 I'm David Thorburn, director of the MIT Communications Forum. This, I think, maybe will probably go down in my memory banks as my favorite forum, because our guest today is an old friend of mine and the individual who I think, in my own experience, in the 20 years he was at MIT, had the largest impact on the institution of any colleague I've known in the humanities. Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in 2009 after 20 years at MIT, where, among other things, he was the founding director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and held the endowed chair, the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities Chair. He's the author or editor of at least 12 books. The number may have changed in the last six months, because Henry is one of the most prolific writers in media studies, as well as an immensely influential teacher and blogger. Some of the titles of his books can give you some sense of the reach and impact of his work, Convergence Culture. You can hear in the titles of his books the themes that have organized media study over the last decade or more. Another of his titles, an earlier book, an immensely influential book, really giving rise to the whole area of fan studies, of fan culture. The title of the book is Textual Poachers, Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It's almost impossible to overemphasize the impact that Henry's work has had on media studies in the United States over the last 25 years. And one of the things I hope to do in our conversation today is talk about some of the leading themes in his work, as well as some of the things that have to do with his own biography, to try to figure out where this remarkable man came from in some respects. So the forum will follow our usual pattern. Henry and I will talk for about 40 minutes or 45 minutes, and then we'll turn it over to the audience for, I hope, even more intense and interesting conversation. Henry's work is so diverse and covers so many different territories that I count on the audience to cover gaps that don't come up in our general conversation. Henry, maybe we couldn't start by asking you to. I'd like to start by asking you to think back. And I'm motivated here by what is in my memory one of your most beautiful pieces of writing, the commemorative obituary you wrote for your mother. And in the course of reading that, I came to a much clearer understanding of how your early life, your childhood, and before you and your years in high school already showed qualities that define the work that came later. And I wonder if you'd talk a bit about that. Yeah, sure. It's really difficult to know where to start and talking about one's family. One place to start would be to think about something that's hanging in the wall of my office at USC that was not hanging in my wall here, but there's a picture of Pogo, Walt Kelly's comic strip character. And this was a picture that it hung on my father's office at Georgia Tech when he was an undergraduate student there in the 1950s. It was drawn by my mother, who carefully recreated it from Walt Kelly's original artwork. And she had stuffed it away in the attic someplace for a very long period of time. And after they passed away, I found that along with a photograph of my father's study and realized that this had been there that far back. So I took it and hung it on the wall of my office at USC in many ways to remind you of where I came from. And one part of that is, of course, Georgia. And Walt Kelly's really interesting because he's from Connecticut. He never lived in Georgia, yet he was accepted by Georgians in the midst of a period of great regional divide as someone who spoke in the voice of Georgia, who captured something about the culture of the South. And that work had always spoken to me. And my father's well-worn copy of the paperback versions of Pogo were very, very important to me growing up. And to me, as point of connection for me to my father, who was in many ways a very practical man, he went to Georgia Tech. He was trained as an architect. He ran a construction company. He had a very applied sense of the universe. And I remember at one point he came to me. And we were traveling together. He pointed to a building, a church that he had built in his construction company, and said, see that. That will still be here in 20 years. So what are you putting your name on that will still be here in 20 years? Well, last year, the 20th anniversary copy of Textural Poachers came out. And I feel a certain sense of pride that as Victor Hugo said holding the book, this will be that, right? But the sense of a continuity is there in a way of responding to my father's. My mother also was an artist, right? She never would have called herself that. She was always doing crafts. She was always making things. But the fact that she was able to draw Pogo in such a convincing way and create something that I still value as a work of art to the present day says something about my mother. My mother was also a clown. She did clowning for charity. And I grew up seeing my mother as a clown. There's a portrait that I still have in my living room that her best friend painted of her and her clown garb, which is the way I will always remember my mother. So when I was on the Donahue show years ago and got beaten up trying to defend violent video games and called my mother in the phone rather sheepishly because it had been a humiliating process. And her line to me was, you forgot to make them laugh. And more importantly, I forgot to laugh myself in the process. And so that's the advice from my mother that I always remember. So that picture in summary embodies an awful lot about them. They were both very active in the Church, the Baptist Church. And part of their philosophy always was that if someone in your community asks for your help and you can give it, you are morally and ethically obligated to do so. And that's a philosophy that I have lived with for most of my life. The challenge is they were doing it in a small local congregation. And I do it in an age of global internet. And so the demands, the potential of what your community is, who's asking for help, how much help can you possibly process in a day, is shift pretty profoundly. But there is a sense to me that when I think about the choices I make as a professional, they're already governed by that commitment to community, to service, to trying to give yourself over to other people. And if you can help someone, you're an obligation to do it. It's not, do I have the time? Do I have the inclination? It really is your commitment. And that was very important. But my father and mother never really got the media studies side of this. But when I was about to go off to grad school, my grandfather pulled me aside and took me into his tool shed, and he had, which was full of wooden crosses he'd made, and metal he'd done. He was a sheet metal worker. And he said, I wanted to give you this. And he gave me a check. Not a significant amount of money, but enough money that meant something for him who was living on his retirement funds and so forth. And he's recalled the experience he had of leaving the farm in rural Georgia, going off to World War I, and making the decision when he came back, when everyone in the family expected him to return to the farm to move to Atlanta to be part of the city. For him, that was the connection he made to me going off to graduate school. And he, on some levels, understood more deeply than anyone else the choice I was making to leave the South and go to school and study something that no one around, no one in my family understood how you could possibly imagine you could make a living studying popular culture and graduate school. And going off with a PhD someplace, as my father would say, one of those doctors who can't do you any good. And that sense of going off to do was, but my grandfather, that connected to my grandfather. So when I get to grad school, one of the first things that I read that was really deeply significant to me was Raymond Williams' essay, Culture is Ordinary, where Williams is describing his journey from the farm country, from the rural hinterland, from working class background, into elite institutions and the choices that he made and so forth. And what I admire most about that essay are, first of all, the ways in which Williams refuses to forget where he came from, that Williams responds to the experience of those people whose taste may differ from his post-education, whose background and goals differ from his, but he still feels a connection to. And a deep respect for the ordinariness of culture, the ordinariness of political voice, the importance of respecting those voices and bringing them into the conversation. And secondly, his refusal to accept theories that clash with his own lived experience. There are places in that essay where Raymond Williams just draws a line and says, that's what I'm being taught in the school, but it doesn't make sense in relation to the life I've led, the people I've known, the conversations I've participated in. And for me, the first phases of my graduate career were very much like that, that I was coming into grad school in a moment, where the theory was all about subject positioning and the powerlessness of the audience and so forth. And I was looking for a way that respected the fan communities I'd been part of in high school, the kinds of cultural remix practices that I'd seen in my own family, whether it's my mother copying a picture or comic strip and making it something personal that she gives to my father, whether it's my grandmother, who was a remix artist because she was a quilter in Appalachia, that those kinds of experiences had to be respected by the theories that were there. And I kept questing, found cultural studies, found John Fisk, found Raymond Williams, and that gave me a language to talk about some of the things in my background that I had not, couldn't talk about in the theoretical vocabulary that was dominating media studies in the late 70s, early 80s. So there's hardly a part of popular culture on which Henry has not written wonderfully in some sense, just from my own memory of things of his that I've read. You remember your essay on wrestling? Of course. I'm not quite that old that I'm forgetting my essays yet. You've written so much, I'm not sure you can remember it. So wrestling, children's culture, Henry has written widely about children's culture. And of course, at the center of his work, especially in the early part of his career, were these theories of fan appropriation. And maybe we should talk a little bit more about that, Henry, because it was such a central aspect of the early part of your career and