Henry Jenkins

Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide

Updated and with a New Afterword

New York University Press • New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London www.nyupress.org

© 2006 by New York University All rights reserved

First published in paperback in 2008.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jenkins, Henry, 1958-Convergence culture : where old and new media collide I Henry Jenkins. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4281-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8147-4281-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4295-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8147-4295-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Mass media and culture-United States. 2. Popular culture-United States. I. Title. P94.65.U6J46 2006 302.230973–dc22 2006007358

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Conclusion

Democratizing Television? The Politics of Participation

In August 2005, former Democratic vice president Albert Gore helped to launch a new cable news network, Current. The network's stated goal was to encourage the active participation of young people as citi­zen j ournalists; viewers were intended not simply to consume Cur­rent's programming but also to participate in its production, selection, and distribution. As Gore explained at a press conference in late 2004, "We are about empowering this generation of young people in the 18-to-34 population to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell their stories of what's going on in their lives, in the dominant medium of our time. The Internet opened a floodgate for young people, whose pas­sions are finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit. . . . Our aim is to give young, people a voice, to democratize television."1 The net­work estimates that as much as 25 percent of the content they air will come from their viewers. Amateur media producers will upload digital videos to a Web site; visitors to the site will be able to evaluate each submission, and those which receive the strongest support from view­ers will make it onto the airwaves.

The idea of reader-moderated news content is not new. Slashdot was one of the first sites to experiment with user-moderation, gather­ing a wealth of information with a five-person paid staff, mostly part time, by empowering readers not only to submit their own stories but to work collectively to determine the relative value of each submis­sion. Slashdot's focus is explicitly on technology and culture, and so it became a focal point for information about Internet privacy issues, the debates over mandatory filters in public libraries, the open-source movement, and so forth. Slashdot attracts an estimated 1.1 million unique users per month, and some 250,000 per day, constituting a user base as large as that of many of the nation's leading online general

251

252 Conclusion

interest and technology-centered news sites.2 Yet, this would be the first time that something like the Slashdot model was being applied to tele­vision.

Even before the network reached the air, Current's promise to "de· mocratize television" became a focal point for debates about the poli­tics of participation. Cara Mertes, the executive producer for the PBS documentary program POV, itself an icon of the struggle to get alter­native perspectives on television, asked, "What are you talking about when you say 'democratizing the media'? Is it using media to further democratic ends, to create an environment conducive to the democratic process through unity, empathy and civil discourse? Or does it mean handing over the means of production, which is the logic of public access?"3 Was Current going to be democratic in its content (focusing on the kinds of information that a democratic society needs to func­tion), its effects (mobilizing young people to participate more fully in the democratic process), its values (fostering rational discourse and a stronger sense of social contract), or its process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution)?

Others pushed further, arguing that market pressures, the demand to satisfy advertisers and placate stockholders, would ensure that no commercial network could possibly be as democratic on any of these levels as the Gore operation was promising. Any truly democratic form of broadcasting would necessarily arise outside corporate media and would likely see corporate America as its primary target for reform. Even if the network remained true to its goals, they argued, those most drawn to the alternative media perspective would be skeptical of any media channel shaped by traditional corporate gatekeepers. A growing number of Web services-such as participatoryculture . org and ourmedia.org-were making it easier for amateur media makers to gain visibility via the Web without having to turn over exclusive rights to their material to a network funded by some of the wealthiest men and women in the country. In a society where blogs-both text based and video enhanced-were thriving, why would anyone need to put their content on television?

Others expressed disappointment in the network's volunteeristic ap­proach. Original plans to pay a large number of independent filmmak­ers to become roaming correspondents had given way to a plan to allow amateurs to submit material for consideration and then get paid upon acceptance. The first plan, critics argued, would have sustained

Conclusion 253

an infrastructure to support alternative media production; the other would lead to little more than a glorified public access station.

The network defended itself as a work in progress-one that was doing what it could to democratize a medium while working under market conditions. A spokesman for the network observed, "For some people, the perfect is always the enemy of the good."4 Current might not change everything about television, they pleaded, but it could make a difference. Gore held firm in his belief that enabling audience­generated content had the potential to diversify civic discourse: "I per­sonally believe that when this medium is connected to the grassroots storytellers that are out there, it will have an impact on the kinds of things that are discussed and the way they are discussed."5

At about the same time, the British Broadcasting Company was em­bracing an even more radical vision of how consumers might relate to its content. The first signs of this new policy had come through a speech made by Ashley Highfield, director of BBC New Media & Tech­nology, in October 2003, explaining how the widespread adoption of broadband and digital technologies will impact the ways his network serves its public:

Future TV may be unrecognizable from today, defined not just by linear

TV channels, packaged and scheduled by television executives, but in­

stead will resemble more of a kaleidoscope, thousands of streams of con­

tent, some indistinguishable as actual channels. These streams will mix

together broadcasters' content and programs, and our viewers' contribu­

tions. At the simplest level-audiences will want to organize and re­

organize content the way they want it. They'll add comments to our pro­

grams, vote on them, and generally mess about with them. But at another

level, audiences will want to create these streams of video themselves

from scratch, with or without our help. At this end of the spectrum, the

traditional "monologue broadcaster" to "grateful viewer" relationship

will break down. 6

By 2005, the BBC was digitizing large segments of its archive and mak­ing the streaming content available via the Web? The BBC was also en­couraging grassroots experimentation with ways to annotate and index these materials. Current's path led from the Web-where many could share what they created-into broadcast media, where many could consume what a few had created. The BBC efforts were moving in the

254 Conclusion

other direction, opening up television content to the more participatory impulses shaping digital culture.

Both were in a sense promoting what this book has been calling con­vergence culture. Convergence does not depend on any specific deliv­ery mechanism. Rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift-a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture. Despite the rhet­oric about "democratizing television," this shift is being driven by eco­nomic calculations and not by some broad mission to empower the public. Media industries are embracing convergence for a number of reasons: because convergence-based strategies exploit the advantages of media conglomeration; because convergence creates multiple ways of selling content to consumers; because convergence cements con­sumer loyalty at a time when the fragmentation of the marketplace and the rise of file sharing threaten old ways of doing business. In some cases, convergence is being pushed by corporations as a way of shap­ing consumer behavior. In other cases, convergence is being pushed by consumers who are demanding that media companies be more respon­sive to their tastes and interests. Yet, whatever its motivations, conver­gence is changing the ways in which media industries operate and the ways average people think about their relation to media. We are in a critical moment of transition during which the old rules are open to change and companies may be forced to renegotiate their relationship to consumers. The question is whether the public is ready to push for greater participation or willing to settle for the same old relations to mass media.

Writing in 1991, W. Russell Neuman sought to examine the ways that consumer "habit" or what he called "the psychology of the mass audi­ence, the semi-attentive, entertainment-oriented mind-set of day-to-day media behavior" would slow down the interactive potentials of emerg­ing digital technologies.8 In his model, the technology was ready at hand but the culture was not ready to embrace it: "The new developments in horizontal, user-controlled media that allow the user to amend, refor­mat, store, copy, forward to others, and comment on the flow of ideas do not rule out mass communications. Quite the contrary, they comple­ment the traditional mass media. "9 The public will not rethink their

Conclusion 255

relationship to media content overnight, and the media industries will not relinquish their stranglehold on culture without a fight.

Today, we are more apt to hear the opposite claim-that early adopt­ers are racing ahead of technological developments. No sooner is a new technology-say, Coogle Maps-released to the public than diverse grassroots communities begin to tinker with it, expanding its func­tionality, hacking its code, and pushing it into a more participatory direction. Indeed, many industry leaders argue that the main reason that television cannot continue to operate in the same old ways is that the broadcasters are losing younger viewers, who expect greater influ­ence over the media they consume. Speaking at MIT in April 2004, Betsy Frank, executive vice president for research and planning at MTV Networks, described these consumers as "media-actives" whom she characterized as "the group of people born since the mid-70s who've never known a world without cable television, the vcr, or the internet, who have never had to settle for forced choice or least objectionable program, who grew up with a 'what I want when I want it' view atti­tude towards media, and as a result, take a much more active role in their media choices. "10 Noting that "their fingerprints are on the re­mote," she said that the media industry was scrambling to make sense of and respond to sharp declines in television viewership among the highly valued 18-27 male demographic as they defected from televi­sion toward more interactive and participatory media channels.

This book has sought to document a moment of transition during which at least some segments of the public have learned what it means to live within a convergence culture. Betsy Frank and other industry thinkers still tend to emphasize changes that are occurring within indi­viduals, whereas this book's argument is that the greatest changes are occurring within consumption communities. The biggest change may be the shift from individualized and personalized media consumption toward consumption as a networked practice.

Personalized media was one of the ideals of the digital revolution in the early 1990s: digital media was going to "liberate" us from the "tyr­anny" of mass media, allowing us to consume only content we found personally meaningful. Conservative ideologue turned digital theor­ist George Gilder argues that the intrinsic properties of the computer pushed toward ever more decentralization and personalization. Com­pared to the one-size-fits-all diet of the broadcast networks, the com­ing media age would be a "feast of niches and specialties. "11 An era of

256 Conclusion

customized and interactive content, he argues, would appeal to our highest ambitions and not our lowest, as we enter "a new age of indi­vidualism. "12 Consider Gilder 's ideal of "first choice media" as yet another model for how we might democratize television.

By contrast, this book has argued that convergence encourages par­ticipation and collective intelligence, a view nicely summed up by the New York Times's Marshall Sella: "With the aid of the Internet, the lofti­est dream for television is being realized: an odd brand of interactivity. Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to con­sumers, but that street is now becoming two-way. A man with one ma­chine (a TV) is doomed to isolation, but a man with two machines (TV and a computer) can belong to a community. "13 Each of the case studies shows what happens when people who have access to multiple ma­chines consume-and produce-media together, when they pool their insights and information, mobilize to promote common interests, and function as grassroots intermediaries ensuring that important messages and interesting content circulate more broadly. Rather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media -media that become part of our lives as members of commu­nities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net.

Throughout the book, I have shown that convergence culture is enabling new forms of participation and collaboration. For Levy, the power to participate within knowledge communities exists alongside the power that the nation-state exerts over its citizens and that corpora­tions within commodity capitalism exert over its workers and con­sumers. For Levy, at his most utopian, this emerging power to participate serves as a strong corrective to those traditional sources of power, though they will also seek ways to turn it toward their own ends. We are just learning how to exercise that power-individually and collectively-and we are still fighting to define the terms under which we will be allowed to participate. Many fear this power; others embrace it. There are no guarantees that we will use our new power any more responsibly than nation-states or corporations have exercised theirs. We are trying to hammer out the ethical codes and social con­tracts that will determine how we will relate to one another just as we are trying to determine how this power will insert itself into the enter­tainment system or into the political process. Part of what we must do is figure out how-and why-groups with different backgrounds,

Conclusion 257

agendas, perspectives, and knowledge can listen to one another and work together toward the common good. We have a lot to learn.

