Convergence Culture | Henry Jenkins | Talks at Google

I'm really excited to introduce Henry Jenkins, who I think is going to give a great talk. He's been a professor at MIT for over 16 years, and he's currently the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, which is just down the street. He's authored or edited over nine books on media and popular culture, including the one he's going to talk about today, convergence Culture. He's been a columnist in numerous magazines. He's been a strong advocate for popular culture when it's been under severe attacks such as Post Columbine. He has a great blog named Confessions of an Acafan, and he can also bust a meme move to Soulja Boy's crank dad. So his blog, akafan, stands for Academic Fan, and I think it's a real good description of him and the book. The academic thing comes, it really shows in the book through tying it into a lot of media theory, viewing the idea of convergence culture through multiple perspectives, et cetera. And his fan comes through and how exciting book is to read and how sort of deeply involved he is with the details of the fan culture and the fan niches. And I think it's a great combination of the two. So without further ado, Henry Jenkins.

Well, it's a great pleasure to be here today and to meet our neighbors up the street. Just out of curiosity, how many of you were tied to MIT at one time or another? Clearly a large number of MIT folks at Google, I noticed a number of brass rats as I was standing around talking to people. So it's always exciting to meet some of our alums and share with you some of what's been going on in the humanities part of mit. I'm finding to myself, I always joke that I end up going where no humanist has gone before, which is to sort of go into companies, go into technical spaces, engage in dialogue about the directions our culture is taking as social and cultural change and technological change interface with each other in more and more powerful ways. And so while it might have been true a decade ago that the central challenges of our time were going to be technological, as the web has sort of settled in, as we begin to live with, the reality is this stuff becomes embedded in people's everyday life, then there needs to be a different dialogue between those of us who look at culture and society and those of you who work on technology. And that's why I welcome opportunities like this one to come in and just share some of the things I'm seeing on my side of things, many of which touch on things your company is already involved with, but to see if we can mix it up a little bit. Now, before I start, let me say a word or two about comparative media studies. Comparative Media Studies is in its ninth year at MIT as a master's program. We are the largest undergraduate program in the humanities at mit. We are involved in a whole variety of research initiatives involving humanities databases, involving new media literacies, the design of computer games for both education and recreational purposes. We have a corporate consortium which consults regularly with companies about some of the challenges they're facing, especially in dealing with areas like user generated content. And we've just launched with the Knight Foundation, a Center for the Future of Civic Media, which is a joint venture with the Media Lab at mit. So what we look for are ways we can apply what we know as humanist about culture and society, just cutting edge issues that are affecting the larger society. So we're trying to build a space where students can learn what humanists know, but do so in a way that may actually make them valuable as future employees for companies like Google. And while Google tends, my bet is that most of you who are from MIT come from the technical side of the institute. My hope is that five years from now that you'll start to see people from the cultural side as well mixing it up with you. Because I think the kinds of challenges you face every day in a company like this are best addressed in that intersection. So as Chris so today I'm going to talk a lot. I'm going to talk about some ideas from Convergence Culture, but I'm also going to try to bring it up to date. Interestingly enough, Convergent Culture was written two years ago. It's only been on the market for a year. But the book predated the real buzz about YouTube. It predated the real buzz about Second Life. It predated the launch of the word Web 2.0. So if anything, the tendencies that book is talking about have been more fully realized by more recent developments. It was sort of looking toward an era of participatory culture that we saw already emerging, a shift in the ways we live in relation to media. But these developments in the last year or so have last couple of years have really made this even more profound a change than we once and so what this talk is designed to do is both lay out some core ideas from the book, but also apply them to some of the cutting edge issues that are affecting media. And I'll begin with a quote from this and this should not say Kevin O'Reilly. Kevin O'Reilly is a character from Star Trek, the original, classic Star Trek, I should say. Tim O'Reilly in his essay, what is Web 2.0? The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the 1.0 era who survived the lead, the 2.0 era appear to be this, that they've embraced the power of the Web to harness collective intelligence. The lesson, network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the web 2.0 era. So this is O'Reilly saying we really. This is O'Reilly's point about the focus on how we generate community participation, because it's a central part of what drives all of these companies. And clearly this map of Web 2.0 includes, you know, many of the search engines, many of the companies that sort of you guys are doing business with. Here's a more cynical Description of Web 2.0. Someone has asked, Please describe Web 2.0 to me in two sentences or less. And the answer is, you make all the content, they keep all the revenue, right? And that's the negative. So what we've seen in the last we've already, this phrase, Web 2.0 has already gone through an interesting cycle that last year was a year of enormous excitement about Web 2.0. This year, we've seen more and more friction and tension as communities are speaking Back to Web 2.0 Companies in a variety of ways and challenging the implicit social contract that underlies Web 2.0. And it does often look like this idea that labor is being transferred into the hands of consumers, but wealth production is being kept in the hands of media companies. And so how we think about how value is produced, how value gets monetized, and how value gets rewarded In a web 2.0 economy is a central part of what I think the work of convergence culture helps us to try to understand. So here's the story. As of last year, Time puts you on the COVID as the person of the Year. I don't know about you, but I bought the issue that had my picture on the COVID putting the we. And the Web is on the COVID of Newsweek, and the power of us is on the power of Business Week. And it's all in the pronouns, it seems to me, because Times cover is really interestingly ambiguous, as is the name YouTube, because in the English language, you is both singular and plural. And the tension I saw in Times coverage was between the idea of YouTube as a space for individual expression. Anyone in America can produce something, put it up there. And YouTube is a site for subcultural