continues, in some sense, to be part of your perspective on media culture. Yeah, I mean, I had been, as I write in the beginning of Textual Poachers, I was a fan well before I was an academic. Indeed, being passionate about media was what drove me into studying it in the first place. So the only language I have to write about popular culture is from the inside. And in fact, the nature of popular culture is it creates intimacy, it creates emotional intensity. Academics who try to write about popular culture from the outside, I think, miss so much about the phenomenon. You have to write within its thrall. You have to write in relation to its place in our everyday life, to me, to fully capture why popular culture matters, what the stakes are in popular culture and popular politics. So beginning to write about fans was a natural outgrowth of that. As I said, the book I wrote to Textual Poachers is now 20 years old. That's the book where I coined the phrase participatory culture and began to try to figure out what that phrase meant. I still struggle with the phrase. Every year I discover more deep questions to ask about whether that's an adequate way to describe what's going on. And partially, it's because the phrase participation cuts across so many different disciplines that I was drawing at that moment almost entirely on a cultural studies, media studies trajectory. The same moment in time, there was a lot of resurgence of interest in participatory politics and political philosophy has dealt very deeply in that. There was a huge tradition in educational theory, whether we're talking about Thomas Dewey or Paolo Frere or Seymour Papert, who was a huge influence on me when I arrived at MIT, those all have theories of participation judging. Lav, we are now at a point where we have to bring the fan study strand into dialogue with those other traditions. And so fans continue to influence and inform my work. The last few years, I've really been trying to create dialogues across some of these different traditions. So I did a piece for Convergence last year where I exchange of Nico Carpenterra, who's a European-based political philosopher who's thought deeply about participation. And it really is trying to explore how cultural theories of participation and political theories of participation can learn from each other. Nick Koldry and I just added a series that will run an international journal of communication that brings together about 20 scholars across a range of different disciplines talking through what we mean by participation and it will be divided into creativity, politics, labor, education, knowledge and learning, and technologies and platforms. And we'll run over the next six months, once a month online. Really rich dialogue that has emerged from critical theorists, more emancipatory theorists talking about what we mean for it. But for me, my point of entry into that was through fandom. And I think it's still a very powerful idea. Present time, I'm really applying those ideas to thinking about participatory politics and youth movements, mostly in the United States, but around the world, where people are drawing on the language of popular culture and the practices of participatory culture to try to make change. Henry, one thing I'd like to ask you about is, to press you harder on, we mentioned this earlier when we were planning this conversation. There's a way in which a kind of politically radical critique of your position would say something like, look, all this talk about participation is a kind of mystification because the fact is what these fans are dealing with has been handed to them by the corporate culture. It's not as if writing a new version of Star Trek is as imaginative as creating your own world. How do you answer that complaint? Well, there's a bunch of assumptions built into that. I mean, I think history tells us the people built on the culture that's around them that we draw on the resources which are there. So we could describe the painters of the Renaissance as derivative because all of their stories come from the Bible by that same logic, right? They're painting all this endless Madonna's and children and they're not making up anything new and any new stories emerging from that. Yet we would say the measure of that is why it was meaningful to them, why it's meaningful to the culture, the aesthetics they brought to bear on it. So the fact it's derivative to me is not the crucial question. The fact that they are bound up with a set of categories reproduced by a commercialized industry is more troubling to me, right? And this question is, we can only build those things. Our raw materials allow us to construct. That those materials bring constraints for them seems important. And I've always talked about fandom as a mixture of fascination and frustration. There is a tendency to think for people to assume what I'm saying is all resistance all the time, that people are breaking out of pop culture, that they're simply masters of their own universe. And that's not what I'm arguing, although that's the radical side of what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that they're not totally constrained, contained, manipulated by media, that they are making choices in relation to it. And I think those choices are collective rather than individual, which is why fandom as a kind of social formation is very interesting to me. It's a space where we form collective opinions, forge collective myths, engage with a civic imagination, that that part is very, very important to me. But they are working with a culture that has been patriarchal, homophobic, colonialist. We can say all kinds of negative things about the values of that culture. They push and pull at it, but they are the consummate negotiated readers, right? We are building on a mythology whose elements we don't fully understand or fully engage with. The challenge fandom is facing right now has to do with race, right? I think fandom has been really, fairly progressive in the politics of gender and sexuality through the years. I think it has been far less so in the politics of race and many in fandom would agree with that. There have been heated debates. We're just trying to figure out how to keep up with what fandom is gonna mean in a world where we will soon live in a minority majority nation. And the television shows we're dealing with, say Sleepy Hollow would be this year's example or scandal, are shows which are dealing with diversity in more complex ways. Fans often reproduce incredibly narrow stereotypes when they think about that diversity. The fandom still remains a largely white space. And in most fan conventions I go to, there's inevitably a panel or a group of white people sit around two or three people of color and ask why aren't there more people like you here? And the result is that those people don't come back next time, right? So being grilled in that way is not a very productive way to foster a politics of diversity. And so in so far as fandom has been useful as a way of thinking forward about gender and sexuality, I'm now struggling to think about what are the exclusions or marginalizations or hierarchies, the silences that come into play where we talk about race in America today. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of fandom would have to answer for by those axes. So I'm not claiming this is a radical transformation that rejects everything, the commercial culture around it. I am saying that it is more diverse, more open to critique than the media that it's built on. And it's in part because of the social structures that support that questioning in some areas and not in others. I'd like to sort of almost pause in a certain way, although I think the argument about Henry's ideas will continue. But I don't want too much time to elapse before we turn to your time at MIT, Henry. And we can, I think, continue the discourse of your ideas. But look, in a way, what we were saying essentially was that your early years, your high school years encouraged you or led you to certain forms of study later on that had to do with popular culture and the kinds of experiences you yourself had found so meaningful. We didn't mention science fiction or you're dressing up in goth outfits, which I regret. I still imagine Henry the teenager dressed as a goth. That would be a little a-historical, but I did wear trench coats all the way through high school and did feel a strong connection with goth culture, especially post-Columbine when the notion of a trench coat mafia came into play. So after that, I wore a black trench coat when I went to speak in high schools, including some that trench coats were banned and sort of daring the principal to make me take it off. And that spoke a lot to the politics of cultural self-representation that was going on in some of those schools. Well, so one way to make the transition to your time at MIT is to ask you about, some of you may not know this, but among other things, apart from being a riveting teacher, Henry was also a housemaster and had a much more intimate connection to the MIT undergraduate culture than most professors do. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about how you think your time at MIT not only shaped your own thinking and attitudes, but also more generally what you thought about MIT, your views of MIT? Well, for 14 years I was housemaster at Senior House, which to my mind was the most robust community that I've ever been able to participate in. And it's a community during most of the time that was under siege by the MIT administration who inevitably are spooked or frightened by the kind of radical difference that Senior House can absorb. It was to my pride, one of the most queer friendly dorms at the MIT campus, if not the most friendly. It was a place where there was lots of experimentation with identity, where there's a strong kind of anti-authoritarian or anarchistic culture. And it was a place that kept students sane and safe, who might not have fit otherwise within the MIT system. So from my point of view, it was a culture that is worth defending and worth defending vigorously. So much of my time there was working with those students and I learned an enormous amount from working with the students inside that dorm. But also providing them a model of how to argue effectively for their own interest within a system where they were often stigmatized, often treated as not really truly the cart of MIT and so forth and helping them win battles and accept defeats in battles that were fought along the way as the administration sought ways to rein in what they saw as the darker sides of that culture. My sense is that they suffered then and suffer now enormously from stereotypes that people at MIT have about what Senior House is, what its values are, what its core system is. At the heart, I saw a community where people gather 40, 50 years later at Steer Roast as one of the largest alumni events that MIT has and give energies and support to a community of students which threatens MIT frankly, which wants everyone's identification to be with the Institute and not with their living group. So I see one of the most important things I did in MIT was working with the students in that dorm and providing as much support for it as I could through the times that are there and particularly the final four or five years there which I felt that MIT had become risk adverse and liability obsessed and that those things make it very difficult to support a rigorous student culture at the Institute. So I think it was, and how I worked with those students really grows out of being committed to cultural studies, being committed to an idea that there's dignity, there's respect, that our core value should be building community, supporting different diversity and allowing people to explore and develop their own modes of cultural expression even if some of them are unorthodox or radical from other people's points of view. It's also the community that supports the arts at MIT probably as vigorously as any other part of the Institute. The number of students involved in student drama, student music, student art production in that dorm is extraordinary and all you have to do is walk down the hall of senior house and see the creative expression that's taking place there. So one of my biggest regrets, and I have two regrets about leaving MIT. One was leaving CMS and the other was leaving senior house. Other parts of MIT, I have less regrets about leaving. Okay, talk a little bit about the way in which your time at MIT shaped your thinking, Henry. Well, I think to be at one of the worlds, to be a humanist at one of the world's largest and most important technological institutions is to be a walking, talking oxymoron. That there is a contradiction built into doing humanities in MIT, but that's also the contradiction we face in the culture at large in a period of prolonged media change, of a period of media and transition is the phrase that we both have put a lot of our energies into trying to explore. If technological change is driving much of the changes of the culture, we cannot do cultural studies without understanding the role of technology in the culture. I was lucky to arrive here at a time that the foundations for what comparative media studies would be was built by people like yourself, right? That David has been a champion of popular culture, of television studies from quite early on, had assembled a team of gifted scholars from a variety of disciplines who were committed to doing multidisciplinary work about media and popular culture at MIT. And I felt really privileged to be mentored by you, to be invited into that community and to make a difference. And that is foundational to what CMS became. That we, you and I disagreed over the years on a number of things, but I think at the core, one of the things I respect so much about you David, is your own commitment to the dignity of everyday people to the importance of citizenly discourse, to the value of multidisciplinary work, and particularly to the role of history in understanding media change. And so those are foundation- I never thought my admiration for Henry would be increased, but it's happened. You know, and so finding myself in that context paved the way for what we built. And then the partnership with William was every bit as foundational to building a notion of what comparative media studies could be, that again, I have such enormous gratitude for everything I've learned from David, especially in the, or from William, especially in the international arena, especially in terms of historical perspectives, especially in terms of his diplomatic ability to diffuse problems. At a time we used to joke about the problem du jour, you know, the problem of the day as we were struggling to hold this thing together and make it work. And I think the greatest thing we've accomplished is the quality of our students. And I now work with a number of CMS students on the West Coast. I see them all over the world. We train the generation who we wanted to think beyond academic careers. The goal originally was about 40% going into university posts, 60% into other things, to be leaders in those other areas, and we pulled that off, right? If you look at the 40% who are academics, people like Aspen Puntabacher, you know, are extraordinary leaders in the field who are worth paying attention to and are really, I feel, enormous successes. But if you talk to the people in industry, we have people at the top of Etsy and Kickstarter, some of the companies that have been transformative in the recent digital economy. We have people in key roles in educational technology. We have people who are pushing forward trans-media storytelling in a variety of ways. They came out of a program that had a commitment to application as well as theory. And the phrase applied humanism was a controversial one while I was here. It still should be a controversial one. It was never meant to be an easy phrase, but I think we've created a generation of people who embody that in their work and are still in contact with each other across silos, which is very much what we set out to do. And so my work has partially been about fostering those students, and I now carry those ideas with me to USC. So I taught in the fall last year course on how to be a public intellectual, essentially. And it really was looking at how to do a public-facing dimension of your research, how to help young PhD students learn to communicate more effectively through the press, through blogosphere, through op-ed pieces, how to be committed to opening up a dialogue with the public about their research. And a number of the people we brought through were people like Sam Ford, like the folks from the Atter Education Arcade here who have done the really groundbreaking work thinking about how we mix research into practice. And so that dimension of CMS is also something I carry with me from MIT to the other work that I do, and it's something I think about every day. One of the things that I learned when I was talking to Henry preparing for this conversation is that one of his most recent and interesting gigs is that he's on the jury for the Peabody Awards this year. The Peabody Awards, as some of you must know, are awards given to television and radio programming, both fiction and non-fiction programming of all sorts, and they're among the, probably the most distinguished television awards of their kind. And it seemed to me that, and Henry had mentioned to me that his work on the Peabody jury had re-immersed him in a tremendous amount of contemporary television and radio, and we thought that might be an opportunity for us to talk a bit more about issues that are at the center of his work, but also in some degree my own perspectives. So Henry, let's begin by, let me begin just by asking me what your sort of general impression is of the welter of new material that you've been looking at. Has it changed your sense of the media landscape in some ways? Well, it's been an extraordinary process. I mean, to be a jury member, keep in mind there are about 2,000 entries that come into the Peabody Award group to measure, and all of them have to be seen by at least two members of a 14-member jury. So you spend an extraordinary amount of time looking at television from all over the world, looking at television from all kinds of networks, all kinds of modes of production, as well as radio, as well as web-based content. An ever-escalating number of different kinds of modes of production across many, many categories that none of us watch all of those categories in our everyday lives. So drilling into documentary for me has been a revelation in something that I'm thinking deeply about, because I'm a pop culture guy and I don't watch a lot of documentaries. The overall quality of what's being produced is extraordinary. I mean, I think that, and you're seeing groups like Al Jazeera, which really Al Jazeera America just started as a network less than 14 months ago, produce consistently high-quality work which is asking questions that no other piece of American media is asking, and doing it with the highest professional standards from the West, but not necessarily beholding to the same frames that we see in US-based, have seen in US-based media before. That's extraordinary to see. We're seeing massive numbers of documentaries that go briefly through the theater and go directly to television via independent lens and point-of-view and dozens of other series that are showing documentaries. We're seeing quality drama. You can't even count the number of quality dramas that are produced right now across a range of genres. You're seeing the explosion of diversities and platforms, right? Yeah, so, and I think I was telling you just a little while ago, or tea, that I think when the history of television was written the last 18 months will represent one of those tipping points where everything from the Kickstarter funding of Veronica Mars to the role of Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, so Xbox in production and distribution of television are changing fundamentally what we mean by television in our culture and what counts as quality, whose interests are represented. And we're starting to see things like Sleepy Hollow, as I mentioned earlier, represent diversity in fundamentally new ways. Sleepy Hollow is a massive a show, but at the same time it's a show that's got more minority cast members than the white protagonist and which is forcing it to deal with the black family in a totally different way than I've seen on television to see the multicultural workplace in ways we haven't seen on television before. And because it goes back and forth in time to represent the history of race in America in radically different ways, to introduce black history during the Revolutionary War period is something we can discuss and represent on American television. So everywhere I look, I'm seeing incredibly great things. Now we were arguing that this could be just a transitional moment. My theory is that we may be in a moment like the moment of the 1970s for American movies that is an astonishingly rich moment, the moment of all those remarkable film. Partly a function of the fact that television had become so dominant that the movies were liberated in a certain way. But it didn't last. And I'm wondering whether or not, then what happened in the 80s and 90s where