Right now, we are learning how to apply these new participatory skills through our relation to commercial entertainment-or, more pre­cisely, right now some groups of early adopters are testing the waters and mapping out directions where many more of us are apt to follow. These skills are being applied to popular culture first for two reasons: on the one hand, because the stakes are so low; and on the other, be­cause playing with popular culture is a lot more fun than playing with more serious matters. Yet, as we saw in looking at Campaign 2004, what we learn through spoiling Survivor or remaking Star Wars may quickly get applied to political activism or education or the workplace.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, cultural scholars, myself included, depicted media fandom as an important test site for ideas about ac­tive consumption and grassroots creativity. We were drawn toward the idea of "fan culture" as operating in the shadows of, in response to, as well as an alternative to commercial culture. Fan culture was defined through the appropriation and transformation of materials borrowed from mass culture; it was the application of folk culture practices to mass culture content.14 Across the past decade, the Web has brought these consumers from the margins of the media industry into the spot­light; research into fandom has been embraced by important thinkers in the legal and business communities. What might once have been seen as "rogue readers" are now Kevin Roberts's "inspirational con­sumers. " Participation is understood as part of the normal ways that media operate, while the current debates center around the terms of our participation. Just as studying fan culture helped us to understand the innovations that occur on the fringes of the media industry, we may also want to look at the structures of fan communities as showing us new ways of thinking about citizenship and collaboration. The political effects of these fan communities come not simply through the produc­tion and circulation of new ideas (the critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to new social structures (collective intelligence) and new models of cultural production (participatory culture).

Have I gone too far? Am I granting too much power here to these consumption communities? Perhaps. But keep in mind that I am not really trying to predict the future. I want to avoid the kind of grand claims about the withering away of mass media institutions that make the rhetoric of the digital revolution seem silly a decade later. Rather, I

258 Conclusion

am trying to point toward the democratic potentials found in some contemporary cultural trends. There is nothing inevitable about the outcome. Everything is up for grabs. Pierre Levy described his ideal of collective intelligence as a "realizable utopia, " and so it is. I think of myself as a critical utopian. As a utopian, I want to identify possibilities within our culture that might lead toward a better, more just society. My experiences as a fan have changed how I think about media poli­tics, helping me to look for and promote unrealized potentials rather than reject out of hand anything that doesn't rise to my standards. Fan­dom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it. Today, I hear a great deal of frustration about the state of our media culture, yet surprisingly few people talk about how we might rewrite it.

But pointing to those opportunities for change is not enough in and of itself. One must also identify the various barriers that block the real­ization of those possibilities and look for ways to route around them. Having a sense of what a more ideal society looks like gives one a yardstick for determining what we must do to achieve our goals. Here, this book has offered specific case studies of groups who are already achieving some of the promises of collective intelligence or of a more participatory culture. I do not mean for us to read these groups as typi­cal of the average consumer (if such a thing exists in an era of niche media and fragmented culture). Rather, we should read these case studies as demonstrations of what it is possible to do in the context of convergence culture.

This approach differs dramatically from what I call critical pessi­mism. Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obsta­cles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into tak­ing action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentra­tion, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propa­ganda machines " and "weapons of mass deception." Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity

Conclusion 259

of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those op­posed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of criti­cal utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empow­ered, not when they are at their weakest.

Media concentration is a very real problem that potentially stifles many of the developments I have been describing across this book. Concentration is bad because it stifles competition and places media industries above the demands of their consumers. Concentration is bad because it lowers diversity-important in terms of popular culture, es­sential in terms of news. Concentration is bad because it lowers the incentives for companies to negotiate with their consumers and raises the barriers to their participation. Big concentrated media can ignore their audience (at least up to a point); smaller niche media must accom­modate us.

That said, the fight over media concentration is only one struggle that should concern media reformers. The potentials of a more partici­patory media culture are also worth fighting for. Right now, conver­gence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding the opportunities for grassroots groups to speak back to the mass media. Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this window of opportunity will have passed. That is why it is so important to fight against the cor­porate copyright regime, to argue against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize these emerging forms of participation, to publi­cize the best practices of these online communities, to expand access and participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind, and to promote forms of media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed to become full participants in their culture.

If early readers are any indication, the most controversial claim in this book may be my operating assumption that increasing participa­tion in popular culture is a good thing. Too many critical pessimists are still locked into the old politics of culture jamming. Resistance be­comes an end in and of itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diver­sity and corporate responsibility. The debate keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative were to opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published

260 Conclusion

on recycled paper by small alternative presses. But what would it mean to tap media power for our own purposes? Is ideological and aesthetic purity really more valuable than transforming our culture?

A politics of participation starts from the assumption that we may have greater collective bargaining power if we form consumption com­munities. Consider the example of the Sequential Tarts. Started in 1997, www.sequentialtart.com serves as an advocacy group for female con­sumers frustrated by their historical neglect or patronizing treatment by the comics industry. Marcia Allas, the current editor of Sequential Tart, explained: "In the early days we wanted to change the apparent percep­tion of the female reader of comics. . . . We wanted to show what we already knew-that the female audience for comics, while probably smaller than the male audience, is both diverse and has a collectively large disposable income."15 In her study of Sequential Tart, scholar and sometime contributor Kimberly M. De Vries argues that the group self­consciously rejects the negative stereotypes about female comics readers constructed by men in and around the comics industry but also the well-meaning but equally constraining stereotypes constructed b y the first generation o f feminist critics o f comics.l6 The Sequential Tarts defend the pleasures women take in comics even as they critique nega­tive representations of women. The Web zine combines interviews with comics creators, retailers, and industry leaders, reviews of current publi­cations, and critical essays about gender and comics. It showcases indus­try practices that attract or repel women, spotlights the work of smaller presses that often fell through the cracks, and promotes books that reflect their readers' tastes and interests. The Sequential Tarts are increasingly courted by publishers or individual artists who feel they have content that female readers might embrace and have helped to make the main­stream publishers more attentive to this often underserved market.

The Sequential Tarts represent a new kind of consumer advocacy group-one that seeks to diversify content and make mass media more responsive to its consumers. This is not to say that commercial media will ever truly operate according to democratic principles. Media com­panies don't need to share our ideals in order to change their practices. W hat will motivate the media companies is their own economic inter­ests. W hat will motivate consumer-based politics will be our shared cultural and political interests. But we can't change much of anything if we are not on speaking terms with people inside the media industry. A politics of confrontation must give way to one focused on tactical col-

Conclusion 26 1

laboration. The old model, which many wisely dismissed, was that consumers vote with their pocketbooks. The new model is that we are collectively changing the nature of the marketplace, and in so doing we are pressuring companies to change the products they are creating and the ways they relate to their consumers.

We still do not have any models for what a mature, fully realized knowledge culture would look like. But popular culture may provide us with prototypes. A case in point is Warren Ellis's comic-book series, Global Frequency. Set in the near future, Global Frequency depicts a mul­tiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. As Ellis explains, "You could be sit­ting there watching the news and suddenly hear an unusual cell phone tone, and within moments you might see your neighbor leaving the house in a hurry, wearing a jacket or a shirt with the distinctive Global Frequency symbol . . . or, hell, your girlfriend might answer the phone … and promise to explain later …. Anyone could be on the Global Fre­quency, and you'd never know until they got the call." 17 Ellis rejects the mighty demigods and elite groups of the superhero tradition and in­stead depicts the twenty-first-century equivalent of a volunteer fire de­partment. Ellis conceived of the story in the wake of September 11 as an alternative to calls for increased state power and paternalistic con­straints on communications: Global Frequency doesn't imagine the gov­ernment saving its citizens from whatever Big Bad is out there. Rather, as Ellis explains, "Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves." Each issue focuses on a different set of characters in a different location, ex­amining what it means for Global Frequency members personally and professionally to contribute their labor to a cause larger than them­selves. The only recurring characters are those at the communications hub who contact the volunteers. Once Frequency participants are called into action, most of the key decisions get made on site as the volunteers are allowed to act on their localized knowledge. Most of the challenges come, appropriately enough, from the debris left behind by the collapse of the military-industrial complex and the end of the cold war-"The bad mad things in the dark that the public never found out about." In other words, the citizen soldiers use distributed knowledge to over­come the dangers of government secrecy.

Ellis's Global Frequency Network closely mirrors what journalist and digital activist Howard Rheingold has to say about smart mobs: "Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if

262 Conclusion

they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs co­operate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities . . . . Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power. "18 In Manila and in Madrid, activists, using cell phones, were able to rally massive numbers of supporters in opposition to governments who might otherwise have controlled discourse on the mass media; these efforts resulted in transformations of power. In Boston, we are seeing home schoolers use these same technologies to organize field trips on the fly that deliver dozens of kids and their parents to a museum or historic site in a matter of a few hours.

Other writers, such as science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, describe such groups as "adhocracies. " The polar opposite of a bureaucracy, an adhocracy is an organization characterized by a lack of hierarchy. In it, each person contributes to confronting a particular problem as needed based on his or her knowledge and abilities, and leadership roles shift as tasks change. An adhocracy, thus, is a knowledge culture that turns information into action. Doctorow' s science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom depicts a future when the fans run Disney World, public support becomes the most important kind of currency, and debates about popular culture become the focus of politics. 19

Ellis's vision of the Global Frequency Network and Doctorow's vi­sion of a grassroots Disney World are far out there-well beyond any­thing we've seen in the real world yet. But fans put some of what they learned from Global Frequency into action: tapping a range of communi­cations channels to push the networks and production company to try to get a television series on the air. 2° Consider this to be another exam­ple of what it would mean to "democratize television. " Mark Burnett, Survivor's executive producer, had taken an option on adopting the comic books for television; Warner Bros. had already announced plans to air Global Frequency as a midseason replacement, which then got postponed and later canceled. A copy of the series pilot was leaked on the Internet, circulating as an illegal download on BitTorrent, where it became the focus of a grassroots effort to get the series back into pro­duction. John Rogers, the show's head writer and producer, said that the massive response to the never-aired series was giving the produc­ers leverage to push for the pilot's distribution on DV D and potentially to sell the series to another network. Studio and network executives predictably cited concerns about what the consumers were doing:

Conclusion 263

"W hether the pilot was picked up or not, it is still the property of War­ner Bros. Entertainment and we take the protection of all of our intel­lectual property seriously …. While Warner Bros. Entertainment values feedback from consumers, copyright infringement is not a productive way to try to influence a corporate decision." Rogers wrote about his encounters with the Global Frequency fans in his blog: "It changes the way I'll do my next project. … I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set." Rogers's comments invite us to imagine a time when small niches of consumers who are willing to commit their money to a cause might ensure the production of a minority-interest program. From a producer's perspec­tive, such a scheme would be attractive since television series are made at a loss for the first several seasons until the production company ac­cumulates enough episodes to sell a syndication package. DV D lowers that risk by allowing producers to sell the series one season at a time and even to package and sell unaired episodes. Selling directly to the consumer would allow producers to recoup their costs even earlier in the production cycle.

People in the entertainment industry are talking a lot these days about what Wired reporter Chris Anderson calls "The Long Tail."21 An­derson argues that as distribution costs lower, as companies can keep more and more backlist titles in circulation, and as niche communities can use the Web to mobilize around titles that satisfy their particular interests, then the greatest profit will be made by those companies that generate the most diverse content and keep it available at the most rea­sonable prices. If Anderson is right, then niche-content stands a much better chance of turning a profit than ever before. The Long Tail model assumes an increasingly savvy media consumer, one who will actively seek out content of interest and who will take pride in being able to rec­ommend that content to friends.