expression. It's a Site where different communities involved in conversations that have produced media and separate sites now have a nexus or gateway that the media they're producing can be shared through. To my interest as a cultural studies guy, it is the fact that there are all of these pre existing communities that have gravitated into the space of YouTube and are sharing their media not only among themselves but with each other. And innovation is sped up by the flow of these ideas from one subcultural community to the next is what the real excitement about YouTube has been. It is a mixed media, hybrid media space, to use the term that Yochai Binkler talks about in the wealth of Networks. He talks about this being a moment where spaces are shared between commercial and amateur, but also non profit, governmental, educational activists. All kinds of groups are producing media, sharing media with each other. And the power of a platform like YouTube is precisely that all of those groups are using it in a variety of different ways, and that those different groups trade ideas with each other. What once had been compartmentalized into these different silos is brought together into a shared portal. And that brings about really dramatic cultural change. The problem with Web 2.0 companies is they start to believe that they created all that participatory culture. They start to imagine they built this thing. And instead of imagining that there's a whole history behind any of those communities is decade long history of a push for more participatory media that fuels the engagement and participation that something like YouTube creates. So here I have behind me a graphic of Kirk and Spock enjoying a nice bubble bath together. And it's an image from the Star Trek fan world where for 20 plus years going back to the 1960s, fans have been involved in the production and circulation of fan fiction, including homoerotic fan fiction known as slash, which deals with erotic relations originally between Kirk and Spock, now all the way up through Harry Potter characters and you know, characters from Supernatural or any other show that you might want to imagine. There is a whole subculture writing it. Hundreds of, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people involved in the production and circulation of stories. This community historically has been overwhelmingly female. And when I did studies on it 15 years ago, it was about 90% female. I think the gender gap has closed a little. It's probably about 70 to 80% female writers at the moment, but it's still overwhelmingly female community. It has a history of producing these things, first by mimeography, then by Xerox, then by using the web for their own amateur distribution. This community comes into play because of a story involving this company, FanLib. There's a story that sort of broke this summer and it's sort of an example of the tensions that are emerged around Web 2.0. FanLib was started by a number of people from the digital industries, the media industries, pooling their resources and they wanted to create a site, a Web 2.0 company focused on fan web fiction. And the initial move was actually a smart one. They went to some of the lesser known series, the L word being an example. They negotiated with those producers for the rights to create a safe zone for fan fiction. So fan fiction is always in a legal gray area. Companies claim it violates their intellectual property. They shut it down. This provided a space for people who wanted to write L word fan fiction to put their stuff up on the web. They ran contests, there was official recognition. All was going fine until FanLib decided it wanted to become the general portal for all fan fiction on the web. Screw legality, screw rights holders. We're simply going to open it up. We're going to recruit the best fans, we're going to invite them inside and we're going to encourage them to write stuff for us. And we're going to take all of the money that's generated by eyeballs hitting the site and we're going to keep it inside. So we're going to get these writers to write for us. We're not going to do any revenue sharing and we're not going to provide them any legal protection when the rights holders come crashing down on them. We've potentially put a big red sign around the fan community which up to now has sort of got this uneasy truce where they're now most companies turn a blind eye to fan fiction as long as no one's making money on it. And we're moving into a space where people are going to make money on it. Needless to say, this didn't go down well. What angered it even further is this is the ad campaign they used to launch for a community that's 80 to 90% female. The image is that if we go a corporate version of fan fiction, we will be more muscular that the old version is weak, but the new version is muscular and masculine, which invited people to look, for example, at the board of directors of this company, which were 100% male. So that 100% male board was dealing with a female community and doing ad campaigns that reflect almost no awareness of the gender politics of the the space they were entering into. Now adding it to the fact that already flowing around the web were their commercial pitch to rights holders. And the sort of commercial clients which gave exactly the opposite message is what they were giving to the fan fiction world that they were telling fan fiction world, we're going to empower you. We're supporting you. We think this is really powerful. And meanwhile, floating around in the corporate prospectus are all the fan Live action takes place in a highly customized environment that you control. As with a coloring book, players must stay within the lines. Restrictive players terms of service protects your rights and property. Moderated scene missions keeps the story under your control. Full monitoring and management of submissions and players. Automatic profanity filter completed work is just the first draft to be polished by the pros. I put over here an image of a coloring book which I was looking for coloring book images. Rather interesting. It has a picture of Riker talking to Picard card and it says when will I get to be captain? Suggesting that even coloring books can be used in subversive ways, at least by communities determined to use them that way. But the fan world was just infuriated by this gap of information which is easy enough to trace down. Your search engine made it pretty easy for us for the fans to see both sides of that communication. Fans were using LiveJournal, they were using blogs, they were using MySpace, they were using YouTube to communicate about this movement. And they were raising. They raised a series of objections, including the concern about who is making money off this. And more deeply, this is a community that has historically understood itself as involved in a gift economy in which fans created stuff to give to each other. And the idea that anyone was commodifying this and making money of it was already a destruction of the core values. There had been 20 years of debate about whether zines should charge money, whether it's okay to recoup the cost of a zine, so forth. And into that blindly comes a corporation which wants to immediately generate revenue off of what fans have created. And so there was enormous anger over this that generated. And in the end, several things happened. One was a lot of backlash against the company, and I think it's really slowed the growth of this