover and discuss literature is much greater now than it ever was previously. But doing so would simply invite another salvo of replies — that I am an educated academic with critical skills that enable me to leverage technology better than “amateur” readers, that I am proselytizing for a set of practices that I have vested interest in justifying, or that the non-heirarchical setup of the Web puts Orwell’s 1984 on the same level as bttf4444′s Down With Big Brother!, a crossover fan fiction mixing Orwell’s original with characters and themes drawn from the Back to the Future series. I would, of course, disagree with all these contentions; the ball would bounce back into Carr’s court, and we’d continue ad infinitum.

Such PvP arguments typify much of public life in this country; I’d rather look for solutions and opportunities to be found in the notion that reading is an expanding category which now takes into account a multiplicity of practices. Conceived of in this light, literacy education becomes the site of overlap between many interrelated practices. Learning how to tell the difference between fact and speculation, good sources and suspect ones, poetry and drivel, bttf4444 and Orwell — and how to properly appreciate, contextualize and interact with them all — has always been the work of the active reader, and a part of this work has been to find ways to adapt to changes in the technological and social landscape. Dealing with the new layers of literacy demanded by network culture is just the latest stage in this ongoing evolution.

Let me put this plainly: Blackboard is an impediment to scholarship, and the sooner universities stop using it, the better. Let’s leave aside for the moment the clunky UI and bothersome content-framing that makes efficiently using Blackboard materials alongside other web content almost impossible. Let’s just pretend that it’s not a scandalous waste of university resources to pay for a substandard set of collaboration tools when better and more well-supported products exist in the free and open source community. And let’s not worry about the fact that the company behind the software has attempted to patent basic functions like posting course materials and grades online. Even if these issues didn’t exist, the system would still be deeply and fundamentally wrong-headed.

Why do I have such a hate-on for Blackboard? Because Blackboard is a walled garden. Or, put another way, it doesn’t play well with the Web. Which is a pretty serious problem for a product that is supposed to “intertwine easily with the other technologies” learners rely on. Take Blackboard’s RSS support, for example — or, rather, its lack thereof. Getting a feed to display in Blackboard takes a lot more work than it does in, say, a completely free blogging and collaboration system like WordPress. And getting feeds out of Blackboard? Forget about it.

Of course, closed-off, login-required systems like Blackboard are useful for restricting access to private information like grades, internal planning documents and direct email-like communications between professors and students (though why email itself isn’t good enough for this function, I don’t exactly understand). But Blackboard also seals off from public view useful materials like course syllabi, readings, web links and — most importantly — crucial knowledge-production activities like class discussion-board activity and blogs. Hiding this kind of content from public view is destructive and wasteful. I submit that if students and professors are engaging in scholarly discourse in online forums, sharing resources and collaborating on the development of new ideas, it is in the best interest of the students themselves, the Academy at large and — yes — human civilization for this information to be universally accessible, remixable and spreadable. Blackboard works directly against this imperative by locking down the productive activities of the classroom in the name of archaic intellectual property laws and nonsensical bugaboos about privacy, cutting students off from the massive intellectual cross-pollination potential of what James Paul Gee calls “affinity spaces.”

According to Gee, affinity spaces are discursive learning spaces defined not by membership in a particular community or group, but rather by a common endeavor or interest. Enabling these kinds of spaces is arguably the most significant and transformative affordance of the Web. Sure, it’s great that we can link documents together, send information to one another and cheaply produce one-to-many communications. Even walled gardens have their use. But the true power of a global information network is only realized when ideas are linked together and communication begins to occur on a many-to-many scale. This is precisely what happens in an affinity space, which functions as a kind of lens, focusing energy and enthusiasm from a dispersed array of sources onto a particular topic or semantic domain. Knowledge is generated, portals are opened and connections are established. Gee cites AoM Heaven, a player-community resource site for the (now somewhat long-in-the-tooth) RTS game, Age of Mythology, as an example of an affinity space, but it’s easy to think of dozens more. Yelp’s section on Pizza in Los Angeles, the Wikipedia page on micronations, the ThinkWiki Linux Thinkpad users site and the Delicious tag archive for ‘henryjenkins’ are all affinity spaces to a greater or lesser degree. Each is a portal to/generator of content co-created by a distributed group of individuals, expert and novice alike, assembled around a common endeavor.

Blackboard subtracts the efforts of students and professors alike from the pool of sources from which affinity spaces draw their power, interrupting rather than fostering the formation of productive educational bonds. By keeping online discussions, blogs and other discursive engagements under lock and key, Blackboard ensures that no one else on the Web will be able to look at, cite, aggregate, argue with, agree with, blog about or otherwise use any of the content generated or portals opened by the work of the class. This seems like a terrible waste to me — for the students, the professors, and the public at large.

Put another way, affinity spaces know few boundaries and take all comers, and that’s a big part of why they work and how they have become so ubiquitous in network learning practices (indeed, I would argue that affinity spaces are in fact synonymous with network learning practices); Blackboard, on the other hand, reifies an older order of property, unitary authority and isolated community — an order that makes little sense in the context of a broader learning environment governed by sharing, networking and openness.