Imagine a subscription-based model in which viewers commit to pay a monthly fee to watch a season of episodes delivered into their homes via broadband. A pilot could be produced to test the waters, and if the response looked positive, subscriptions could be sold for a show that had gotten enough subscribers to defer the company's initial production costs. Early subscribers would get a package price, others would pay more on a pay-per-view basis, which would cover the next phase of production. Others could buy access to individual episodes. Distribution could be on a DV D mailed directly to your home or via

264 Conclusion

streaming media (perhaps you could simply download it onto your iPod).

It was the announcement that ABC-Disney was going to be offer­ing recent episodes of cult television series (such as Lost and Desperate Housewives) for purchase and download via the Apple Music Store that really took these discussions to the next level. Other networks quickly followed with their own download packages. Within the first twenty days, there were more than a million television episodes downloaded. The video iPod seems emblematic of the new convergence culture-not because everyone believes the small screen of the iPod is the ideal vehi­cle for watching broadcast content but because the ability to download reruns on demand represents a major shift in the relationship between consumers and media content.

Writing in Slate, media analyst Ivan Askwith described some of the implications of television downloads:

As iTunes and its inevitable competitors offer more broadcast-television

content, producers . . . won't have to compromise their programs to meet

broadcast requirements. Episode lengths can vary as needed, content can

be darker, more topical, and more explicit. . . . Audiences already expect

director's cuts and deleted scenes on DVDs. It's not hard to imagine that

the networks might one day air a "broadcast cut" of an episode, then en­

courage viewers to downl6ad the longer, racier director's cut the next

afternoon. . . . W hile DVDs now give viewers the chance to catch up

between seasons, on-demand television will allow anyone to catch up at

any time, quickly and legally. Producers will no longer have to choose

between alienating new viewers with a complex storyline or alienating

the established audience by rehashing details from previous episodes . .. .

Direct downloads will give fans of endangered shows the chance to vote

with their wallets while a show is still on the air. And when a program

does go off the air, direct payments from fans might provide enough rev­

enue to keep it in production as an online-only venture. 22

Almost immediately, fans of canceled series, such as The West Wing and Arrested Development, have begun to embrace such a model as a way to sustain the shows' production, pledging money to support shows they want to watch.23 Cult-television producers have begun to talk openly about bypassing the networks and selling their series directly to their most loyal consumers. One can imagine independent media pro-

Conclusion 265

ducers using downloads as a way of distributing content that would never make it onto commercial television. And, of course, once you distribute via the Web, television instantly becomes global, pav­ing the way for international producers to sell their content directly to American consumers. Google and Yahoo! began cutting deals with media producers in the hope that they might be able to profit from this new economy in television downloads. All of this came too late for Global Frequency, and so far the producers of The West Wing and Arrested Devel­opment have not trusted their fates to such a subscription-based model. Yet, many feel that sooner or later some producer will test the waters, much as ABC-Disney did with its video iPod announcement. And once again, there are likely to be many others waiting in the wings to pounce on the proposition once they can measure public response to the deal. What was once a fan-boy fantasy now seems closer and closer to reality.

While producers, analysts, and fans have used the fate of Global Frequency to explore how we might rethink the distribution of televi­sion content, the series premise also offers us some tools for thinking about the new kinds of knowledge communities that this book has dis­cussed. If one wants to see a real-world example of something like the Global Frequency Network, take a look at the Wikipedia-a grassroots, multinational effort to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet written collaboratively from an army of volunteers, working in roughly two hundred different languages. So far, adhocracy principles have been embraced by the open-source movement, where software engineers worldwide collaborate on projects for the common good. The Wiki­pedia project represents the application of these open-source principles to the production and management of knowledge. The Wikipedia con­tains more than 1 .6 million articles and receives around 60 million hits per day.24

Perhaps the most interesting and controversial aspect of the Wiki­pedia project has been the ways it shifts what counts as knowledge (from the kinds of topics sanctioned by traditional encyclopedias to a much broader range of topics relevant to specialized interest groups and subcultures) and the ways it shifts what counts as expertise (from recog­nized academic authorities to something close to Levy's concept of col­lective intelligence). Some worry that the encyclopedia will contain much inaccurate information, but the Wikipedia community, at its best, functions as a self-correcting adhocracy. Any knowledge that gets posted can and most likely will be revised and corrected by other readers.

266 Conclusion

For this process to work, all involved must try for inclusiveness and respect diversity. The Wikipedia project has found it necessary to de­velop both a politics and an ethics-a set of community norms-about knowledge sharing:

Probably, as we grow, nearly every view on every subject will ( eventu­

ally) be found among our authors and readership . . . . But since Wiki­

pedia is a community-built, international resource, we surely cannot

expect our collaborators to agree in all cases, or even in many cases, on

what constitutes human knowledge in a strict sense . . . . We must make

an effort to present these conflicting theories fairly, without advocating

any one of them. . . . W hen it is clear to readers that we do not expect

them to adopt any particular opinion, this is conducive to our readers'

feeling free to make up their own minds for themselves, and thus to en­

courage in them intellectual independence. So totalitarian governments and

dogmatic institutions everywhere have reason to be opposed to Wiki­

pedia . . . . We, the creators of Wikipedia, trust readers' competence to

form their own opinions themselves. Texts that present the merits of mul­

tiple viewpoints fairly, without demanding that the reader accept any

one of them, are liberating. 25

You probably won't believe in the Wikipedia unless you try it, but the process works. The process works because more and more people are taking seriously their obligations as participants to the community as a whole: not everyone does so yet; we can see various flame wars as people with very different politics and ethics interact within the same knowledge communities. Such disputes often foreground those conflicting assumptions, forcing people to reflect more deeply on their choices. What was once taken for granted must now be articulated. What emerges might be called a moral economy of information: that is, a sense of mutual obligations and shared expectations about what con­stitutes good citizenship within a knowledge community.

We might think of fan fiction communities as the literary equivalent of the Wikipedia: around any given media property, writers are con­structing a range of different interpretations that get expressed through stories. Sharing of these stories opens up new possibilities in the text. Here, individual contributions do not have to be neutral; participants simply have to agree to disagree, and, indeed, many fans come to value the sheer diversity of versions of the same characters and situations.

Conclusion 267

On the other hand, mass media has tended to use its tight control over intellectual property to rein in competing interpretations, resulting in a world where there is one official version. Such tight controls increase the coherence of the franchise and protect the producers' economic in­terests, yet the culture is impoverished through such regulation. Fan fiction repairs the damage caused by an increasingly privatized culture. Consider, for example, this statement made by a fan:

W hat I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to

create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits

still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story

building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and

maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation …. I find

that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to

keep changing our characters and giving them a new life over and over.

We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their

personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character

and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can

give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of

their original creation.26

Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and reg­ulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths. Here, the right to participate in the culture is assumed to be "the freedom we have allowed ourselves," not a privilege granted by a benevolent company, not something they are prepared to barter away for better sound files or free Web hosting. Fans also reject the studio's assumption that intellectual property is a "limited good," to be tightly controlled lest it dilute its value. Instead, they embrace an understanding of intellectual property as "shareware," something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in various ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of alternative meanings.

Nobody is anticipating a point where all bureaucracies will become adhocracies. Concentrated power is apt to remain concentrated. But we will see adhocracy principles applied to more and more different kinds of projects. Such experiments thrive within convergence culture, which creates a context where viewers-individually and collectively-can

268 Conclusion

reshape and recontextualize massmedia content. Most of this activity will occur around the edges of commercial culture through grassroots or niche media industries such as comics or games. On that scale, small groups like the Sequential Tarts can make a material difference. On that scale, entrepreneurs have an incentive to give their consumers greater opportunities to shape the content and participate in its distribution. As we move closer to the older and more mass market media industries, corporate resistance to grassroots participation increases: the stakes are too high to experiment, and the economic impact of any given consump­tion community lessens. Yet, within these media companies, there are still potential allies who for their own reasons may want to ap­peal to audience support to strengthen their hands in their negotiations around the boardroom table. A media industry struggling to hold on to its core audience in the face of competition from other media may be forced to take greater risks to accommodate consumer interests.

As we have seen across the book, convergence culture is highly gener­ative: some ideas spread top down, starting with commercial media and being adopted and appropriated by a range of different publics as they spread outward across the culture. Others emerge bottom up from vari­ous sites of participatory culture and getting pulled into the mainstream if the media industries see some way of profiting from it. The power of the grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broadcast media is that it amplifies. That's why we should be concerned with the flow between the two: expanding the potentials for participation represents the greatest opportunity for cultural diversity. Throw away the powers of broadcasting and one has only cultural fragmentation. The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it, madding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media.

Read in those terms, participation becomes an important political right. In the American context, one could argue that First Amendment protections of the right to speech, press, belief, and assembly represent a more abstract right to participate in a democratic culture. After all, the First Amendment emerged in the context of a thriving folk culture, where it was assumed that songs and stories would get retold many dif­ferent times for many different purposes. The country's founding docu­ments were written by men who appropriated the names of classical orators or mythic heroes. Over time, freedom of the press increasingly

Conclusion 269

came to rest with those who could afford to buy printing presses. The emergence of new media technologies supports a democratic urge to allow more people to create and circulate media. Sometimes the media are designed to respond to mass media content-positively or negatively -and sometimes grassroots creativity goes places no one in the media industry could have imagined. The challenge is to rethink our under­standing of the First Amendment to recognize this expanded opportunity to participate. We should thus regard those things that block participation -whether commercial or governmental-as important obstacles to route around if we are going to "democratize television" or any other aspect of our culture. We have identified some of those obstacles in the book, most centrally the challenges surrounding corporate control over intellectual property and the need for a clearer definition of the kinds of fair-use rights held by amateur artists, writers, journalists, and critics, who want to share work inspired or incited by existing media content.

Another core obstacle might be described as the participation gap. So far, much of the discussion of the digital divide has emphasized prob­lems of access, seeing the issue primarily in technical terms-but a medium is more than a technology. As activists have sought a variety of means to broaden access to digital media, they have created a hodge­podge of different opportunities for participation. Some have extended access to these resources through the home, and others have limited, fil­tered, regulated access through schools and public libraries. Now, we need to confront the cultural factors that diminish the likelihood that different groups will participate. Race, class, language differences amplify these inequalities in opportunities for participation. One reason we see early adopters is not only that some groups feel more confidence in engaging with new technologies but also that some groups seem more comfortable going public with their views about culture.