company enjoyed. On the other hand, when I talked to Chris Williams at Fan Library a couple of weeks ago, he said they had about 10,000 subscribers at the present time. Now, these subscribers seem to be a mixture of those people entering fandom for the first time because they discovered it by this commercial site and fans who were already disenchanted with the existing fan community and wanted a place that they knew those other fans wouldn't go. And I suspect those two things combined meant there was a market here for those people that fanlib tapped the but at the same time it alienated much of the base of the fan fiction movement and there's a great deal of concern that it may endanger the kind of uneasy status of fan fiction at the present time. What's an example of one of a Number of Web 2.0 controversies this past year that sort of reflect the consumers growing awareness of their own value as cultural creators, as cultural distributors. Their own participation means has some importance behind it and they're beginning to rally using all the social network technologies they have to speak back to companies that simply want to go in, colonize, strip mine, whatever we want to call it, take their content, turn it into a revenue generator for them and offer neither be accountable to these communities nor offer revenue back. And I think it seems to me one of the big challenges as we go forward is how do we think about what those relationships should look like as we begin to engage with these new communities. Now to understand the story, we need to take a step back and think about what's going on in terms of convergence. Now in the book I use that the book's title is Convergence Culture and it flies in the face of a largely technological notion of what we mean by convergence. That is, when the industry talks about convergence, most often it falls into what I call the black box fallacy, that is trying to figure out which black box all the media in our lives are going to flow through. And I think the reality is that we are going to use a variety of media platforms for the foreseeable future. Those platforms will be interconnected, but it doesn't follow that we want a single device, single media device that does everything. Something that the confusion of this world is suggested by. This cartoon says, no sir, I was not talking on my cell phone, I was watching TV show on my ipod. And the sense of us carrying content from one platform to another is part of the world we live in. In my living room I got more black boxes than ever before. I also have multiple black boxes on my body at the present time. We carry technology around with us. And I think part of the challenge is moving beyond the technological notion of convergence to think about convergence in cultural sense as a world where every story, every image, every sound, every relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media channels. A shift that's shaped top down by decisions in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers bedrooms. Decisions that are shaped by the desire of Media companies to be in every possible media sector and to maximize touch points with consumers. And shaped by the desire of consumers to have the media they want, where they want it, when they want it in the form they want it, and their willingness to take it there illegally if it's not provided there legally. And those two things come together to result in a world where content spreads really rapidly across media platforms. So this technical idea of convergence is suggested by this little device that Knifey made for himself, which had an ipod, a camera, a shaver, a taser, a drum machine, a Swiss army knife, a circular saw, a robot arm, a guitar, a Pepsi, a laser. This device, in other words, it did everything that Knifey wanted. Looks something like this, right? The idea of packaging it all together into the iPhone or some other sort of device, we sort of. We reach the point where these become the digital equivalent of the Swiss army knife that every media function we possibly want in a single device, which no one knows how to use. You know, my experience is constantly taking pictures of my ear and sending them to my entire mailing list. You know, it's like we push the wrong buttons, we're startled, we grab things. The idea of putting it all on the same device seems to me fundamentally the wrong direction. And I think as things sort themselves out, we will have a better sense of which devices should serve which functions and how these things are going to work together. But I think we're at a period of a lot of kludged technologies literally on the ground. Five or six black boxes in my living room patched together to do what I want, my living room. On the other hand, a lot of converged technologies, which often create confusion for users, and we're sorting out how these things fit together. As that's going on though, we're seeing an explosion of what I call transmedia entertainment. In the book, I talk about the Matrix in this regard. That is, the Matrix is a story that spread across three films, about a dozen anime shorts, about 20 comic book episodes that were distributed via the web, about three or four video games and massively multiplayer games at the present time. And the information of the Matrix is dispersed across all of them. Heroes is another example of a very successful media franchise that is partially a TV show, partially a comic series, partially a variety of web based experiences. We mobile episodes. There will be a second television series that fills in the cracks between reruns of Heroes. A lot of stuff going on. Geico's Caveman is the branding version of this. Right. Starts out as a television commercial, becomes A website, and now has generated his own TV sitcom. So that we're seeing that stories spread across media platforms almost without regard to technical barriers, and that people seem quite eager to follow these stories and pursue bits of information about them across as many media platforms as possible. And that's the heart of what I mean by convergence when I talk about convergence culture. It's a cultural logic. It's a system of the ways in which our culture operates. All right? Second, big idea in the book. In a network society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. And we call this collective intelligence. This is a pretty interesting illustration of it. This is a command chart for the Zion resistance underground movement in the Matrix movies. Right. And the people who put it together and had to put it together across all of those media sources that I talked about. Right. They have to figure out all the ships, who the captains are, what the organizations are, who reports to who. All of this is pieced together by a large group of people pooling knowledge that's gleaned across a large number of media texts. This is the world of the discussion list. It's a world where Pierre Levy tells us, nobody knows everything. Everybody knows some things. And what any given member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment's notice on an ad hoc basis. If you ever belong to a discussion list, it's probably true. You watch an episode show, you ask a question about it, dozens of people will send answers in, and that knowledge gets shared, and it becomes part of the shared resources of that particular community. This fundamentally changes the way we consume culture. So I first started noticing this 16 years ago when I started following