Star Wars and Schwarzenegger movies succeeded all the wonderful films that had been made in the early and middle 70s. I'm wondering if that's a moment, like if we may be in such a moment of television. So we always are the glass half full, glass half empty duo up here. But I think that there is some truth and some value in wondering what are the conditions which will sustain the level of cultural production and creativity that we're seeing at the present moment. I think that's a very real question. So one analogy to the 70s that would be interesting is whether broadcast television is now the Dr. Doolittle's and the big bloated Hollywood epics that were being coming out alongside of which the mean streets and the Nashville's and so forth are defining their identities. And if the web and web production which is lowering the cost, lowering barriers to marketplace and is resulting in more diverse producers entering the system are the kind of challengers, the gorillas who will challenge it. And so what comes out the other side, particularly post-comcast merger is something to be very concerned about because a comcast merger could signal some of the concentration in the digital sphere that many of us have been concerned about or at least the death of net neutrality which will then make the participatory dimensions of the web harder to achieve and sustain. So there are danger points to pay attention to as we think about that level of creativity. We know that change comes in jerks, right? It's not a revolution that's won and then we go on, it's a series of evolution and so if there's progress and regression there's people pushing for new opportunities, some of which are achieved, some of which fail to materialize. So it's easy to be an optimist at any moment because you can see all the change that's possible but it also realistically if you look at the larger view there are going to be pushbacks and some of the changes that we're seeing right now may not be sustained. Well, Henry, let me ask you to comment on something else we discussed briefly earlier but I think is really worth expanding on. We ran a conference, a median transition conference after you left devoted to what we call the instability of platforms. It was called unstable platforms, the peril and promise of transition and essentially what we're talking about there has to do with the sort of immense variety of ways in which let's limit ourselves just to narrative forms are being delivered today and this instability is potentially very disturbing because it seems unending. I wonder if you have a comment about that. Well, I mean, we can think of several ways in which it's potentially disturbing as well as ways that it's potentially liberating. One would be the inability to archive what's being produced, right? It's already easier to write the history of the first decade of film than the history of the first decade of the web. We are not holding on to these things if the platforms are constantly changing, chapters of our history will be lost and our ability to understand the past. As someone who studies comics, we are just now getting to the point where comics have forcefully reclaimed 500 years of cultural production as a canon that we can actually draw on and make sense of the history of the medium and that artists are building on and quoting in ways where they count on a literacy of their readers to understand what's going on. Digitally, that's gonna be very hard to sustain and so we are losing things that we will not get back and so the illusion that the web has everything on it denies the reality that the history of the web is losing things daily and that history is an endangered species in a digital culture. The second is if artists are preoccupied with changing platforms, they are not actually preoccupied with the nature of their medium and the genres and materials and I think the game industry is a great example of that where if the basic tools of your medium shift every two to three years, the depth of the medium has not achieved what its potential are. As someone who was an early to proclaim games as a potential art form, it's continually disappointed by the superficiality of the stories and experiences that are offered us by games compared to the technical sophistication. So the technology is growing, our depth of understanding of the media or how it can express the world has not matured and that I think is a deeply troubling development and I would argue technological instability plays a crucial role in making that happen. That said, I also get very excited by the kind of unexpected juxtapositions of media that are possible in a moment of change and my fascination with trans media is partially the idea that we're seeing new combinations of media, new mixtures of affordances, new kinds of experiences, new experimentation that is incredibly rich and we're seeing deeper and great things. So I would say the Lizzie Bennett Diaries last year which takes Shane Austin's Pride and Prejudice and translates it into the world of social media as a profound intervention, that it's in mixing webcam footage with Twitter and so forth, it actually tells us something interesting about the world that Austin's describing and the politics of reputation, of gossip, of social connection and so forth that it found a way to use these emergent forms to reopen an older text to a new generation of viewers. And there's a real lesson there about the nature of media transition, isn't there Henry, because the older text stabilizes the process in some sense. It shows you that transformation always has elements of continuity in it. Yeah, so it's no accident that it's drawn on but it's also no accident that it's deeply disrespectful and tone to a kind of heritage version of Jane Austin, right? I mean, Lydia is a fascinating character who speaks in contemporary slang and really knows how to play to the webcam. Those kinds of characters, the connections are there if we know the original text, they open up a way of understanding that text to new readers and the fact that it's a story told across dozens of channels. Then the reader puts those pieces together and has the experience of an epistolary novel of sorts, right, of these different kinds of textural systems being brought together, not that Austin wrote an epistolary novel, but the form of this early history of the novel was reproduced here with different- There are plenty of letters in her books. Yeah, yeah. So I think there's very interesting things that are happening right now because of the instability of platforms, even though I share the sense that there are several dangers attached to the instability of platforms. If you were thinking about the experiments in narrative that you've paid attention to over the course of your career, are there one or two especially recent ones that you would point to, especially that seem to you really significant? Now, I'm thinking about some of the programs that you had mentioned to me earlier, for example. Oh, well, well, which? Well, for example, House of Cards as an instance. Well, I mean, there are so many rich and interesting narratives, I'm struggling to try to figure out which ones we pay attention to. Going back to the Peabody thing, one of the struggles that Peabody deals with when it currents to the web right now is whether text is the best way to describe the new sets of practices, right? So Peabody gives awards to distinguished text. If you think the era of interactivity, so I am replacing Janet Murray on the Peabody board as their digital person. Janet Murray's work deals with interactivity. She's still in a world where text or what defines it, right? So it's the interactivity of the text. How does an interactive text create set of structured experiences that readers have? I'm about participation. So I was trying to get the board to think about something like the phenomenon of nerdfighters, John and Hank Green, who do YouTube videos that have been incredibly effective at creating political awareness, social mobilization, social sensitivity among young people. They explain everything. They just went up one about what's happening with Russia and the Ukraine in five minutes on YouTube that really lay it out in a language that young people understand. But it's not one text. It's not one program. They produced a variety of texts that distributed across a variety of media channels, including both written word and audio visual material. They're a novelist and one of their novels about young people in cancer have just been turned through a film that's coming out later this year. So how does the category of the Peabody recognize the contribution? Beyond that, it's not just their writing. It's thousands and thousands of nerdfighters who've made their own videos, responding to the provocations they've offered once a year take over the top ranks of YouTube to call attention to social causes and charity. So is that something Peabody can give an award to? So are you thinking about a new category, like a process category? I don't know. Can we think about the distinguished process in a way that's very different from what journalism could be thought of as a distinguished process? And I don't know that my thinking is far enough along. Leave aside the board. So I'm not announcing some new development by Peabody. I'm using Peabody to ask a question about is narrative text the right way to think about the modes of expression which are so innovative and interesting at the current moment? Or is the text simply a box we put around? So I went around. Someone in Europe had asked me a couple of summers ago to talk about the future of content. And one of the things I discovered looking at content, which is an awful word and we use in stupid ways, well, if you look at content in the dictionary, content is that which is contained as in a table of contents or the contents of a bottle. And I think the nature of current media is that it's not contained. So is content even the right word to describe the experiences we're having that are dispersed across media, that are spread across the web, that have grassroots and commercial participation in the production of, that lead to new experiences that move across national borders to all of those ways in which media is not totally contained. Change fundamentally the categories we use to talk about it. So that I think is why it was grappling with, your question at first was narrative innovation, yeah, sure. But that's just the tip of an iceberg and it may in fact put us in that box that I've been struggling with and how to talk about the web since I became a Peabody juror, that most of the things that really excite me about the web today aren't content and aren't programs