Historically, public education in the United States was a product of the need to distribute the skills and knowledge necessary to train in­formed citizens. The participation gap becomes much more important as we think about what it would mean to foster the skills and knowledge needed by monitorial citizens: here, the challenge is not simply being able to read and write, but being able to participate in the deliberations over what issues matter, what knowledge counts, and what ways of knowing command authority and respect. The ideal of the informed citi­zen is breaking down because there is simply too much for any individ­ual to know. The ideal of monitorial citizenship depends on developing

270 Conclusion

new skills in collaboration and a new ethic of knowledge sharing that will allow us to deliberate together.27

Right now, people are learning how to participate in such knowledge cultures outside of any formal educational setting. Much of this learning takes place in the affinity spaces that are emerging around popular culture. The emergence of these knowledge cultures partially reflects the demands these texts place on consumers (the complexity of transme­dia entertainment, for example), but they also reflect the demands con­sumers place on media (the hunger for complexity, the need for community, the desire to rewrite core stories). Many schools remain openly hostile to these kinds of experiences, continuing to promote autonomous problem solvers and self-contained learners. Here, un­authorized collaboration is cheating. As I finish writing this book, my own focus is increasingly being drawn toward the importance of media literacy education. Many media literacy activists still act as if the role of mass media had remained unchanged by the introduction of new media technologies. Media are read primarily as threats rather than as resources. More focus is placed on the dangers of manipulation rather than the possibilities of participation, on restricting access-turning off the television, saying no to Nintendo-rather than in expanding skills at deploying media for one's own ends, rewriting the core stories our cul­ture has given us. One of the ways we can shape the future of media cul­ture is by resisting such disempowering approaches to media literacy education. We need to rethink the goals of media education so that young people can come to think of themselves as cultural producers and participants and not simply as consumers, critical or otherwise. To achieve this goal, we also need media education for adults. Parents, for example, receive plenty of advice on whether they should allow their kids to have a television set in their room or how many hours a week they should allow their kids to consume media. Yet, they receive almost no advice on how they can help their kids build a meaningful relation­ship with media.

Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpre­dictable ways. Convergence culture is the future, but it is taking shape now. Consumers will be more powerful within convergence culture­but only if they recognize and use that power as both consumers and cit­izens, as full participants in our culture.

Afterword

Reflections on Politics in the Age of You Tube

Newscaster Anderson Cooper opened the Democratic CNN /You Tube debate with a warning to expect the unexpected: "Tonight is really something of an experiment. This is something we've never done before. What you're about to see is, well, it's untried. We are not exactly sure how this is going to work. The candidates on this stage don't know how it is going to work. Neither do their campaigns. And frankly we think that's a good thing. "1 The eight candidates seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidency would face questions selected from more than 3,000 videos "average" citizens had submitted via You Tube. Speaking on NPR' s Talk of the Nation a few days before, CNN executive producer David Bohrman stressed that the new format would give the American public "a seat at the table," reflecting a world where "everyone is one degree of separation away from a video camera."2

"Welcome to my Home, Candidates," said Chris of Portland, before demanding that the presidential hopefuls provide straight answers. Many of the questions came in the confessional form many associated with YouTube-speaking directly into a handheld camera from their own living rooms and kitchens. There were some powerful moments­a relief camp worker asking about Darfur, a man holding a semiauto­matic weapon asking about gun control, a lesbian couple wondering about the candidates' perspective on gay marriage-and some questions on topics like the government's unsatisfactory response to Katrina, the minimum wage, and reparations for slavery which hadn't surfaced in previous debates.

Afterwards, most people only wanted to talk about the Snowman. One short segment featured a claymation snowman talking about

global warming, "the single most important issue to the snowmen of this country. " As the video showed Junior 's frightened face, the Snowman

27 1

272 Afterword

asked, "As president, what will you do to ensure that my son will live a full and happy life?" The candidates chuckled. Cooper explained, "It's a funny video. It's a serious question," before directing the query to Den­nis Kucinich. The serious-minded Kucinich drew links between "global warming" and "global warring," explaining how the military defense of oil interests increased American reliance on fossil fuels and describing his own green-friendly policies: "We don't have to have our snowmen melting, and the planet shouldn't be melting either. " Follow up ques­tions pursued other environmental policy issues.

CNN ended the broadcast by announcing a future debate involving the GOP candidates, but the status of this debate was far from resolved. By the end of the week, most of the front-runners for the Republican nomination were refusing to participate. Former Massachusetts gover­nor Mitt Romney put a face on their discomfort: "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."3 CNN's Bohrman deflected criticism of this particular selection: "I think running for president is serious business . . . but we do want to know that the president has a sense of humor."4

Many bloggers also argued that the Snowman demeaned citizens' participation in the debates: "By heavily moderating the questions, by deliberately choosing silly, fluffy, or offbeat videos to show the nation, CNN is reinforcing the old media idea that the Internet entertains, but does not offer real, serious discussion or insight."5 There would be a CNN /You Tube GOP debate, but behind the scenes negotiations delayed it and substantially toned down the content.

In this afterword, I will use the Snowman controversy as a point of entry for a broader investigation into the role of Internet parody during the pre-primary season in the 2008 presidential campaign. This debate about debates raises questions about the redistribution of media power, the authenticity of grassroots media, and the appropriateness of parody as a mode of political rhetoric. Parody videos, produced both by the pub­lic and by the campaigns, played an unprecedented role in shaping pub­lic perceptions of this unusually crowded field of candidates. By studying You Tube as a site of civic discourse, I want to better understand how convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture are impacting the political process.

I will pick up where chapter 6, "Photoshop for Democracy," left off­with a call for us to rethink the cultural underpinnings of democracy in response to an era of profound and prolonged media change.6 The rise of

Afterword 273

networking computing, and the social and cultural practices which have grown up around it, have expanded the ability of average citizens to express our ideas, circulate them before a larger public, and pool infor­mation in the hopes of transforming our society. To do so, however, we have to apply skills we have acquired through our play with popular culture and direct them towards the challenges of participatory democ­racy. Chapter 6 showed how Howard Dean's so-called cybercampaign actually unfolded across multiple media channels, new and old, com­mercial and grassroots. I argued that the public was seizing control over the campaign process-for better and for worse-and speculated about new forms of political rhetoric that blurred our roles as citizens, con­sumers, and fans. A closer look at the role parody videos played in Amer­ican politics in 2007 may help us to understand how we are or are not realizing the potentials of this new communication environment. Such videos give us an alternative perspective on what democracy might look like, though we have a long way to go before we can achieve anything like a revitalized public sphere in the online world. As Anderson Cooper suggests, none of us knows where this will take us-and for the moment, at least, that's a good thing.

Tu rd B l o s s o m v s . T h e O b a m atar

Debates about digital democracy have long been shaped by the fantasy of a "digital revolution," with its assumptions that old media (or in this case, the old political establishment) would be displaced by the rise of new participants, whether new media startups confronting old media conglomerates, bloggers displacing journalists, or cybercandidates over­coming political machines. The same month that CNN was hosting the debates, Mother Jones ran a cover story on the "Politics 2.0 Smackdown," thus linking the upcoming campaign to larger conversation about how the participatory platforms and social networks of "web 2.0" were impacting culture and commerce. The Mother Jones cover juxtaposes Karl Rove, dressed like an old-style politico, with Barack Obama, represented as a video game avatar. The caption reads, "Turd Blossom vs. The Oba­matar," while an asterisked comment tells us that "Turd Blossom" was George W. Bush's nickname for his longtime political adviser and "The Obamatar" was a phrase the magazine coined. Mother Jones summed up the stakes: "Forget party bosses in smoky backrooms-netroots evangel-

274 Afterword

ists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold minicon­ventions in Second Life. The halls of power will belong to whoever can tap the passions of the online masses. That kid with a laptop has Karl Rove quaking in his boots. And if you believe that, we've got some left­over Pets.com stock to sell to you."7 Mother Jones reproduced the logic of a "digital revolution," even as it expressed skepticism that the changes would be as dramatic as advocates predicted.

This depiction of media change as a zero-sum battle between old powerbrokers and insurgents distracts us from the real changes occur­ring in our media ecology. Rather than displacing old media, what I call convergence culture is shaped by increased contact and collaboration between established and emerging media institutions, expansion of the number of players producing and circulating media, and the flow of con­tent across multiple platforms and networks. The collaboration between CNN (an icon of old media power) and YouTube (an icon of new media power) might be understood as one such attempt to work through the still unstable and "untried" relations between these different media sys­tems. Promoters and pundits alike represented the CNN /You Tube debates as a decisive event, raising expectations that opening up a chan­nel for public participation might broaden the political agenda, rewrite the campaign rhetoric, or reveal the candidates' authentic personalities. Yet, it also represented a temporary tactical alliance between old and new media players on the eve of an important political struggle.

You Tube has emerged as a key site for the production and distribution of grassroots media-ground zero, as it were, in the disruption in the operations of commercial mass media brought about by the emergence of new forms of participatory culture. Yet, we need to understand YouTube as part of a larger cultural economy. First, YouTube represents the meeting ground between a range of different grassroots communi­ties, each of which has been producing indie media for some time, but are now brought together by this shared media portal. By providing a distribution channel for amateur and semiprofessional media content, YouTube incites new expressive activities-whether through formal events like the CNN /You Tube debates or on a day-to-day basis. Having a shared site means that these productions get much greater visibility than they would if distributed by separate and isolated portals. It also means that they are exposed to each other 's activities, learn quickly from

Afterword 275

new developments, and often find themselves collaborating across com­munities in unpredictable ways. YouTube has become a simple signifier for these alternative sites of production, creating a context for us to talk about the changes taking place.

Second, YouTube functions as a media archive where amateur cura­tors scan the media environment, searching for meaningful bits of con­tent, and bringing them to a larger public (through legal and illegal means). They can do this in response to mass media content, as for exam­ple they focused much more attention on Stephen Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club dinner, or to amateur content, as in the case of a home video recording of candidate George Allen's racist dismissal of a South Asian cameraman which effectively foreclosed his entry into the 2008 presidential race. Collectors are sharing vintage materials; fans are remixing contemporary content; and everyone has the ability to freeze a moment out of the "flow" of mass media and try to focus greater attention on what just happened.

Third, YouTube functions in relation to a range of other social net­works; its content gets spread via blogs and LiveJoumal entries, via Face book and MySpace, where it gets reframed for different publics and becomes the focal point for discussions. YouTube content might be described as spreadable media, a term which shares some of the conno­tations of "memes" or "viral video," both commonly used terms, but which carries with it a greater sense of agency on the part of the user. Metaphors from genetics or virology still carry with them notions of cul­ture as self-replicating or infectious, whereas thinking of YouTube con­tent as spreadable focuses attention on both properties of texts and the activities of participants. Talking about YouTube content as spreadable also enables us to talk about the importance of distribution in the cre­ation of value and the reshaping of meaning within You Tube culture.

Participation occurs at three distinct levels here-those of production, selection, and distribution. Each of these functions and relationships plays a role in the following analysis. None of these activities is new, even in the context of digital media, but YouTube was the first to bring all three functions together into a single platform and direct so much attention on the role of everyday people in this changed media land­scape. Skeptical readers of this book have argued that in focusing so much attention on fans, I remain in the borderlands of the culture. They miss two points: first, in the age of convergence culture, there may no longer be a strong mainstream but rather a range of different niche sites

276 Afterword

of media production and consumption; second, in the cultural context of You Tube, what might once have felt like fringe activities are increasingly normalized, with more and more people routinely checking out and dis­cussing content produced by amateur media makers and with mass media institutions routinely reworking their practices to incorporate this alternative site of cultural activity. The CNN / You Tube debates might be seen as an illustration of the negotiations now occurring between these alternative models for how culture gets produced and distributed.