Twin Peaks online. And Twin Peaks was one of those first shows that people talked about that were challenging television shows, puzzling shows in one way or another. What was interesting is the television critics were saying that Twin Peaks had become so complicated, no one could understand it. And the fans online were saying Twin Peaks was being dummied down to such a point that no one was interested in. Why was that? Well, because one critic in their living room watching the TV show by themselves could only process so much information. Whereas the community of hundreds of people pooling insights and knowledge, and hour by hour in the week between an episode totally cracked the code, mastered it. Began proposing theories and ideas of who Killed Laura Palmer much more complex than were offered by any given critic or the show could possibly satisfy. We've seen this play out more and more again that these media franchises are Much more interesting in the middle, when all the theories are possible, at the end, when they have to close it down because the audience keeps generating ideas that are more far reaching and more interesting by far than a small team of writers could possibly generate on a television show. And this is tied to stuff that Steven Johnson has, his book Everything Bad is Good for you, which argues that television is in fact more complex and more demanding than ever before. The argument is that it in fact demands much more of us than our educational system does. And the reason it can do that is because of these large scale knowledge communities where people are working together to process information. And there's a really rich example in the book of Survivor fandom as an example of that knowledge community and how people crack the code, figure out who the contestants are on Survivor before they're announced, figure out where the location is before it's announced, figure out who's boot, the order in which they're booted off. All of this stuff worked out through elaborate theory construction and a lot of investigative work by teams of thousands of people playing together on the Internet. And for all the mystique about Mark Burnett protecting the secrets of Survivor, this community has totally cracked the code. And it's been out there, you know, season after season because there no one can keep secrets from this large scale knowledge communities that are emerging. All right, third big idea. We're seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture, contemporary version of folk culture, as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal collective interests. And this goes back to fan fiction, but it also goes to Machinima. Here we have the red versus blue, and I'm sure most of you know here as an example. Machinima involves taking game engines, creating digital animations with them, the studio via the web. And red versus blue is probably the biggest success story to come out of it. But this happening all around this, there are all kinds of pockets of innovation and experimentation in our culture that are generated by consumers taking media in their own hand and generating new stuff. So here's an example of this. I was looking for a slide to illustrate my ideas and I searched on the Internet under participatory culture and I found someone had already done a PowerPoint slide of my talk laying out my basic ideas. So I figured user generated content, I take it, fold it back into this talk. It was a better slide than I was going to generate. And it makes the same basic idea that a participatory culture is one where there are relatively Low barriers for engagement, where there's strong support for sharing creations with others, where there's informal mentorship in which more experienced people help newer people learn new to master the technology and the cultural processes, where members believe their contributions matter and where they care about others opinions, themselves and their work. And it's not a world. It's a world where not every member must contribute, but all must believe they're free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. And the challenge I think has been for companies to learn how to build those principles into their online presences that are actually at work in these grassroots communities that go back 20, 30 years of history. Fandom as a whole goes back to the 1910s, so it's been developing these practices over a long period of time. And they're deeply embedded in almost everything that a fan community culture does. It's never fully successful at realizing these goals. There are conflicts and feuds and so forth. But the ideals are built into the cultural practices of these communities. And I think companies need to think about what those are as they begin to imagine building these new kinds of user generated content relationships. So what do we think of consumers in this new world? These are words that are popping up, are just some of the words people are using to talk about. Oops. The new relationship. Loyals, media actives, producers, inspirational consumers, prosumers, influencers, connectors, multipliers. What all these words have in common is they represent a world where the assumption of participation governs, where everyone involved in the production of media today assumes the audience will become more and more participatory. But we can't agree on the terms of participation even to try to imagine what the roles are, what the relationships are between consumers and companies that are entering into the space. So here's an example of that multiplier sort of function. You will recognize this as a spoof of the popular ad campaign on television. Here's another example of the spoof that I think captures a little bit how people think about companies. These kinds of spoofs are all over the web and sort of what's interesting about them, not only do they talk about this, but I've seen PlayStation 2 versus the Wii, I've seen Hillary versus Obama that are using more or less the same template. This is appropriation, but it's not culture jamming, right? It's not. While it's playful about these brands, it's not trying to rip these brands apart. It's having a good time with the ad campaign. And what's Interesting to me about it is that we cannot see that without remembering the original campaign. So while it may be a grassroots comment on the campaign that suggests a loss of control over the brand message from one point of view, from another point of view, this stuff perpetuates the brand message in very powerful ways. It spreads it to new communities. So the work we're doing with the Convergence Culture Consortium, this term, is on what we call spreadable media. And our argument is we're moving from a world of sticky media where you suck everyone in and hold them like a roach motel, to a world of spreadable media where in fact the media that spreads creates value and if it doesn't spread, it's dead. And that spreading may seem out of control on one level, but on another level it's generating new senses of connections. It's spreading meaning and messages. It's just a more complex media ecology that companies are just learning to work with it. Here's an interesting example of how this plays itself out. These are a series of Star Trek digital films that are out there on the web. Hidden Frontier, the New Voyagers. These are fan produced cinema. We can trace fan produced cinema back to Super 8 movies. That goes a long time. These are very interesting though, because if you