and aren't texts as we've traditionally understood them. If you had to pick one or two texts or one or two processes that struck you as significant, what would they be? Well, I think the expansion, I mean, I think the biggest revolution of the 25 years of my career has been the growth of access to the means of cultural production and circulation in the hands of more diverse publics. I used to call that participatory culture. I still think that word's useful. But people have sort of said that the phrase participatory culture sounds settled. It's as if we resolved it. We now live in a participatory culture. I now talk about a more participatory culture which implies movement, change, borderlands that we are moving, that there has been definite progress toward a world where more people have access to greater communicative capacities than ever before but many people are left out of it. And so I'm excited at what's happened already as we've diversified who produces media in our culture and the ways in which that stuff collides with mainstream media and forces mainstream media to respond in different ways. That would be, for my mind, the process that excites me the most. I'm excited by something like comics which has gone in the 20, 25 years that I was in my career from something that would've, I remember when I first got here, a watchman was coming out and Dark Knight Returns was coming out and I was sitting down with a head editor from a university press who was asking about it and I went on a long rift, as you can see, I'm capable of long rifts. I went on a long rift about what was exciting about those books and she listened intently and then she said, at the end of the day, there aren't any in the business of making money. And I asked what business she was in and whether her goal was to lose money and she walked away, right? But that was that moment when Art Spiegelman's mouse was first coming out and Spiegelman's goal was to make comics into an art form and I would say if we look today that any given month there are rich texts coming out of comics that have the weight of a serious novel that are posing culturally interesting questions and maybe even would have satisfied my friend at the university press because they've broken with the men and capes genre which had been the central constraint on them as they move into a world where more and more artists come through the web, more and more comic graphic novels are sold through bookstores and specialty shops, the explosion of that market, I think and the shift in cultural hierarchy that that represents would be another key change. And television terms and television is also undergoing that process and I think that we can have quality dramas that look like Downton Abbey and our own masterpiece theater but we can also have quality dramas whether it's Breaking Bad or Orange is the New Black that come from different places and we can have quality dramas that are also genres, right, so that are in space or in courtrooms or in doctor's offices or whatnot and the fluidity of possibilities right now because we've expanded who's producing media is enormous and who has voice at the table so I'm doing an event in LA and another at the beginning of April where we're bringing 10 female showrunners from television together to talk and I had a list of 40 female showrunners that I was trying to draw on to recruit people for this particular conversation who represent a range of genres and some of the most important shows on television today are produced by women that would not have been the case 25 years ago when I first arrived in MIT and you should just define showrunner for some of the audience. Well, it's a slippery term right and so in this context I'm you, the showrunner is a title on its own but also their titles like creator, head writer, executive producer, all of whom more or less are the creative intelligence behind the television show so the showrunner is responsible for the continuity and conception of a series in television terms the director comes in and does an episode and leaves right so the auteur theory that people use to talk about Hollywood doesn't work for television at all it can't be the director, the creative intelligence and then the showrunner also becomes the voice of the show. He's essentially a supervising producer even though the title is a little strange because they use the title very often. And very often they also play a kind of writing role on the show right that's a little different from a supervising producer in film who rarely wrote the film whereas there are some television series Jamie MS and Babylon 5 comes to mind where almost every episode was written by John J. Michael Strasinski in television there are much more creative opportunities for that and so having women move to a point where the number of women on the script writing trade is gone down over the last 10 years but the number of women controlling series creatively has gone up and it's an interesting paradox but as that happens we're seeing different kinds of stories different kinds of characters and the future is kind of interesting to think about what will happen as these women were almost all mentored by men what will happen when they have a chance to mentor younger women and that there's some continuity of female creativity in the television industry is something I think will be very interesting to observe. Get your questions ready, we'll make a transition I have one last general perspective to ask Henry about and then when we conclude that I hope the audience will begin to engage with Henry. Let's talk a little bit more deeply Henry about what has been in some sense the implicit theme of a great deal of what you've been saying are category media and transition in a certain way what you've been saying is that we're in a moment of really profound deep transformation. How long it will last is problematic and questionable how deep it will go is questionable but make some comments about it as a general category and why it's useful for media study. Well I think part, you know if we think about what the birth of media studies partially at someone like Marshall McLuhan talking beyond the single medium to talk comparatively across media channels and platforms and so forth but McLuhan had ultimately in my mind such an a historical conception of what media was where the traits of a media are defined in an essential way so we talk about hot and cold media. I think understanding change gives us a broad set of questions to ask about media that cut across media platforms media the individual text and allow us to reconfigure them by looking at history. So media change is a question we have to address about the present moment it's future looking it's about where things are going but the only way to answer that question is to look backwards to the past and to see the connections between our current moment of media change and earlier moments were transformations to place whether that's the shift or morality to literacy or the Gutenberg printing press or the Gutenberg parenthesis has been discussed often at the media in transition conferences or whether that's the birth of a novel or the explosion of new modern mass media the late 19th, 20th century or you know the chefs in broadcast the cable there's so many moments of media change that give us insights that we can use at the current moment. So to my mind the phrase media in transition what's given in its power is that it invites us to look both back forwards and backwards at the same time that it encourages to think about the future through the lens of the past and the strength of that conference in particular has always been the bringing together of historians who work on all different time periods with people who are doing cutting edge work looking at digital media that is just emerging or hasn't even fully taken shape we can talk about an anticipatory aesthetic and the way Janet Murray who I mentioned earlier was really thinking about how do we imagine new media based on the early experimentations how do we predict or anticipate where media might be going aesthetically we're also we're talking about social change or political change or economic change that media is part of the challenge is how to do it without putting the technology at the center and so I try very actively in my own writing to never use technology as the noun of a sentence that it should not be the active subject it's not technology does something it's not technology does something to us it's what do we do with technology how does technology how do we fit technology into existing social and cultural structure and how does technology become the battleground a rich word which competing bids for change get fought and negotiated not technology does things but we do things because we have access to technologies we didn't have before and that's where a study of media and transition seems to be a very very useful concept audience maybe you should go to the microphone so we can hear you see the microphones on either side people how do we find out about the advance in LA I will probably be announcing it and a second conference that's the following day that's going to be at UCLA on the futures of television we'll announce them through my blog at henryjenkins.org probably Monday best guess I'm trying to collect all the biographies from the women and their offices are slow getting them to me so it'll be some point next week we will formally announce it and set up the registration process for any of you who have access to LA well there'll be two days of events the women women make create television event which is sort of made as a joking tribute to Richard Shekels the men who make the movies and the future of television futures of television event will be back to back so two days of interesting thinking about media and media change from folks inside the television industry it would be helpful when you ask your question if you would identify yourself people microphones on either side so go and go up stand at the microphone no I want you to because they're recording it's a key thing because they're being recorded we'll start over here with Ian hi Ian Connery CMS thanks Henry it's great to have you back I wanted to hear more about this politics and participation and pop culture issue and you mentioned Nerdfighters I'm curious to hear about if there's another example or two that particularly exemplifies some of the possibilities for what can happen there and related to that I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on questions of crowdsourced production and exploitation and it really it's very striking to me how if you have a world where people are producing things and