Romney framed his distaste for the Snowman in terms of issues of respect, asserting that there was a proper way to speak to someone who wants to be the next president of the United States. Senior newscaster Dan Rather, however, argued that behind-the-scenes negotiations reflected more generalized anxieties about questions from unexpected quarters: "Candidates do hate, genuinely hate, audience participation, because they like to control the environment. "8 For Romney, the Snow­man was a haunting specter of all that worried him about the new digi­tal culture. During his press conference, for example, he mistakenly linked YouTube to public concerns about sexual predators, confusing conservative criticisms against the multimedia portal with those con­cerning MySpace.9 Yet, Romney's campaign had itself launched an effort to get his supporters to create and circulate their own political advertise­ments. 10 None of the candidates-Republican or Democratic–could afford to ignore any potential platform that might allow them to reach undecideds or mobilize supporters. Techniques that seemed radical when deployed by the Howard Dean campaign four years earlier were now taken for granted by the most mainstream candidates; even estab­lishment figures were experimenting with web 2.0 tools to increase their visibility and lower costs. Candidates were adopting avatars and moving their message into Second Life and other virtual worlds; they were using social network sites like MySpace and Facebook to rally their supporters, giving them means to contact each other and organize "meetups" with­out having to go through the centralized campaigns; candidates were sending out regular podcasts and Webcast messages to their supporters. Romney and the other candidates might fear the disruptive impact of web 2.0, but none of them was willing to forgo its affordances, and some candidates-Ron Paul for example-thrived online even as they failed to generate any traction through traditional media channels.

Bloggers and netizens often distrusted the YouTube/ CNN debates for the opposite reason: because CNN's role in selecting the final questions

Afterword 277

protected mainstream media's historical gatekeeping and agenda-set­ting functions. Writing in The Huffington Post, media reform leader Marty Kaplan dismissed what he called the "faux populism" of the "Rube­Tube" debate as an act of corporate ventriloquism: "The notion that the CNN /You Tube debate represents a grass-roots triumph of the Internet age is laughable. The 4,000+ videos are pawns; the questioners are invol­untary shills, deployed by the network producers in no less deliberate, calculating and manipulative a fashion as the words and stories fed by teleprompters into anchors' mouths."11

T h e Powe r to N egate a n d th e Powe r to M a rgi n a l i ze

Far from advocating digital revolution, CNN's Bohrman openly dis­missed new media platforms as "immature" and questioned whether the user-moderated practices of YouTube would have been adequate to the task of determining what questions candidates should address, given how easily such processes could be "gamed." Bohrman often cited what he saw as the public's fascination with "inappropriate" questions: "If you would have taken the most-viewed questions last time, the top question would have been whether Arnold Schwarzenegger was a cyborg sent to save the planet Earth. The second-most-viewed video question was: Will you convene a national meeting on UFOs?"12

Here, the CNN producer showed limited understanding of the role which parody was going to play in the buildup to this presidential cam­paign. Tongue-in-check questions about cyborgs and aliens allowed many to thumb their noses at the official gatekeepers and their antici­pated dismay at being "forced" to put such content onto the public air­waves. Such gestures reflect a growing public skepticism about old media power as well as uncertainty about how far to trust emerging (though still limited and often trivial) efforts to solicit our participation. We might link this phenomenon back to the discussion of the Vote for the Worst movement among American Idol fans, for example. Given a toe­hold into mass media, the public seems to take great pleasure in its abil­ity to negate its normal operating procedures, forcing the networks to act against their own interests if they wish to preserve the credibility of these mechanisms for popular participation.

Some such material made it into the final broadcast but only as part of an opening segment in which a smirking Cooper lectured the public

278 Afterword

about videos that did not belong on national television: "Dressing up in costume was probably not the best way to get taken seriously. " Here, participatory culture's power to negate ran up against old media's power to marginalize. Old media still defines which forms of cultural expression are mainstream through its ability to amplify the impact of some user-generated content while labeling other submissions out of bounds. On You Tube, there were thousands of submissions, each equally accessible; on CNN, a corporate selection process had narrowed the field to maybe thirty questions; and the news coverage of the debates might focus on only three or four (maybe only the Snowman video). At each step along the way, the field narrowed, but those messages which sur­vived gain greater attention.

Because the public openly submitted their videos through a partici­patory media channel like YouTube, the selection process leaves traces. Even if we can't know what happened within the closed-door meetings of the CNN producers, we can see which submitted questions got left out, which issues did not get addressed, and which groups did not get represented. The thousands of posted videos drew significant traffic to You Tube prior to the debates, suggesting that the promise of greater par­ticipation did generate greater public interest than more traditional debates.

Afterwards, some who felt excluded or marginalized deployed You Tube as a platform to criticize the news network. anonymousAmeri­can, a rotund man in a Mexican wrestling mask who speaks with a work­ing-class accent, posted a video labeled "Fuck You, CNN. " He describes his anger over the fact that CNN deployed his masked face but not his words: "This could lead the public to imagine that my question was insulting or irrelevant. We all know that CNN would never air anything insulting such as a host asking the only Moslem member of Congress if he's a terrorist or irrelevant like a very old man spending his show inter­viewing people like Paris Hilton (That would be Larry King, wouldn't it?) . " Links lead to the question he submitted (calling for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq) and other political videos concerning the Bush administration's crackdown on civil liberties. His mask allows him both to speak as an everyman figure and to represent visually the process of political repression; it also links his videos to the Luchador tradition, where Mexican wrestlers often used their masked personas to speak out against social injustice. 13 CNN may have taken away his voice, but YouTube offered him a way to speak back to that silencing power.

Afterword 279

T h e B i rth of a S n ow m a n

Writing i n The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler suggests, "What institutions and decisions are considered 'legitimate' and worthy of compliance or participation; what courses of action are attractive; what forms of interaction with others are considered appro­priate-these are all understandings negotiated from within a set of shared frames of meaning. "14 All involved in contemporary media rec­ognize that our future culture will be more participatory, but there is widespread disagreement about the terms of our participation. A range of public controversies are erupting around the terms of our participa­tion-struggles over intellectual property and file sharing, legal battles between media producers and fans, conflicts between web 2.0 compa­nies and the communities they serve, or disagreements over the nature of citizen participation in televised debates. As average citizens acquire the ability to meaningfully impact the flow of ideas, these new forms of participatory culture change how we see ourselves ("through new eyes-the eyes of someone who could actually interject a thought, a crit­icism, or a concern into the public debate") and how we see our society (as subject to change as a consequence of our deliberations).l5 What "pissed off" anonymousAmerican at CNN was the way the debates had raised expectations of greater citizen participation and then offered up a high-tech version of America's Funniest Home Videos. Such heightened expectations motivated thousands to grab their camcorders or cell phones and produce videos for submission. Some were making their first videos, but many more had acquired their skills as media producers through more mundane and everyday practices, through their produc­tion of home movies or their participation in various fan communities, or through media sharing sites.

The strange history of the Snowman illustrates this process at work. The Snowman video was produced by Nathan and Greg Hamel, two brothers from Minneapolis.16 Their debate video repurposed animations from an earlier, less-politically-oriented video showing a samurai attack­ing Billiam the Snowman while his young child watched in horror. The name of the Snowman, his high-pitched voice, and the video's aggres­sive slapstick paid homage to the Mr. Bill videos originally produced by Walter Williams for Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. The Mr. Bill seg­ments represented an earlier chapter in the history of the networks' rela­tionship to user-generated content: Williams had submitted a Super-S

280 Afterword

reel in response to Saturday Night Live's request for home movies during its first season.17 The impressed producers hired Williams as a full-time writer, resulting in more than twenty subsequent Mr. Bill segments, all maintaining the low-tech look and feel of his original amateur produc­tions. Williams's subsequent career might have provided the Hamel brothers with a model for their next step-from broad slapstick towards political satire. Starting in 2004, Williams deployed Mr. Bill as a spokesperson in a series of public service announcements about envi­ronmental issues (specifically, the threat to Louisiana wetlands).18

The Hamel brothers were surely surprised that Billiam had become the focal point for responses to the debate. Empowered by the media attention, they produced a series of other videos confronting Romney, the man who refused to debate a snowman. While these subsequent videos were not incorporated into the GOP debate, they did attract other media attention. When interviewed by CNN about a video in which Bil­liam tells Romney to "lighten up slightly, " the brothers used their expla­nation to direct attention at a growing controversy within the blogosphere. During a campaign appearance in New Hampshire, Rom­ney had been photographed holding a supporter 's sign, which read "No to Obama, Osama, and Chelsea's Mama" (part of a larger effort to play on xenophobic concerns about Barack's "foreign sounding" name).19 Another amateur videomaker had captured a confrontation at an Iowa campaign appearance where Romney told a critic of the sign to "lighten up slightly," insisting that he has little control over what his supporters might bring to an event.20 Bloggers were circulating the video of what they saw as a disingenuous response. This Romney video fits into a larger history of footage captured by amateur videomakers that reached greater public visibility via YouTube and sometimes found its way into mainstream coverage. For example, one popular video showed John McCain joking with supporters, singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" in imitation of a classic rock-and-roll tune. The Hamel brothers were using their five minutes of fame to direct the media's attention onto a brewing controversy that might further undermine Romney's credibility.

Over just a few weeks, the Hamel brothers progressed from sopho­moric skit comedy to progressively more savvy interventions into media politics, demonstrating a growing understanding of how media travels through You Tube and how You Tube intersects broadcast media. As they did so, they formed an informal alliance with other "citizen journalists" and inspired a range of other amateur producers to create their own

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snowman videos, including those which included a man wearing a snowman mask, or which recycled footage from old Christmas specials, in hopes that they might get caught up in Billiam' s media coverage.

CNN had urged the public to find "creative" new ways to express their concerns, yet the producers clearly saw many of the more colorful videos as the civic equivalent of Let 's Make a Deal-as so many people in colorful costumes huckstering to get on television. Some certainly were hungry for personal fame, but others were using parody to dramatize legitimate policy concerns. In the case of the Snowman, his question about global warming was not outside the frames of the current political debate, but the use of the animated Snowman as a spokesperson broke with the rationalist discourse that typically characterizes Green politics. The Snowman parody spoofed two of American politics' most cherished rhetorical moves. Snowmen are represented here as one more identity politics group; snowmen are made to "embody" larger societal concerns. We might compare Billiam's attempt to speak about the environment on behalf of snowmen with the oft-cited image of Iron Eyes Cody weeping as a Native American over the littering of the American landscape dur­ing the Keep America Beautiful campaign produced for the 1971 Earth Day celebration, or for that matter the ways that Al Gore deployed drowning polar bears to dramatize the threat of global warming in An Inconvenient Truth. The video also spoofs the ways both conservative and progressive groups make policy appeals in the name of protecting inno­cent children from some perceived threat.21 We might link Billiam's frightened offspring back to the famous LBJ spot depicting a little girl plucking the petals from a daisy over the soundtrack of a countdown to a nuclear bomb blast.

Presidential candidates have long deployed animations and dramati­zations as part of the rhetoric of their advertising campaigns, so why should voters be prohibited from using such images in addressing can­didates? What's different, perhaps, is the way such videos appropriate popular culture contents (Mr. Bill) as vehicles for their message. As Ben­kler notes, mass media has so dominated American culture for the past century that people are necessarily going to draw on it as a shared vocab­ulary as they learn how to use participatory media towards their own ends: "One cannot make new culture ex nihilo. We are, as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of the industrial period. If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new plat-

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form for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture. "22

Parody represents one important mode for reworking mass media materials for alternative purposes. Television commercials, for example, often provide simple, easily recognized templates for representing ideo­logical concerns. A group called SmallMediaXL produced a series �f spoofs on the differences between Republicans and Democrats modeled on a popular Mac/PC campaign. While the Apple commercials repre­sent the PC as a stuffed-shirt middle manager and the Mac as a free­thinking hipster, SmallMediaXL depicts Republicans as "very good at looking after the interests of big business" and the Democrats as "being better at the people stuff. " Here, the Mac / PC template invites us to com­parison shop for presidential candidates, creating new personas who dramatize the differences between the two major parties and the conse­quences of their policies. No doubt, the producers turned to advertising images and rhetoric to express their critiques, recognizing that the power of Madison Avenue had already ensured that this iconography bore deep cultural resonances and would be widely recognized by a range of potential viewers.