look closely this episode, this fan movie episode is directed by Tim Ross, who, those of you who are classic Trek fans, know that he was in fact an actor in the series. It features Nicole Nichols, Walter Cunning, Tim Ross, Grace Lee, Whitney, Crystal Allen and others. The sets are sometimes designed by set designers from the original Trek. The sound effects and music are provided by people from the Trek cast. These are people not. This is not commercially sponsored by Paramount, but Paramount hasn't shut it down. And it's tacitly given approval for the production of these films by not going after the various members of the cast and crew who've chosen to work in it. So this is a world where Chekhov can command the ship or Sulu can command the ship, where the actors get to have scenes play out scenes that they always wanted to do in the movies. And they're distributed via the Internet and are generating a great deal of buzz at a time that Star Trek itself is off the air. We're in a lull between no truck series on the air, film on the horizons. This period of time is being filled by fan generated content that's hybrid in the sense that it's both commercially involved and amateur content working together to produce this new thing. Now, why would they do it? One reason to do it is because that in fact this is a training ground and a recruiting ground for future employees. The best talent to come out of this can be sucked back into the entertainment industry when Star Trek launches again. It will no doubt involve people who are involved in this grassroots media production. Now this guy, Robert Kuznets, a business scholar, calls this Wikimedia and it's a nice metaphor to think about. What's going on in this regard seem far fetched. Well, same thing happened to Dr. Who. It was off the air in England for almost 15 years. When it came back, the people who run Doctor who now and it made it a really hot franchise again, were all people involved in grassroots span activities during the lull time when it was off the air. So this is a kind of value production. These communities are involved with, with these companies. Now here's the story of the Browncoats. Many of you know Firefly, Josh Whedon show was taken off the air. There was rallying point. It was turned into the film Serenity. The Browncoats were out there in front publicizing this film every inch of the way. The studio pulled back its promotional budget because the grassroots promotion were so strong and the media coverage of the Brown Coats were what made most people hear about Serenity as a film. When all of it was over, the company then turned around and sent a cease and desist letter to the Browncoats and wanted to collect money for the illegal use of images from the show on their T shirts and posters they used to publicize the movie. The fan organization took a logical step. They used the web. They collected all of the hours that their members had contributed to promoting the film and they sent an invoice back to the studio for billable hours. The studio took a look at that, looked at what they were going to charge them and sort of conceded publicly that in fact the fans had generated more wealth for the company than they were going to collect in license fees for the circulation of these photographs and apologized for the miscalculation. But this sort of raises this question of how do we think about value in this new environment? Right. The old model was that fans depreciated the value of this work by seizing control over it by running it down by violating copyright. I want to argue that fans in fact appreciate the work in the double sense that they both appreciate it because they like it and they appreciate it because they're generating greater publicity around that they've increased the value of it. In an economic sense, they appreciate the value of this work through their activity. And so it's about recognizing the kinds of values that emerge in that space. So this is the new model of consumers. If the old consumer were predictable and stayed where you told them. The new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media, but not necessarily to shows. Right. They will trace a franchise across every possible media department. They scan the environment looking for interesting stuff. When they find stuff they really like, they drill down deep. And that's a good way of describing this new behavior. If old consumers are isolated individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected. And this is this image show. It's a little dark in here, but it shows Spider man and the Black Widow sort of looking at each picture they took on the cell phone camera at Comic Con. But I think it sort of captures this moment where they're there to perform and to be seen to share their media with other people. Whole range of relationships, but they're social relationships. All the talk for the last decade has been about personalized media. I want to argue we are living in a world now of socialized media in the sense that it's about social networks and the ways people consume media within social communities. And we need to make that adjustment. If the work of old consumers was once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy in public. This is an image of a meetup of fans of the Matrix in Shibula train station in Tokyo, where these fans restaged the burly man brawl. There in the train station, people captured it with cell phone cameras. It went out via Flickr to the world. It got picked up by blogs. This picture I got off. Boing, boing. So it became part of the story of the circulation of the Matrix films in Asia, where this fan organized event, no one in the production company had anything to do with it. It's one of many outpourings of fan support which have increased visibility around the launch of new media products. If old consumers were seen as compliant, the new consumers are resistant, taking media in their own hands. This is the Harry Potter alliance, which is a new organization for fan activism. And basically the argument is, if Harry Potter taught a generation of kids how to read and write, can it also help teach them how to become activists and fight for what they believe in? The central theme of the Harry Potter books is about young people battling evil, questioning adult authority, going out and changing the world. They're trying to harness that to focus on human rights issues around the world. And the result has been a really powerful organization that I think is generating a lot of interest. So in this environment, then what we've got are places where mass media content gets appropriated bottom up, content emerges around it and then those trends get folded back into the media economy. So here we've got an image from one of the action figure movies that was produced by Gay and I write about in the book called Ethan Mather. And Mather basically created a series of spoofs of Star wars using Star wars action figures distributed over the web. We've got Lego site that has a Star wars fan cinema on it and we've got this is the Skeletor show. Not that you can tell it, but the Skeletor show is a you can find on YouTube. Someone has redubbed old he man episodes in a kind of smart ass kind of snarky way. And it's really a lot of fun, the sort of redubbing that goes on of these old cartoons. And I put at the bottom Robot Chicken. And I suggest that something like Robot Chicken we could trace its genealogy back to a whole wave of young people who were making films and photo montages using action figures and spoofing the content of their whole childhood that fed into the production of a fairly successful comedy series that I'm a big fan of, Robot Chicken. So we see that as grassroots stuff bubbling to the top. We can see something similar occurring. When you think about anime's entry into the American marketplace, which anime is now one of the leading cultural exports of Japan, a huge moneymaker. 