no money is changing hands then one of the things people say is well shouldn't they be paid for this you know and shouldn't people get a little money for this if some people are profiting but then as soon as some people start getting paid then somehow it's exploitation for everybody or either they're paid too little or the people aren't paid at all and there's an interesting kind of paradox in there because I always hear well people should be paid but then you realize it's when people start to be paid that exploitation really comes to the fore so I know you've been thinking about it I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts All right so yeah I hope I can remember both questions long enough to answer them the politics question I've been part of the youth and participatory politics network that the MacArthur Foundation has set up it's about a dozen scholars from all over the US multiple disciplines quantitative qualitative research really trying to get a deep dive into where American young people are in terms of their political and civic activity the news we're getting is generally I think optimistic both in terms that more young people care about the society around them are taking various kinds of actions to change the world and there's more diversity there and more equity across some of those activities then might have been imagined by previous accounts Robert Putnam comes immediately to mind but Malcolm Gladwell also comes to mind as skeptics of this and we're proving it quantitatively we're proving it qualitatively by deep diving my team at USC is writing a book which tentatively is called by any medium necessary which is about sort of critiques on the one hand the idea that online politics is relatively superficial the whole slack of this sort of notion on the other hand the idea of a Twitter revolution so my notion is that the groups we are studying are committing politics by every media necessary the word necessary being the key part of that sentence they're using a variety of tools that are appropriate technologies for the communities they're trying to communicate in and they're doing certain functions by face to face and street protest and public art and print culture and radio and as well as some things that use Twitter and YouTube and these other platforms we're more interested in how this participation take place and how is the civic imagination or role of storytelling play so we just did a webinar series with 20 young activists from different groups talking about the role of storytelling in their practice the why telling stories through is such a central part of the approach and the essence of it would be that young people today find the language of politics both exclusive and repulsive exclusive in so far as you've already have a lot of knowledge of policy policy want style knowledge to get involved in the process at all and repulsive in the sense that it's so charged for partisan bickering and gamesmanship so they're turning towards stories to express a shared cultural understanding of what political change might look like and using those stories to mobilize, to educate to translate the real world into a language and many of those stories come from popular culture so I just saw a video this morning someone sent me, I don't even know who put it out of a first world kid looks like England and you're going on a future war a science fiction war where the society the society is being bombed she's being hurtled from place to place she's dealing with all of the problems of being a refugee and you know and just because it isn't happening here doesn't mean it's not happening in the world and it's that pulling away of the science fiction frame or the Imagine Better Foundation took hunger games and pulled out all the politics for the Occupy era underlying that and used that to express an alternative critique especially of Revlon say which did an ad campaign where they celebrated the fashions and looks of the capital so they said maybe we should be paying attention to the districts they now are partnering with labor organizations particularly those for low income minimum wage workers fast food workers in particular where the three finger it's the other hand the three finger salute from hunger games is going to be a central symbol in this movement that goes from the fan community to labor organizers we're trying to organize McDonald's and Burger King and Wendy's and the other fast food things so we're seeing the vocabulary travel we're seeing dreamers undocumented youth fighting for right education rights using the metaphor of the superhero we're seeing Muslim youth using talk radio talk television themes and comedy to express what it is to be an Islamic America Islamic and America after 9-11 so we're seeing some political activities there that are built on what I called participatory culture we're trying to document that both in terms of a book and a digital archive that will live online and bring together a lot of these videos so people can incorporate them as educational resources both in schools after school things so they're stable and protected goes back to what we said about unstable platforms we're preserving and archiving work that's come out very tactically very short term from that Henry isn't there a dark side to what you're saying there aren't there skinheads who make complicated use of the media media forms and so forth just because it's participatory doesn't mean it's progressive right everything I'm describing could easily be done by the Tea Party right everything I'm describing is being done by neo-nazi groups across Europe that many of these groups many of these groups have conflicted relations to popular culture for example it's not a language that comes very naturally to you after 30 years of culture war rhetoric against popular culture but we are seeing it and there was a kind of libertarian remix of Hunger Games that came out at about the same time as the Harry Potter version that was sort of not about economic inequality but about government overreach in terms of trying to understand the story of the Hunger Games so I'm not saying I think that my goal is to foster more mechanisms of participation and more diversity of participation so that we have an infrastructure through which other battles can be fought right so the Democrats and Republicans should be equally concerned with ensuring democracy they don't happen to be voting rights suppression is a very real concern and it's directed by one party against voters in the other party but it used to be the case that we all felt like the infrastructure of voting was something that everyone had a stake in and once you had the ability to vote then we fought elections and we term in the outcome and I would say in the same way as we move toward a politics that's more informal, less governmental that's more participatory we create a space of free speech and free expression and collective organization and within which then we battle over ideological divides that maybe is equally deep but I'm committed to fostering participatory culture more than I'm fostered of promoting a particular ideology that may get in the way of building some shared spaces that allow us to pass through and fight over some of the key dividing issues of our time now the labor question man, I've run on so long on that one let me, you're absolutely right that this issue of free labor and economic exploitation is an incredibly complex one that the book Spreadable Media which the book I wrote with Sam Ford and Joshua Green that came out of the Convergence Culture Consortium here struggles with it a lot and I'm not, as the books come out I'm less and less satisfied with how we resolve it in that book it's always the case that things get more complicated but I think, yeah, that some parts of the web or have been very much governed by gift economies or sharing economies and it's not simply a matter of that being unpaid labor so the solution is to give them a paycheck it is you fundamentally alter the quality of that labor when you bring commodity culture practices into it I always use the analogy you have a hot night with a date January of your choice you make out passionately all night you fall asleep and the next morning you wake up and there's a hundred dollar bill on the dresser right, has money improved the relationships between those two people? right, was the problem of the inequality between men and women or the homophobia of our society all about whether someone got a paycheck or not I don't think so, right and so we have aspects of our lives that are deeply social, deeply civic goes back to what I said about community whether in the Baptist church of my parents or senior house here at MIT where those sense of communities take precedent over economic questions the problem is that in our culture gift economies or sharing economies exist in a context of capitalism they cannot be pure sharing economies pure gift economies so there is no simple way out in our culture we know a lot about moving from between exchanges based on value to exchanges based on value I give you money you give me a product we know how to go from exchanges based on worth to exchanges based on worth I provide a serve, I provide a favor to you you provide a favor to me it's where we cross those streams that it becomes a problem if you commodify something that I produced as a gift and sell it back right, not just that I re-gifted but I sell it on eBay I probably have violated a set of social norms about what's acceptable if I take something that was produced as a commodity and I mass redistributed as gifts to all of my friends I take your song that you put on the line I redistributed as a gift I've also created a crisis point in those relationships and I think we are not very good we don't have good vocabulary yet to think about how we sort through those relations I think the free labor critique gets us so far and then it abandons us because it doesn't have an alternative for what a viable sense of the relationship between sharing economies and commodity culture actually can look like I think as a critique of some practice the question is are people being exploited do people know that they're being exploited are the trade-offs that they're making conscious choices that are being made and are fully articulated choices, the free labor critique goes a long way to help us ask those questions does it provide us with an alternative of how the interface between those systems of value could operate, no it doesn't and I think it tricks us in the thinking just throw money at the problem and it'll go away and I don't think that's the right solution for these mismatches that we're seeing emerge in