Paro d y i n H igh P l a c e s

In "The Spectacularization of Everyday Life," Denise Mann discusses the ways that early television deployed parody to signal its uncomfort­able relationship to Hollywood glamour, positioning its technology­and its own stars-as closer to the public than their cinema counterparts.23 Early television often spoofed the gap between Holly­wood and reality, making fun of its overdramatic style and cliche situa­tions, depicting television characters (such as Lucy in I Love Lucy) as fans who want but are denied access to film stars. In the process, these pro­grams helped to negotiate television's emerging social status, stressing the authenticity and everydayness of its own modes of representing the world. Something similar has occurred as digital media has negotiated its own position within the media landscape. As we saw in chapter 4, amateur media makers often signal their averageness through parody, openly acknowledging their limited economic resources or technical means compared to more polished commercial entertainment.

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Hollywood stars often embraced self-parody when they appeared in early television, showing that they were also in on the joke and were able to make the adjustments needed to enter our homes on television's terms. Something similar occurs when presidential candidates embrace self-parody as a campaign tactic. In one famous example, the former president and first lady reenacted the final moments of The Sopranos. Here, "Hillary" and "Bill" seek to become more like average Americans, tapping a YouTube trend in the aftermath of the HBO series's wrap-up. Through this video's jokes about Hillary's attempts to control her hus­band's diet and Chelsea's difficulty with parallel parking, the Clintons hoped to shed some of the larger-than-life aura they gained during their years in the White House and to reenter the lifeworld of the voters. A candidate who was otherwise closely associated with a culture war cam­paign against media violence sought to signal her own fannishness; a candidate often seen as uptight sought to show that she could take a joke.

Or take the case of a Mike Huckabee campaign commercial, originally broadcast but also widely circulated via YouTube. The spot's opening promise of a major policy announcement sets up its punchline: action­film star Chuck Norris is unveiled as the Arkansas governor 's policy for securing the U.S. /Mexico border. The video thus seeks to establish Huckabee's credentials as a man's man, even as it makes fun of his need to do so. The video both publicizes-and spoofs-the role of celebrity endorsements in American politics. And the notoriously underfunded Huckabee campaign hoped its grassroots circulation would attract mainstream media attention.

M a n ufactu r i ng D i s s e n t

Traditional campaign rhetoric stresses the seriousness of the choices Americans face, rather than the pleasures of participating within the political process. Both progressives and conservatives have displayed discomfort with the tone and content of popular culture. Most attempts to mobilize popular culture towards political ends are read contemptu­ously as efforts to dumb down civic discourse.

In a recent book, Dream: Re-imaging Progressive Politics in an Age of Fan­tasy, Stephen Duncombe offers a different perspective, arguing that politicos need to move beyond a knee-jerk critique of popular entertain-

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ment as "weapons of mass distraction" and learn strategies for "appro­priating, co-opting and most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change. "24 Playing on a Wal­ter Lippman phrase brought back into public awareness through Noam Chomsky's critique of propaganda (Manufacturing Consent), Duncombe calls on progressives to learn new strategies for "manufacturing dis­sent " : "Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be partici­patory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace real­ity and truth but perform and amplify it."25

Duncombe cites Billionaires for Bush as a primary example of this new kind of political spectacle. Billionaires for Bush used street theater to call attention to issues, such as campaign finance reform, media con­centration, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Seeking to dodge attempts by conservative critics to paint their efforts as "class warfare," the group adopted a more playful posture, dressing up like cartoon-character ver­sions of the wealthy, showing up at campaign stops, and chanting along with other Bush supporters. These "Groucho Marxists" encouraged sup­porters and bystanders alike to enter into the joking process, not simply to make fun of Bush but to see political activism as a fun activity. As we described in chapter 6, similarly playful tactics were adopted by True Majority during the 2004 campaign-including their spoof of The Apprentice to imagine George W. Bush being fired for incompetency.

As YouTube's cultural visibility has increased, more activists have adopted True Majority's "serious fun" approach, making parody videos as a more playful and pleasurable mode of political discourse. Consider, for example, how the HP Alliance, discussed in chapter 5, formed a part­nership with Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed by the Service Employees International Union as a focal point for criticism for the retail chain's employment practices. The HP Alliance and the Boston-based comedy troupe the Late Night Players translated the union's agenda into a series

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of campy, over-the-top videos depicting further adventures impacting Hogwarts and the wizarding world. Harry and Hermione (who is played in drag) discover that the traditional business in Diagon Alley has been closed by "you know which superstore." If they want to keep "magic" in their community, Harry and his friends must do battle with Lord Waldemarte (whose Smiley Face exterior masks his evil intentions, such as exploiting his house elves, driving out local competitors, and refusing to provide health care to his underlings). Andrew Slack of the alliance told a Chicago Tribune reporter, "We don't want anyone feeling that they're being lectured at. We want to break away from that to what they're interested in, and humans tend to be interested in laughing. "26 The circulation of these spoofs, in tum, drove traffic back to the Wal-Mart Watch Website, where one could find a more straightforward discussion of their protest against the company.

Bare ly Po l i t i c a l ?

Most writing about the CNN /You Tube debates gets framed in terms of amateur media makers and commercial network, overlooking how many videos were submitted by semiprofessionals or even by editorial cartoonists for various newspapers and magazines. We might better understand the videos produced for the debates as emerging from the mixed media economy Yochai Benkler describes in The Wealth of Net­works. Media producers with different motives-governmental agencies, activist groups, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, fan communities-operate side by side, using the same production tools and distribution networks. YouTube constitutes a shared portal through which these diverse groups come together to circulate media content and learn from each other 's practices. In this shared distribution space, short­term tactical alliances between such groups are commonplace. On YouTube, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between videos produced by fans as a playful tribute to a favorite media property like Harry Potter, those produced by average citizens seeking to shape the agenda of the campaigns, those produced by activist organizations to promote a specific political objective, and those produced by small-scale comedy groups seeking to break into the cpmmercial mainstream. Such distinctions may not necessarily be productive, given the ways that a

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range of grassroots intermediaries grab content of all kinds and recircu­late it through a range of blogs, discussion boards, and social network sites often without regard to the circumstances of its origin.

A case in point might b·e the series of Obama Girl videos. The initial video, "I Got a Crush . . . on Obama," was produced by advertising exec­utives Ben Relles and Rick Friedrick in collaboration with actress and model Amber Lee Ettinger and singer I comedian Leah Kauffman. These media professionals wanted to use their sexy and irreverent content to generate a buzz that might draw attention to a newly launched online comedy site. In the original video, the scantily clad Obama Girl describes how she fell in love with Obama during his talk to the 2004 Democratic convention, signals her growing passion for the man and his ideas through stroking his campaign posters and kissing his photograph on a Web site, and has the candidate's name printed on her panties. News commentators often reduce women's political interests to which male candidate is most attractive, reading them less as concerned citi­zens and more as groupies for the campaigns. The Obama Girl videos tum such representations around, transforming the candidates into beefcake embodiments of these women's erotic fantasies. The rapid­paced images and the multilayered wordplay reward careful decoding, requiring consumers to learn more about the campaigns in order to "get" the jokes. But like the other media "snacks" associated with YouTube, they may also be consumed on a more casual level, and we cannot easily account for the range of meanings which emerged as these videos were spread within different online communities, passed between friends and co-workers, or mobilized by activist groups and campaign workers.27

The buzz pushed the giggling Obama Girl onto the cable news circuit, where she became one more pundit commenting on the election season. The producers announced a partnership with Voter Vision, a multi­media political campaign marketing program which wanted to demon­strate the political value of "viral video. " Somewhere along the way, the videos had moved from entertainment to activism, from a parody of the campaign into something that was explicitly intended for activist pur­poses. The slippery nature of such distinctions is suggested by the com­pany's name-"Barely Political."

This hybrid media environment and the active circulation of content beyond its points of origin make it hard to tell where any given video is

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coming from-in both the literal and the metaphoric sense. Increasingly, we are seeing fake grassroots media being produced by powerful insti­tutions or economic interests-what has become known as "Astroturf. "

AI Gore's Penguin Army is perhaps the best known example of an Astroturf Internet parody. This cut-up animation spoof of An Inconve­nient Truth was first posted by a user named Toutsmith from Beverly Hills, but further investigation revealed that it was professionally pro­duced by the DCI Group, a commercial advertising firm whose clients included General Motors and Exxon Mobil; the firm also had historically produced content for the Republican Party.28

One of the best known Internet parodies of the 2007 campaign season, a remix of Apple's " 1 984" commercial where Hillary Clinton stands in for Big Brother, has a similarly dubious history. The video turned out to be the work of Phil de Vellis, an employee of Blue State Digital, an Inter­net company that provided technology to both the Richardson and Obama presidential campaigns. As both the company and the cam­paigns sought to distance themselves from his activities, de Vellis was forced to resign his job . He told the readers of The Huffington Post:

I made the "Vote Different" ad because I wanted to express my feelings

about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an indi­

vidual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people

who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it-by

people of all political persuasions-will follow. This shows that the future

of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens. The campaigns

had no idea who made it-not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton cam­

paign, nor any other campaign. I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my

apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software),

uploaded it to You Tube, and sent links around to blogs . … This ad was not

the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed.29

The game has indeed changed, but it isn't necessarily clear what game is being played here or by whom. Will we see other such videos circulated by groups or campaigns which hope to maintain a "plausible deniabil­ity" about their roles in generating their content? What parallels might be drawn between this material which circulates without an acknowl­edged source and the "swift boat" efforts four years earlier which simi­larly claimed independence from the Bush campaign?

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Paro d y as Ped agogy

We cannot reduce the complexity of this hybrid media ecology to simple distinctions between top-down and bottom-up, professional and ama­teur, insider or outsider, old and new media, Astroturf and grassroots, or even "serious fun" and "barely political. " In such a world, grassroots and mainstream media might pursue parallel interests, even as they act autonomously. Consider, for example, a video which TechPresident identifies as one of the top "voter-generated videos" of 2007. The video starts with a clip of Joseph Biden joking during one debate appearance that every sentence Rudolph Giuliani utters includes "a noun, a verb, and 9 / 11 , " and follows with a database of clips showing the former New York mayor referencing 9 / 1 1 . The video was produced and distributed by Talking Points Memo, one of the most widely read progressive polit­ical blogs. In many ways, all the parody does is amplify Biden's own political message, supporting his claims that Giuliani was exploiting a national tragedy for his own political gains. The ready access of digital search tools and online archives makes it easy for small scale operators, like the bloggers, to scan through vast amounts of news footage and assemble clips to illustrate their ideas in a matter of a few days. Such rapid response practices emerged late in the 2004 presidential campaign, when both Democratic and Republican supporters used amateur videos to support their competing interpretations of the presidential debates (such as a series of videos disproving Dick Cheney's claim that he had never previously met John Edwards).