20 years ago you couldn't give it away in the American marketplace. What changed was illegal copying, amateur dubbing and subtitling websites that educated people about anime, tested the market for different genres. And basically almost every successful anime property that's entered the marketplace did so after it had been here illegally for a while and generated buzz. And that the fans have stopped circulating the illegal copies as soon as commercial copies became available and have actually actively supported the commercial production of this into the marketplace. So it's a place where the testing of the market occurred on sort of the illegal side of fan activity. And then the support of the market spread to these companies that enter into it. And the result has been anime is a really important influence in our culture today. Soldier Boy is a beautiful example of this. There was a joke about Crankdat because we did a music video here at MIT with my students produced of Crankdat Soldier Boy Story. But the Soldier Boy Story is this guy, 15 year old guy who puts on his blog I'm going to change, turn the music industry on its head. You're not going to believe it now, but a year from now you will. And a year and a half later he's at the BET Music Awards as one of the top performers, right? And he did it by using the web, using his blog, using MySpace, using music distribution software, using YouTube. He generated buzz. And in part, he did it by encouraging people to appropriate and perform crankdad so that there are hundreds of videos of crankdad of all kinds of groups performing it, all of which spread the word about Soldier Boy and paved the way for his commercial success. So here's a guy that came from nowhere to being one of the top selling artists in recent weeks because of his ability to harness this bottom up energy of consumers. The same energy, the same platforms support the continual production of grassroots music. So here's Wizard Rock, which is a form of pop music generated by fans of Harry Potter. And there are bands like Harry and the Potters, Darko and the Malfoys who have songs like Voldemort, Won't Stop the Rock or My Dad's Rich, your Dad's Dead. Great songs, great songs that capture this world of Harry Potter. And there are now more than 200 wizard rock bands that are using MySpace as their distribution platform and they're producing whole albums and spreading them. They have no desire to break into the commercial media space for the most part. They're simply creating a grassroots distribution of music that allows them to say what they do. I was in an incredible concert of some of these groups in the Storyville district of New Orleans this summer, and this jazz club was completely taken over by Wizard Rock performers and people, you know, their fans. So it's really created its own kind of cultural phenomenon that's not on the radar, by and large, of the commercial music industry. Here's Four Eyed Monsters, an independent film which is publicizing itself through second Life. It has set up an interesting system where people can register to desire to see the film in a local area. When they get X number of local patrons, they go to an independent movie theater and say, would you show the film for the week? Because we can show you. We got about 500 people in your city who want to buy tickets and you'll sell out for the first couple of nights anyway if we show this film. And that's helped this independent film get into many, many markets around the country. It's a successful strategy which is cooperating between fans and producers. So we're at a moment in time in which we see this two sides of a divide. On the one hand, this is a debate that I think is going on in almost all media companies. Between the prohibitionists who want to hold on to tight control of intellectual property, if anything, want to extend control of IP in response to the digital media and the collaboration is to want to open up a space for people to. For fans and consumers to actively participate in the production of value around that intellectual property. And it's the struggle between those, the contradictions between those are what makes it really difficult for us, for consumers to make sense of what role they're supposed to play in this new culture. It's not that consumers are confused about ip, it's companies are confused because companies can't decide where they want to harness the marketing potential of all these participatory culture forms we've been talking about about, or whether they want to. Whether they want to hold on to their old model in the face of the challenge those things represent to them. And I think that's the challenge we need to think about as we go forward. And the poster board of this debate might be Stephen Colbert. And I want to end with talking about Stephen for a minute. I'm a big fan of the Colbert Report and he's someone who really gets web 2.0 right. He's had any number of contests. This is the blue, the green screen contest he did around the Star Wars Kid, where he took Star Wars Kid video, reenacted it himself, created a green screen, encouraged people to remix, make their own versions of it distributed via YouTube, get it onto the shell. He did one more recently where he created a whole routine which is only funny when you anticipate how it was going to be remixed by people. So he has this mock interview and encouraged people to recontextualize what he said and send out versions of it constantly generating this level of interest. Of course, most of us knew about Colbert, but because of the Washington Press Club dinner where he spoke truth to power, he made fun of bush like 10ft away from the guy on national television. But you didn't probably hear about it on C Span, which is where it first aired. You probably heard about it via YouTube where it circulated very widely and generated a great deal of interest among people. The mainstream media missed the story. The YouTube community discovered it and put it out there and people talked about it. And naturally C SPAN had it taken down off YouTube because after all, why should people be watching C Span content? But, you know, nevertheless, not so fast. The Colbert the Book on Print version of the Book on Tape version of it is one of the top selling spoken word albums on itunes at the present time. So it took great root in the culture, it generated a great deal of interest. Walt Colbert took aim in Wikipedia and a kind of playful thing where he encouraged people to go on Wikipedia and change the entry about elephants. So if you look at this entry closely, it says the amount of African elephants has tripled. The number of African elephants that has tripled in the last four months. The number of African elephants has tripled recently, according to Stephen Colbert. The whole entry got taken over and I talked to Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia guy, about, and he described how they had to organize the Wikipedians to defend the integrity of information on the elephant site and to calculate where those