digital culture Over here Excellent Is it working? Okay good, yes By the way the answer to the $100 bill thing is you take that money and then you use it to take your next date out somewhere really nice That's pass it forward I like that, it's a solution What I was going to mention is you actually talked about online political communities and the kind of guerrilla media that appears and when that was kind of kicking up during the sort of I would say the anti-mainstream media communities or during the so-called Occupy Age which many I would say within my age bracket would argue the Occupy Age might have been killed or stomped or infiltrated by certain higher powers I guess a question I would ask is what are the chief values or exchanges that cause people to bring information that they found from a media space or a digital space into the real space? Real life I mean I think they're the same values which cause us to pass along media content in an online space I'm not sure there's radical difference we pass along media content to other people because we think it's valuable as a kind of social or cultural currency because it's information that allow in the case of Occupy it would be information that allowed that community to more effectively critique the maldistribution of wealth in America to take aim at institutions that need to be challenged and questioned and reformed in the case of a fan community it could be a vivid story or image that we think is good raw material for telling the stories that that community wants to express about race, sexuality, gender, and so forth that it's about resourcing it's about taking materials from one place and bringing them to another and so the value of media for me is the conversations it enables us to have once we share that media with each other that media exists as part of a conversation that we're having within our culture and I think that political conversations are one version of that but there are other kinds of conversations we have that are perfectly mundane but very important about how we live our lives how we protect our teeth from rotting out of our mouths how we put food on the table all of the very basic things of being a human being are also important things that we talk about and we often use media to talk about those things also Thanks Do you want to have a follow up? I'm sorry Oh no I said thanks Identify yourself Okay I'm Roy is a student of ENDS thinking about MIT and USC as media in and of themselves could you compare them for us? How do the ideals change? Yeah I think it's very very interesting to think in those terms I mean what I've always loved about MIT was that MIT is the anti-Harvard right so it's and this is not about brand this is not simply about or university branding and differentiation that insofar as Harvard was created as an instrument of the American aristocracy the elites economically educationally and all of its values flow from that including the notions of passing on legacy kids access to admission and honorary degrees and pomp and circumstance and what I loved about MIT and its mythology but I think in its core is that it's a meritocracy the fact that it refused to give an honorary degree to Winston Churchill after the end of World War II says a lot about MIT that Harvard looks to the past and MIT looks to the future now when we differentiate that and again I'm painting in broad strokes but I think it's largely true right and that as we look at USC USC is a space that's still struggling to define what its identity is going to be it's moved dramatically from the University of Spoiled Children which has long been known of which is the place where all of the kids of the rich who couldn't get into Harvard go right and so they're the dumber kids of the privileged classes was what USC's reputation was for an extended period of time I no longer think that's the case I think the quality of students we're seeing at USC on the graduate level it's competitive I think with MIT on the undergraduate level it's not but I think that we're seeing gifted students who worked hard and made good degrees and got enough opportunities to make their way into USC as their standards go up the students have gone up it struggles is with the politics of diversity right and I think I've been deeply troubled by the racial politics of USC in relation to the city of Los Angeles since I got there you'd have to be fit not to see some of the stuff that's gone on there especially when we pass through a gate a fence that's been put around the campus since I arrived there that's intended to protect the students from the surrounding community and that seeing guards there ask every student of color who passes through to produce ID that proves that they belong there right I don't see there was an incident here where the Extropian Club in MIT sent letters to all the entering women and people of color in one year saying you don't belong in MIT and that was deeply troubling and people at all level of MIT were troubled by that I meet administrators at USC who are not troubled by the presence of the fence who think this is a good idea and that troubles me that we had a party at USC last year where two parties on the same street one by a white fraternity one by a black fraternity the LA police get pulled in they stop at the white fraternity and tell people to stay inside for their own protection and then raid the black fraternity right radically different treatments of exactly the same phenomenon at exactly the same time it is very hard to say that USC is done well by the politics of race and yet it's surrounded by one of the most racially diverse cities in America and a place where racial politics has really pushed the fore and so that's what I struggle with when I think about USC by every other axis I'm enormously excited to be there I think there's a vision of the future that's multidisciplinary that's collaborative that allows that has much less bound to traditional structures of knowledge and as I see much less academic politics at USC frankly than I saw at MIT and I really value that but the racial politics of USC troubled me in a very deep way and I think the racial politics of MIT or well non-existent operate in very different terms and I see MIT has dealt better with diversity overall than I think USC has done Next question I'm you first year graduate student at CMS and as a student out of the path of academia and I'd like to learn more about media producers what their responsibilities and possibilities because for now we heard a lot of talking about our children is good our teenagers are well and our senior students well I don't know but what about the producer side what's your opinion on that I'm not sure I fully grasped got the question but I think that I think that if we're talking about CMS's relation to the production side I think that the kinds of quality students we produced are students who came to us seeking the big picture that there are students who lived in a moment of media change understood that the institutions they were working within were undergoing crisis crisis points came to this university to get a bigger picture of what the future of media change could be media and transition going back to what David and I were talking about and it brought that expertise with them into those institutions now traditionally cultural studies would not have had much to say about cultural workers inside the industry there's been an anxiety about the over influence of industry on academic life and that's been a real touch point I don't think we can afford in our economy economic structure not to be engaged with industry that the conversations that constitute media policy in the United States are shaped by industry so profoundly that we have to engage with them in some way and the economic crisis of the university as such we're going to have to partner with them in some ways for funding which means we've got to figure out what the terms of that relationship should be and we have to figure out how to work with it I think it's nonsense to talk about talking truth to power if you're not talking to power and in this country power is held by major media companies and our field if we don't engage with those companies with our critiques and with our advice we're abdicating our responsibility as media scholars doesn't mean it's the only thing we should do doesn't mean it's the only kind of students we should train but it does mean that if we can figure out a way to train creative workers who question and change the institutions they're embedded in we bring about change in a very different way than if we simply train we're simply professional training for people to work in industries or we're simply imagining ourselves in this Ponzi scheme we call academia where if each of us reproduce ourselves endlessly there will always be jobs for those people at the under end of the pipeline and it is a Ponzi scheme at the end of the day unless we were ready to have zero population growth among academics which would crush graduate education in this country we've actually got to think about other places that graduates can go and industry is one of those places where our people can make a difference Yes Great Over here Okay Hi, my name is Pia and I was wondering if we could return to your discussion of race and diversity and talk about how you see the work of Stuart Hall and what you see as the differences if any between cultural studies and multicultural studies and media studies and Hall said that if he had to read another dissertation on the Sopranos he would scream and that there was a lot masquerading as cultural studies and so within academia could you talk about some of the tensions and differences between those fields? Boy, that's not, that's not that's the kind of question I give students some calls I mean, first of all I have enormous admiration for Stuart Hall and I think he always functioned as a conscience on some of the directions the cultural studies would operate and at various moments a conscience on a cultural studies that became overly academic as well as a cultural studies that became too apolitical and I think he achieved over time enormous balancing effect on the way the field grew and so I have great admiration for him I also probably disagree with some of the things that Stuart Hall said which is that, you know that I think Stuart Hall said at one point that if culture is in political I'm not interested in it, right? And I'm interested in culture as culture I'm interested in popular art I'm interested in a number of dimensions of popular culture that don't necessarily lead in a very direct way to politics but are an important part of how we live and I guess within cultural