By eliminating or limiting the role of affinity spaces in classwork, pedagogical approaches that lean heavily on Blackboard not only fail to educate students in crucial digital literacies, but also threaten to alienate them from “traditional” education itself. As administrators consider renewing their expensive contracts with Blackboard, Inc, they would be well-advised to consider the warning that concludes Gee’s paper:

. . . people today are confronted with and enter more and more affinity spaces. They see a different and arguably more powerful vision of learning, affiliation, and identity when they do so. Learning becomes both a personal and unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities (Le., a person’s own unique movement through various affinity spaces over time) and a social journey as one shares aspects of that trajectory with others (who may be very different from oneself and inhabit otherwise quite different spaces) for a shorter or longer time before moving on. What . . . young people see in school may pale by comparison. It may seem to lack the imagination that infuses the non-school aspects of their lives (Gee 2003). At the very least, they may demand an argument for “Why school?” (103)

However one tries to justify the walled garden, be it proprietary protectionism, safety, careerism or institutional vanity, it’s difficult to claim that this cloistering of discussion, debate and ideation is better for scholarship than its alternative — that is, embracing digital literacy as a crucial pedagogical objective and developing a new praxis for education that brings affinity spaces into the center of the classroom. As for Blackboard itself, perhaps the best we can hope for is that students will find ways to hack it into something better…

Henry Jenkins, head of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium, has shared an excellent list of 10 key concepts in the theory and practice of transmedia storytelling. This is a great starting point for learning and teaching about transmedia, and I’ve quoted it in its entirety here (but make sure to visit Henry’s blog anyway; it’s chock-a-block with great resources and insights):

1. Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

2. Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call “synergy.” Modern media companies are horizontally integrated – that is, they hold interests across a range of what were once distinct media industries. A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible. Consider, for example, the comic books published in advance of the release of such films as Batman Begins and Superman Returns by DC ( owned by Warner Brothers, the studio that released these films). These comics provided back-story which enhanced the viewer’s experience of the film even as they also help to publicize the forthcoming release (thus blurring the line between marketing and entertainment). The current configuration of the entertainment industry makes transmedia expansion an economic imperative, yet the most gifted transmedia artists also surf these marketplace pressures to create a more expansive and immersive story than would have been possible otherwise.

3. Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.

4. Extensions may serve a variety of different functions. For example, the BBC used radio dramas to maintain audience interest in Doctor Who during almost a decade during which no new television episodes were produced. The extension may provide insight into the characters and their motivations (as in the case of websites surrounding Dawson’s Creek and Veronica Mars which reproduced the imaginary correspondence or journals of their feature characters), may flesh out aspects of the fictional world (as in the web version of the Daily Planet published each week by DC comics during the run of its 52 series to “report” on the events occurring across its superhero universe), or may bridge between events depicted in a series of sequels (as in the animated series – The Clone Wars – which was aired on the Cartoon Network to bridge over a lapse in time between Star Wars II and III). The extension may add a greater sense of realism to the fiction as a whole (as occurs when fake documents and time lines were produced for the website associated with The Blair Witch Project or in a different sense, the documentary films and cd-roms produced by James Cameron to provide historical context for Titanic).

5. Transmedia storytelling practices may expand the potential market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. So, for example, Marvel produces comic books which tell the Spider-man story in ways that they think will be particularly attractive to female (a romance comic, Mary Jane Loves Spiderman) or younger readers (coloring book or picture book versions of the classic comicbook stories ). Similarly, the strategy may work to draw viewers who are comfortable in a particular medium to experiment with alternative media platforms (as in the development of a Desperate Housewives game designed to attract older female consumers into gaming).

6. Ideally, each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. Game designer Neil Young coined the term, “additive comprehension,” to refer to the ways that each new texts adds a new piece of information which forces us to revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole. His example was the addition of an image of an origami unicorn to the director’s cut edition of Bladerunner, an element which raised questions about whether the protagonist might be a replicant. Transmedia producers have found it difficult to achieve the delicate balance between creating stories which make sense to first time viewers and building in elements which enhance the experience of people reading across multiple media.

7. Because transmedia storytelling requires a high degree of coordination across the different media sectors, it has so far worked best either in independent projects where the same artist shapes the story across all of the media involved or in projects where strong collaboration (or co-creation) is encouraged across the different divisions of the same company. Most media franchises, however, are governed not by co-creation (which involves conceiving the property in transmedia terms from the outset) but rather licensing (where the story originates in one media and subsequent media remain subordinate to the original master text.)

8. Transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence. Pierre Levy coined the term, collective intelligence, to refer to new social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society. Participants pool information and tap each others expertise as they work together to solve problems. Levy argues that art in an age of collective intelligence functions as a cultural attractor, drawing together like-minded individuals to form new knowledge communities. Transmedia narratives also function as textual activators – setting into motion the production, assessment, and archiving information. The ABC television drama, Lost, for example, flashed a dense map in the midst of one second season episode: fans digitized a freeze-frame of the image and put it on the web where together they extrapolated about what it might reveal regarding the Hanso Corporation and its activities on the island. Transmedia storytelling expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything and insure that they must talk about the series with others (see, for example, the hundreds of different species featured in Pokemon or Yu-Gi-O). Consumers become hunters and gatherers moving back across the various narratives trying to stitch together a coherent picture from the dispersed information.

9. A transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life. We might see this performative dimension at play with the release of action figures which encourage children to construct their own stories about the fictional characters or costumes and role playing games which invite us to immerse ourselves in the world of the fiction. In the case of Star Wars, the Boba Fett action figure generated consumer interest in a character who had otherwise played a small role in the series, creating pressure for giving that character a larger plot function in future stories.

10. The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own. Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media franchises into new directions which reflect the reader’s desire to “fill in the gaps” they have discovered in the commercially produced material. (Henry Jenkins)

See also: Transmedia Entertainment webcast from the Futures of Entertainment Conference.