crazy Colbert fans were going to go and tamper with their data. And they had to figure out when it was going to rerun because they knew there'd be another wave of this stuff. And it was like this information war between the Colbert fans and the Wikipedians over elephants. Right? Fascinating stuff. Great deal of fun when you think about the ways that just old media playing with new media and creative ways. So in the midst of all of this, what happens? You guys buy YouTube and the parent company for this Colbert show sues Google to have all of that content taken down, including hundreds of segments from the Colbert Report. So it's a beautiful example of one side of the company getting this new world, embracing that collaborationist logic, seeking new value by tapping the energies of fans, and the other side of the company holding onto this prohibitionist model of shutting down intellectual property, reining it in and not allowing media to be spread and circulate and generate new meanings and new associations. And I think that's the struggle. So on the one hand, I began with a struggle of user journey to content and the tension between the gift economy of participatory culture and the commodity culture of media companies. And we end with this tension between media companies over this question of collaboration versus prohibition. And they represent two sides of a kind of series of tensions that I think we are struggling with as we imagine what a more participatory culture might look like and as we understand what the long term implications of so called Web 2.0 might be. So with that, I'm going to open up for questions. So one of the things in a lot of these participatory culture that occurred, and I believe this actually originated with Yahoo, is this sort of 1% rule that is that in any sort of large participatory community, actually only about 1% of people participate. And based on the communities that I've been part of, that seems to line up about. Right. It seems to vary between somewhere between a quarter percent and 2 to 3%. Is it your opinion that that same sort of relative truth that is, that's just sort of human nature, or is there or can you identify any sort of salient features in the communities that succeed in getting substantially different participatory? Well, I don't think it's an inalienable truth. It's not the law of gravity. It's probably not even Moore's Law, you know, it's someplace. You know, it's a social variable. I definitely think there's always going to be people, people with different levels of intensity of involvement on any particular participatory culture. But I'd say, for example, the traditional world of the fanzine, those ratios were much. The ratio of participation is significantly higher. I think there are other communities that I think the ratio of participation is significantly higher. And there are ones that have really built in mechanisms to encourage participation. And one of the reasons why I'm involved in the MacArthur foundation on work on new media literacy is because I think it's about empowering people to feel like they can participate into their participation matters. We talk there a lot about the participation gap, since the participation gap is different from the digital divide. The digital divide had to do with access to technology. If we look statistically, we've largely closed the digital divide because most kids in America have access to network computing through schools and public libraries, if not through their home. There's some pockets, the Indian reservations being a very notorious one, but many of those have never had a telephone system that worked, let alone an Internet system that works. And I think there's some big problems we need to address there. But the participation gap is modeled by something like Pew foundation, which looked at the Pew center for Internet and American Life, found that 57% of teens online had produced media content, and about a third of them had circulated media content beyond their immediate friends and family. That's a pretty compelling statistic. This suggests that participation is, first of all, partially generational. The kids who've grown up with this technology are more likely to participate, more likely to generate content than their parents, because their parents numbers would be significantly lower than it. But the 43% who aren't producing content right now or the 77% who aren't distributing content right now should pose us to also question what's going on with those people? How do we generate a level of engagement and participation with it? Is it based on familiarity with skills and exposure to kind of defining experiences which allow them to make it over that hump. Are there ways that leadership in these communities can help bridge that gap? To me, it's consistent with, say, studies that show if art museums open their doors free to the public, it's still mostly upper middle class people who go. Because there's a sense of entitlement about the art museum. And many of these spaces we take for granted. It's okay to post stuff. Not everyone feels that. And I think that's, that's one of the factors we need to look at. It's also, of course, the case that not everyone wants to be totally active all the time. We definitely want to still consume good content made by other people. It's not about displacing professional entertainers with amateurs, contrary to what Andrew Keen talks about in his book the Call to the Amateur. It's about building a community where everyone feels like they could contribute if they were able to, and building a space where everyone could be bad and get better. And what's important about these spaces is in fact that if you have only professional stuff and you've got amateur and you've got stuff that doesn't circulate, how do you get up here? Well, you've got stuff down here at all levels that's good, bad and indifferent. And you sort of say, I could do better than that. I'm not quite as good as that. Then people begin to have an incentive to participate. So the question of, do people see the range of what's produced or they only see the best? I think is actually a variable to think about as well as how what's the sort of social mechanism that pull people up? The other thing we're discovering is that participation does not equal diversity. So you look at this. John McMurray has done some research on YouTube. If you look at the top hundred posts on YouTube, the most popular post, overwhelmingly created by white middle class males, right? The Minorities participate in YouTube, they distribute content. But from the mechanisms, the majoritarian mechanisms that move content up in that system results that those things that are most like the majority of users move to the top and those things that don't look like that are weight to the bottom. And so how do you get a point where there's enough diversity in that top tier that people feel like their contributions matter? If you were a black teenager, would you feel, looking at YouTube as it constituted today, that your content was welcome there? Or would you feel, looking at that top, if you looked at the top hundred and saw nothing by black kids, would you feel like that was a place that as a Black kid, you were allowed to come. And that's I think the fundamental problem. It's a social and cultural question, but it's tied to things like the mechanisms by which you weigh and measure audience feedback. And the systems we have tagging right now are based on the