Often, these playful tactics get described in terms of the need to adopt new rhetorical practices to reach the so-called digital natives, a generation of young people who have grown up in a world where the affordances of participatory media technologies have been commonplace. Researchers debate whether these young people are, in fact, politically engaged since their civic lives take very different forms from those of previous generations. They are, for example, more likely to get informa­tion about the world through news comedy shows and blogs than through traditional journalism. There is conflicting evidence about their willingness to vote, but most research shows that they are very con­cerned about issues such as the war and the environment and willing to translate their concerns into community service. W. Lance Bennett con­trasts two different framings of this data: under what he calls the "dis­engaged youth paradigm," forms of participatory culture are seen as

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"distracting" emerging citizens from more serious inquiry, seducing them with the freedoms offered by virtual worlds rather than encourag­ing them to transform real-world institutions. Under what he calls the "engaged youth" paradigm, there is no such rigid separation between the kinds of civic engagement these young people find through their involvement in game guilds or the expressive freedom they experienced through circulating their do-it-yourself videos on YouTube and other forms of citizenly discourse. Young people are finding their voice through their play with popular culture and then deploying it through their participation in public service projects or various political move­ments.30

The activist deployment of parody videos can be understood as an attempt to negotiate between these two perspectives. Young people have come to see You Tube as supporting individual and collective expression; they often feel excluded by the policy-wonk language of traditional pol­itics and the inside-the-beltway focus of much campaign news coverage. Parody offers an alternative language through which policy debates and campaign pitches might be framed, one that, as Duncombe suggests, models itself on popular culture but responds to different ethical and political imperatives. The often "politically incorrect" style of Internet parody flies in the face of the language and assumptions by which pre­vious generations debated public policy. Such videos may not look like "politics as usual," yet the people who produced and circulated these videos want to motivate young voters to participate in the electoral process. Such a model sees Internet parodies as springboards for larger conversations-whether through blogs and discussion forums online or face-to-face between people gathered around a water cooler.

These parody videos bring the issues down to a human scale, depict­ing Bush as an incompetent reality show contestant, Romney as someone who's afraid to go man-to-man with a snowman, Giuliani as obsessed with 9 / 11, or Edwards as a narcissist with fluffy hair. Duncombe has argued that news comedy shows, such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, foster a kind of civic literacy, teaching viewers to ask skeptical questions about core political values and the rhetorical process that embodies them: "In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. "31 We might connect Dun-

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combe's argument back to Benkler 's larger claim that living within a more participatory culture changes how we understand our place in the world, even if we never choose to actively participate. Yet, there is also the risk, as Duncombe points out, that such parody "can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for is to get a good laugh out of it all." Here, skepticism gives way to cynicism. Nothing ensures that a politics based in parody will foster one and not the other.

T h e D own s i d e s of D igital D e m o c racy

If this chapter can be read as a defense of the Snowman as a meaningful and valid participant in a debate about the future of American democ­racy, it is at best a qualified defense. I have tried to move us from an understanding of the CNN /You Tube debates through a lens of digital revolution in favor of a model based on the ever more complicated inter­play of old and new media and on the hybrid media ecology that has emerged as groups with different motives and goals interact through shared media portals. I have tried to move beyond thinking of the Snow­man as trivializing public policy debates towards seeing parody as a strategy which a range of different stakeholders (official and unofficial, commercial and grassroots, entertainers and activists) are deploying towards their own ends, each seeking to use YouTube as a distribution hub.

While I believe very firmly in the potential for participatory culture to serve as a catalyst for revitalizing civic life, we still fall short of the full realization of those ideals. As John McMurria has noted, the democratic promise of YouTube as a site open to everyone's participation is tem­pered by the reality that participation is unevenly distributed across the culture. An open platform does not necessarily ensure diversity.32 The mechanisms of user-moderation work well when they help us to evalu­ate collectively the merits of individual contributions and thus push to the top the "best" content; they work badly when they preempt the expression of minority perspectives and hide unpopular and alternative content from view.

Chuck Tyron has argued that the speed with which such videos are produced and circulated can undercut the desired pedagogical and activist goals, sparking short-lived and superficial conversations among

Afterword 29 1

consumers who are always looking over their shoulders for the next new thing.33 To put it mildly, the user comments posted on YouTube fall far short of Habermasian ideals of the public sphere, as was suggested by one blogger 's parody of the CNN /YouTube debates. Here, the candi­dates interact in ways more commonly associated with the online responses to the posted videos:

Sen. Christopher Dodd: omg that video was totaly gay Sen. Barack Obama: Shut up Dodd thats offensive when u say gay

like that. Former Sen. Mike Gravel: Check out my vids at youtube.com/ user I

gravel2008. Rep. Dennis Kucinich: to answre your question bush is a facist who

only wants more power. hes not even the president you knopw, cheny is. i would b different because i would have a vice presi­dant that doesnt just try and control everything from behind the seens/

Sen. Hillary Clinton: C H E N E Y C A N T BE P R E S I D ENT B E C UZ THE C O N S T I T U T I O N SAYS T H E V I C E PRESIDENT I S N O T THE PRESI­D E N T WHY DON'T U TRY R E A D I N G THE C O N S TITUTION SOME­T I M E ? ? ? ? ? ? ! ! ! ! 34

In this parody, YouTube is associated more with mangled syntax, poor spelling, misinformation, and fractured logic than with any degree of political self-consciousness or citizenly discourse. Yet, YouTube cannot be understood in isolation from a range of other blogging and social net­work sites where the videos often get discussed in greater depth and substance.

The insulting tone of this depicted interaction captures something of the no-holds-barred nature of political dialogue on YouTube. In an elec­tion whose candidates include women, African Americans and Hispan­ics, Catholics and Mormons, groups which have historically been underrepresented in American political life, online parody often embraces racist, sexist, and xenophobic humor, which further discour­ages minority participation or conversations across ideological differ­ences. One popular genre of Internet parodies depicts insult matches between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or their supporters (typi­cally represented as women and minorities). One prototype of this style of humor was a MADtv sketch, which drew more than half a million

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viewers when it was posted online. The sketch ends with a Giuliani sup­porter clapping as the two Democratic campaigns rip each other apart, suggesting an interpretation focused on the dangers of party infighting. But this frame figures little in the public response to the video, whether in the form of comments posted on the site (such as one person who com­plained about being forced "to pick between a Nigger and a woman") or videos generated by amateur media producers (which often push the original's already over-the-line humor to even nastier extremes). Here, "politically incorrect" comedy provides an opportunity for the public to laugh at the unseemly spectacle of a struggle between women and African Americans, or may offer a justification for trotting out ancient but still hurtful slurs and allegations-women are inappropriate for public office because of, haw, "that time of the month"; black men are irresponsible because they are, haha, likely to desert their families, to go to jail, or to experiment with drugs.

Another Web site posted a range of Photoshop collages about the cam­paign submitted by readers, including ones showing Hillary in a yellow jump suit waving a samurai sword on a mocked-up poster for Kill Bill, Obama depicted as Borat in a parody which plays upon his foreign sounding name, and Obama depicted as a chauffeur driving around Mrs. Clinton in an ad for a remake of Driving Miss Daisy.35 Such parodies use humor to put minority candidates and voters back in "their place," suggesting that women and blacks are inappropriate candidates for the nation's highest office. This problem may originate from the interplay between old and new media: racist and sexist assumptions structured the original MADtv segment, self-consciously playing with racial and gender stereotypes even as it reproduces them; these racist and sexist assumptions may account for why Internet fans were drawn to it in the first place; the subsequent reactions amplify its problematic aspects, though the amateur responses stoop lower than network standards and practices would allow.

In doing so, Internet parody producers fall far short of the "ethical spectacles" Duncombe advocates: "A progressive ethical spectacle will be one that is directly democratic, breaks down hierarchies, fosters com­munity, allows for diversity, and engages with reality while asking what new realities might be possible."36 By contrast, too many of the parody videos currently circulating on YouTube do the opposite:-promoting traditional authority, preserving gender and racial hierarchies, frag­menting communities, discouraging diversity, and refusing to imagine

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any kind of social order other than the one which has long dominated American government. Speaking to a Mother Jones reporter, Lawrence Lessig explained, "If you look at the top 1 00 things on YouTube or Google it's not like it's compelling art. There's going to be a lot of ques­tions about whether it's compelling politics either. We can still play ugly in lots of ways, but the traditional ways of playing ugly are sort of over."37 All of this is to suggest that Romney would have faced things far more frightening than snowmen if he had ventured into the uncharted and untamed space of YouTube rather than the filtered and protected space provided him by CNN.

The advent of new production tools and distribution channels have lowered barriers of entry into the marketplace of ideas. These shifts place resources for activism and social commentary into the hands of everyday citizens, resources which were once the exclusive domain of the candi­dates, the parties, and the mass media. These citizens have increasingly turned towards parody as a rhetorical practice which allows them to express their skepticism towards "politics as usual," to break out of the exclusionary language through which many discussions of public policy are conducted, and to find a shared language of borrowed images that mobilize what they know as consumers to reflect on the political process. Such practices blur the lines between producer and consumer, between consumers and citizens, between the commercial and the amateur, and between education, activism, and entertainment, as groups with com­peting and contradictory motives deploy parody to serve their own ends. These tactics are drawing many into the debates who would once have paid little or no attention to the campaign process. As they have done so, they have brought to the surface both inequalities in participa­tion and deep-rooted hostilities between groups within American soci­ety. Democracy has always been a messy business: the politics of parody offers us no easy way out, yet it does offer us a chance to rewrite the rules and transform the language through which our civic life is conducted.

For better and for worse, this is what democracy looks like in the era of convergence culture. Those of us who care about the future of partici­patory culture as a mechanism for promoting diversity and enabling democracy do the world no favor if we ignore the ways that our current culture falls far short of these goals. Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as somehow "resistant" to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-up means to keep others down. Too often, we have fallen into the trap of see-

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ing democracy as an "inevitable" outcome of technological change rather than as something which we need to fight to achieve with every tool at our disposal. Too often, we have sought to deflect criticism of grassroots culture rather than trying to identify and resolve conflicts and contradictions which might prevent it from achieving its full potentials. Too often, we have celebrated those alternative voices which are being brought into the marketplace of ideas without considering which voices remain trapped outside. As this book has suggested, the current moment of media change is bringing about transformations in the way other core institutions operate. Every day we see new signs that old practices are subject to change. If we are to move towards what Pierre Levy called an "achievable utopia," we must continue to ask hard questions about the practices and institutions which are taking their place. We need to be attentive to the ethical dimensions by which we are generating knowl­edge, producing culture, and engaging in politics together.

YouTubeO iogy

anonymousAmerican,"Fuck You, CNN" http: I I www. youtube.com/ watch ?v=xJRGb2zlBTO

"Ask a Ninja Special Delivery 4 'Net Neutrality' " http : I I www. youtube.com / watch?v=H69eCY cDcuQ

Billiam the Snowman "CNN /You Tube Debate: Global Warming" http : / / www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OBPnnvl47Q

Billiam the Snowman, "The Original Video" http : / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=BJpZD_pGCgk

Billiam the Snowman "Billiam the Snowman Responds to Mitt Romney" http : / / www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtU9ReDhFiE

CNN, "Snowman vs. Romney" http: / /www.youtube.com /watch?v=Nm Vlm_jRHH4

"Donald Trump Fires Bush" http : / / www.youtube.com / watch?v=RrYXY_jYzX8

"Keep America Beautiful" http : / / www.youtube.com/watch?v=87SOjmdYCWI

Lyndon Johnson, "Daisy" http : / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=63h_ v6uf0Ao

Bill Holt, "Mitt Romney Meets Jaguar" http: / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=Swr4JruUTpU

Hillary Clinton "Sopranos Spoof" http : / / www.youtube.com / watch?v=shKJk3RphOE

"Jackie and Dunlap on the CNN YouTube Democratic Debate" http : / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=ZrPnWoZTjlQ

295

296 YouTubeOiogy

John Edwards, "Hair" http : / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=Yl qG6m9SnWI

MADtv, "Hillary vs. Obama" http: / / www.youtube.com /watch?v= YqOHquOkpaU

Mike Huckabee, "Chuck Norris Approved" http: I / www. youtube.com/watch?v=MDUQW8LUMs8

Mckathomas, "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" http: I I www. youtube.com / watch ?v=o-zoPgv _n Y g

Obama Girl, "I Got a Crush . . . On Obama" http : / /www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

ParkRidge47, "Vote Different" http : / /www.youtube.com /watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

RCFriedman, "Snowman Challenges Mitt Romney to Debate" http: I I www. youtube.com / watch ?v=e9RnExM4lu4&feature=related

RogerRmJet, "John Edwards Feeling Pretty" http: / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q

SmallMediaXL, "I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican" http : I I www. youtube.com / watch ?v=ApNyDMj7zLI

This Spartan Life, "Net Neutrality" http : / /www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8q4FUY5fc

Toutsmith, "Al Gore's Penquin Army" http: / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI

TPMtv, "I'm Rudy Giuliani and I Approve This Message" http: / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=qQ7-3M-YrdA

"YouTubers & Snowmen Unite AGAINST Romney! " http : / / www.youtube.com /watch?v=8xvEH-6R16o&feature=related

3 1 4 r

N otes to the C o n c l u s i o n

1. Ari Berman, "AI Gets Down," The Nation, April 28, 2005, http: / / www.the nation.com / doc.mhtml?i=2005051 6&c=1 &s=berman.

2. See Anita J. Chan, "Distributed Editing, Collective Action, and the Con­struction of Online News on Slashdot.org," Master 's thesis, Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 2002. For more on participa­tory journalism, see Dan Gilmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the Peo­ple, For the People (New York: O'Reilly, 2004); and Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

3. Berman, "AI Gets Down." For more on the debates about Current, see Niall McCay, "The Vee Pee's New Tee Vee," Wired News, April 6, 2005, http: / I www.wired.com/news/ digiwood / 0,1412,67143,00.html; Farhad Manjoo, "The Television Will Be Revolutionized," Salon, July 7, 2005, http: / /www.salon.com/ news/ feature / 2005 /07 / 11 / goretv / print.html; Tamara Straus, "I Want My AI TV," San Francisco magazine, July 2005, http:/ / www.sanfran.com /home/ view _story I 625 I ?PHPSESSID=d8ef14a995fed84316b461491 d1 6f667.

4. Manjoo, "The Television." 5. Berman, "AI Gets Down." 6. Ashley Highfield, "TV's Tipping Point: W hy the Digital Revolution Is Only

Just Beginning," October 7, 2003, Paidcontent.org, http:/ /www.paidcontent .org/ stories / ashleyrts.shtml.

7. "BBC Opens TV Listings for Remix," BBC Online, July 23, 2005, http: / I news.bbc.co. uk/ 1 / hi / technology I 47071 87.stm.

8. W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 54.

9. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 10. Betsy Frank, "Changing Media, Changing Audiences," MIT Communica­

tions Forum, April 1, 2004, http: / /web.mit.edu/ comm-forum /forums/changing _audiences.html.

11. George Gilder, Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 66.

12. Ibid., p. 68. 13. Marshall Sella, "The Remote Controllers," New York Times, October 20,

2002.

Notes to the Afterword 3 I S

14. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991).

15. Marcia Allas, e-mail interview with author, Fall 2003. 16. Kimberly M. De Vries, "A Tart Point of View: Building a Community of

Resistance Online," presented at Media in Transition 2: Globalization and Con­vergence, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., May 10-12, 2002.

1 7. Quotations in this paragraph taken from Warren Ellis, "Global Frequency: An Introduction," http:/ / www.warrenellis.com/ gf.html.

18. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. xii.

19. Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York: Tor, 2003).

20. All information and quotes in this paragraph taken from Michael Gebb, "Rejected TV Pilot Thrives on P2P, " Wired News, June 27, 2005, http: / / www .wired.com /news / digiwood / 0,1412,67986,00.html.

2 1 . Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail," Wired, October 2004, http: / / www .wired.com /wired/ archive / 12.1 0 / tail.html?pg=3&topic=tail&topic_set.

22. Ivan Askwith, "TV You'll Want to Pay For: How $2 Downloads Can Re­vive Network Television, " Slate, November 1, 2005, http: / /www.slateuk.com/ id /2129003 / .

23. Andy Bowers, "Reincarnating The West Wing: Could the Canceled NBC Drama Be Reborn on iTunes?" Slate, January 24, 2006, http: / / www.slateuk.com/ id /2134803 / .

24. Information taken from the Wikipedia entry a t http: / /en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia.

25. "Neutral Point of View," Wikipedia, http:/ / www.infowrangler.com I phpwiki/ wiki.phtml ?title= Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_ view.

26. Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, " 'The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (eds.), Theorizing Fandom (New York: Hampton, 1998).

27. My ideas about the kinds of media literacies required for participation in the new convergence culture were developed into a white paper for the MacArthur Foundation. See Henry Jenkins, with Katherine Clinton, Ravi Purushatma, Alice Robison, and Margaret Weigel, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 2 1 st Century, http: / / projectnml.org.

N otes to the Afterword

1. For a video archive of the debates, see http: / / www.youtube.com/ democraticdebate and http: / / www.youtube.com/ republicandebate. I am in­debted to Colleen Kaman and Steve Schultz for their assistance in tracking down references and materials for this study.

3 I 6 Notes to the Afterword

2. Talk of the Nation, "Digital Democracy: You Tube's Presidential Debates," July 18, 2007, http: / / www.npr.org / templates / story / story.php?storyid=120 62554.

3. Jose Antonio Vargas, "The Trail: The GOP YouTube Debate Is Back On," Washington Post, August 12 2007, http: / / blog.washingtonpost.com/ the-trail / 2007 /08/ 12 / the_gop_youtube_debate_is_back_1 .html.

4. Ibid. 5. Jason Rosenbaum, "It's a Trap!," The Seminal, November 29, 2007,

http: / /www.theseminal.com/2007 / 11 /28/its-a-trap/ . See also Micah L. Sifry, "How CNN Demeans the Internet," TechPresident, November 29, 2007, http: / I www.techpresident.com/blog/ entry / 1 4238/how_cnn_demeans_the_internet.

6. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

7. "Fight Different," Mother Jones, August 2007, p. 27. 8. "The YouTube-ification of Politics: Candidates Losing Control,"

CNN.com, July 18, 2007, http: / / edition.cnn.com/2007 / POLITICS / 07 / 1 8 / youtube.effect / index.html.

9. Ana Marie Cox, "Will the GOP Say No to YouTube?," Time.com, July 27, 2007, http: / /www.time.com/time/ politics /article/0,8599,1 647805,00.html.

10. "Team Mitt: Create Your Own Ad!," http: / / www.jumpcut.com / groups/ detail?g_id= 5DD3300851 A311D C8DA1000423CF381C .

1 1 . Marty Kaplan, "The C N N / Rube Tube Debate," The Huffington Post, Novem­ber 25, 2007, http:/ /www.huffingtonpost.com/ marty-kaplan / the-cnnrubetube -debate_b _7 4003.html.

12. Sarah Lee Stirland, "CNN-YouTube Debate Producer Doubts the Wisdom of the Crowd," Wired, November 27, 2007, http: / / www.wired.com/ politics/ onlinerights I news I 2007 I 11 I cnn_debate#.

13. Heather Levi, "The Mask of the Luchador: Wrestling, Politics, and Iden­tity in Mexico," in Nicholas Sammond (ed.), Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasures and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp.96-131 .

14. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 274-275.

15. Ibid. 16. See "Snowman vs. Romney-CNN Reports," http: / / www.youtube

.com/ watch?v=NmVIm_jRHH4. 17. "Walter Williams," http: / / www.mrbill.com/ wwbio.html. 18. Cain Burdeau, "Mr. Bill Tapped to Help Save La. Swamps," Associated

Press, as reprinted at http: / / www.mrbill.com/ LASinks.html. 19. http:/ /www.tmz.com/2007 / 07 /21 / mitt-catches-s-t-over-hillary-bashing

-sign / .

Notes to the Afterword 3 1 7

20. http:/ / www.tmz.com /2007 / 07 /23 / rornney-on-osarna-sign-lighten-up/ ; http: / / www.dailykos.com/ story /2007/ 7/23 / 31 656/4987.

21. For more discussion, see Henry Jenkins, "Childhood Innocence and Other Modem Myths, " The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York Uni­versity Press, 1998), pp. 1-40.

22. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 200. 23 . Denise Mann, "The Spectacularization of Everyday Life: Recycling Hol­

lywood Stars and Fans in Early Television Variety Shows," in Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (eds.), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (Min­neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 41-70.

24. Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007), p. 16.

25. Ibid., p. 17. 26. Sandra M. Jones, "Wal-Mart Case as Dark Lord," Chicago Tribune, July 1

2007, p.xx. 27. Wired represented YouTube as central to a new culture of media snacks in

"Snack Attack !," Wired, March 2007, http: / / www.wired.com/wired/ archive/ 15.03 I snack.html.

28. Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2006, http: / I online.wsj.com/ public/ article / S B 1 1 54571 771 98425388-0TpYE6bU6EGvfSqtP8_hHjJJ77I_2006 0 8 1 0 .html ?mod=blogs.

29. Phil de Vellis, aka Parkridge47, "I Made the 'Vote Different' Ad," The Huff­ington Post, March 21, 2007, http: / / www.huffingtonpost.com/ phil-de-vellis-aka -parkridge/ i-made-the-vote-differen_b_43989.html.

30. W. Lance Bennett, "Changing Citizenship in a Digital Age," in W. Lance Bennett (ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 2-3.

31. Henry Jenkins, "Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 23, 2007, http: / / henryjenkins .org /2007 /07 /manufacturing_dissent_an_inter.html.

32. John McMurria, "The YouTube Community," FlowTV, October 20, 2006, http: / / flowtv.org / ?p=48.

33. Chuck Tyron, "Is Internet Politics Better Off Than It Was Four Years Ago?," FlowTV, September 29, 2007, http: / /flowtv.org / ?p=797.

34. "Transcript: CNN /You Tube Democratic Debate," Defective Yetii, http:/ / www.defectiveyeti.com /archives /0021 72.html.

35. Each of these examples taken from images submitted to http:/ / political humor.about.com /.

36. Duncombe, Dream, p. 126. 37. "Interview with Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law Professor, Creative

Commons Chair," Mother Jones, June 29, 2007, http: / / www.motherjones.com/ interview /2007/07 /lawrence_lessig.html.