assumption of the wisdom of the crowd, which is good up to a certain point. It's good for finding the right answer or finding the center of of opinion. It may not be good for ensuring diversity and therefore enabling participation. And those may be very different questions we actually have to think about. Yeah, so this is more of a legal question, so maybe there's no good answer. But would Paramount lose future rights to say Star Trek if they let too many of the user generated movies get distributed? Or is that not even, well, conventional wisdom is that they would. In a sense. It's like if you got a piece of land and you let the neighbor kids walk past it for 25 years and you sue one of them for trespassing, you probably don't have the right to do that. The courts are going to throw it out because you've ceded your right to that property in that way. And that's the logic that I think companies have started to use. Now what a number of people in the legal community are trying to look at is is there a way to give blanket permit for nonprofit non commercial uses of your content, something like Creative Commons that would enable the span generated stuff to go on and not threaten copyright. Given that Paramount doesn't want, you know, some other studio coming in and making a Star Trek movie, that's their biggest concern. Is it actually hurt by allowing amateurs to make movies? That's debatable. And I would argue that more value is created than lost in that system. But the way the law currently is operating, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm take all this with a grain of salt. But the way the law currently is operated, it's very hard for them to differentiate between those two layers of use. That said, I think in fact, much more open appropriation takes place from commercial competitors who know exactly what the gentleman's agreement is, know where to draw the line, have lawyers protecting them than are comfortably going on with the amateurs in the audience. And they end up, ironically enough, that they're less likely to hold up in court an attack on a real critic of the company, a culture jam or ad buster kind of critic, than a fan. Because it's fairly easy to show that the the ad buster took their content and made it a focus of critical commentary. The fan who likes it. The courts have had much more difficult seeing that as a form of critical commentary, despite the fact that legally critical doesn't mean negative. It's never less in people's mind is so associated with that notion of criticism that it's actually proven hard for courts to see that someone who valued what you produced and were sympathetic to it might actually be involved and an act of criticism. In my world, if you write an essay about Shakespeare, you're a critic even if you like Shakespeare. And I think most people who write about Shakespeare like Shakespeare. But it's a confusion in the way we think about the law. But either way, it could be fixed by Creative Commons, kind of like I think a Creative Commons kind of license might fix a lot of that. I don't know that I'm not seeing the studios line enough to sign Creative Commons license. What I am seeing is an open acknowledgement from some studio spokesman that they're turning a blind eye to a lot of the creation because they're starting to appreciate the value. And the movement is toward engagement as the model for thinking about how value is produced among television viewers. We're moving from an era of appointment television to engagement television. And that means they want to find ways in the short run to figure out who's engaged. Doesn't mean they're not limited. So a site like TV Links, which was an amazing site where you get hundreds of television shows around the world, you can click on and watch all the episodes of it because people had uploaded them, the guy got arrested in England two weeks ago and the site's gone. So there are limits to what's going on. But I think there's a tolerance right now as companies are trying to figure out what's going to work. They'll go after Napster, they'll go after TV links where there's actual content being exchanged. But then remix stuff seems to circulate fairly openly at the moment. And we see far fewer cease and desist letters for that all over the place over here. Then I have a question about your take on community journalism. It seems like the thing to do in these trying times in journalism is for a local newspaper to set up some sort of community page where people can submit comments and even write stories. Do you feel as though this will change the face of journalism and ultimately save these local newspapers, or do you think it's just kind of a passing trend? Well, I think it's going to help. I mean, I think the newspaper is here to stay. I wouldn't put any bet on the future of any given newspaper, I think the trends are right now in two directions. One is we're moving to the point where most Americans get their news from national sources rather than local sources. So more people get news from USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor than get news from their local newspaper. Or they get it from the web or they get it from some other source. I think that's a change that's going to continue. And what it probably means is we're going to start to see in an area like ours, the Boston paper, the Providence paper, the Hartford paper. Will all three of those survive? Probably not long term. I think you'll see in the great megalopolis the consolidation of those things. The reverse has been hyperlocal. And this is where user generated content actually does make a lot of sense. The publications people are most invested in right now, stuff that really just covers the local community and covers it well. And that's where harnessing the power of everyday citizens can make a huge difference in terms of increasing the kinds of coverage that we can provide. And that's a lot of what we're interested in. The center for Future Civic Media trying to figure out how we harness citizen journalism, how we create new relations between governments and citizens. And the sad thing is right now in Boston it's very hard to find out who the candidates are for a Cambridge election because we're caught between Globe's tendency to want to go national and hyper and not much coverage filling in the gap. Jen in Cambridge, because we've got a good local paper, but we're not still able to find out who the candidates are for election and what they stand for. And I think it's a serious challenge in the ways information is operating, how to figure out how we get there, and citizen based stuff. The old League of Women Voters sort of questionnaires have historically filled in the gap. That's not a new trend, that's an old trend. And the web is an effective platform for doing more of that kind of thing. So it surprises me if you go to the candidates for local office, you see the equivalent of a brochure and no real imaginative use of social network software to really begin to communicate with local voters. And I think there's a lot we need to understand about how we can use this new media to convey news. But yeah, I think, I think it won't save the newspaper, but I think it will. I think that the uses of it that will make a huge difference in communities and long term. But I think long term, there's going to be a closing down of a lot of papers before this is all over with. Yeah, it's five o'. Clock.

Once again, thank you, Henry Jenkins, for giving the talk.