studies I probably have somewhat more fidelity to Raymond Williams than to Stuart Hall because of that but on the other hand what I value most about Stuart Hall was his willingness to open up and really deal with the diversity around race culture and to incorporate materials that would not pass through commercial culture but were culturally significant to the people who produced them and that really is very much part of that idea of culture as ordinary that culture belongs Stuart Hall tells us in every mind in every hand and the every is always that crisis point because when Raymond Williams was writing I don't think he was thinking as far about it some of the people that Stuart Hall incorporated into the study of culture and I think those are vital forces today that we as a society have to deal with you know we have to think about diversity in new ways because the simple shifts of our society are not dictated even if I didn't care about people of color which I do care about people of color obviously but even if I didn't care about it if I cared about the society I live in I have to find a way to think differently about race or I'm not going I'm not going to survive and this is a point John Fisk made in Media Matters more than 20 years ago that the demographic shifts of America would shift its culture and its politics in profound ways and the way it would play itself out would be both through representations that were both popular fictions and popular news and that those are the spaces where we'll work through diversity the web through a kink in that right and Fisk was writing that book as the web is coming into being and what he describes in that book is very much he talks about pirate radio but he doesn't talk about digital media as sources for alternative voices alternative perspectives by which groups are able to articulate difference in terms of the culture Fisk though in that book when he talks about technology is very cautious about inevitable outcomes right and what Fisk says in that book at one point is that people in the middle ages had to learn X's but it didn't mean everyone got to speak and I love that quote as a description of that access to technology is not the same thing as access to voice is not the same thing as access to power and it's particularly not the same thing as access to listening and so someone like Nick Caldry talks about new forms of listening being an ethical responsibility if we're going to live in a new era of voice and I think what as we think about diversity right now what is it that allows diversity to be heard it's clear what allows diversity to be expressed it's not always clear what allows diversity to be heard and I think that's a core question we should be paying attention to so I totally did not succeed in answering your question but hopefully I do saw enough stuff at it you didn't notice win hi I'm win Kelly and in literature Henry it's great to have you back happy to be back when my question is about you were talking about media and transition my question is about institutions in transition and it's inspired in part by the amazing tour you gave me of the children's reading room at the library in LA oh yes and so it's my question is about libraries which are in transition here at MIT my understanding of a narrative narrative in transmedia migration is that books have become or libraries have become places of social spaces and fan culture shows us that a book isn't necessary in order for reading and social the social exchanges that books provide to take place and I also understand that libraries have become more and more social centers and that as books have migrated to digital that has opened up other kinds of fan spaces or work spaces or democratic spaces but I'm also thinking that children's room and all the people who got started on their democratic experience through reading books through literacy, through immigration and I'm wondering what commitment libraries still need to make to books as a technology, as objects, as things that take up space in our lives and are expensive that have a tradition and a history and how libraries like our own at MIT are gonna negotiate those competing needs I have a very important question and I have multiple minds on it as I am on most things you know what you're describing in social space is beautifully demonstrated by the you media centers that started at the Chicago Public Library and have become really important spaces for young people across Chicago when I visited the you media center and there was, they're closed during school hours and so at three o'clock there were more than 100 kids waiting in line outside the library to get inside the you media center when I was there and that was just extraordinary to see kids from all over Chicago all races, all classes waiting in line to get inside a library now inside that library were all kinds of digital resources but more than digital resources, mentorship that allowed them to make things, to do things what they're surrounded by books, right and plush chairs that you can sit in and the result was has been the number of books checked out of that collection is multiplied by 10 the enormous increase in books because kids are sitting there the people are playing the computer and they're waiting to get on the computer and they pick a book off the shelf and start flipping through it and discover there's something interesting there and they take it home with them so that the two are not necessarily opposed that that's a space where in fact we're seeing access to digital technology is leading people to use books in ways they didn't before and books as we all know are marvelous things that we like to hold in our hands like they have affordances that are really amazing and I would hate to see those books go away but the other part of it is that mentorship, right and the fact that there are people that can help them get better things they care about and help connect their passions back to books i.e. the librarians are a very huge part of it so just as I worry about libraries without books I especially worry about libraries without librarians who are our major resources and fostering dialogue with the culture around us who are the coaches for the information age and in LA we've seen librarians get fired from the LA public schools so we have school libraries that are well stocked and don't have librarians and that the librarians only survive if they can quote teach overlooking the mentorship that librarians provide is teaching and teaching of a more valuable kind because it's the passion driven teaching of schools that is really an important part of what the librarian does so I don't know much about what's happened here at MIT since I left in the library so I can't localize this but this is an issue that's playing out everywhere and I care deeply about the future librarian but I don't think that the digital is necessarily the enemy of the print and that the ideal space for me, my utopian space is a place where those things can be combined in ways that benefit each other. Hi, Jason Lipschian, CMS grad student also graduate of the University of spoiled children. Right, so my question is about the relationship between sort of theory and practice and by practice I mean media production within graduate education specifically in media studies. I think one of the things that really interested me about CMS originally was the opportunity to both think about and write about media and technology but then also get your hands dirty and create things and so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that sort of original vision and also how that model, I sing it pop up everywhere at USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy was really, really formative for me but also if there are other spaces that you think are interesting that are dealing with whether it be called digital humanities or digital art or whatever, what your thoughts are on that. Well, while we're sitting here talking elsewhere at the university people are commemorating the death of Chuck Vest, right? And it's left me to think about Chuck Vest inauguration where Steve Topps got one of our colleagues in literature read a powerful poem on a vision of what MIT could be in which he referred to the MIT seal, the man with a book and the man with the anvil who are not facing each other, right? As sort of emblematic of the culture of MIT and it was just such a powerful image that stuck in my head almost 20 years later, maybe more, I still can recall Steve delivering those lines and that was very much in my mind and I think in William's mind when we were building CMS was how we got those, tapped each of them on the shoulders, stepped away and got them talking to each other is how do we get the technical side of MIT and the bookish side of MIT engaged in the dialogue? How do we bring hand and mind together in the spirit of MIT and does the humanities play a different role in the context of MIT? So that's part of it, and I'm a total hypocrite on this point because I have worried every production class I could possibly have worried in grad school and we really didn't hang out with those guys who actually made things but I came from a generation of people who worked with their hands, the sheet metal worker who was my grandfather, my father who built buildings and so I have a deep appreciation of the understandings that come out of working with material, working with your hands and understanding what those things can do that govern me as I thought about this. The other thing was it was governed by this question of jobs and how do we break out of the Ponzi scheme of academia that I was talking about and we went around, Alex Chisholm and I went around to 60, 70 different organizations, companies and said what do you value about people who have liberal arts or humanities degree and what do you see as their weakness? And the answer we got over and over again was that what was valuable was the creativity, the breadth of knowledge, the ability to think outside of fixed boxes. The downside we heard over and over again was problem solving, brainstorming, leadership, project completion. Those are things that humanists have done rather badly by and so the question was can you create humanities labs at MIT that foster those skills by doing applied resource research which gets people thinking and making as part of their degree and we thought of it as a whole system, not just a set of classes, production classes next to theory classes and history classes, but the research assistantships that are provided by comparative media studies were ones that allowed people to have applied, take what they were studying in their classes and immediately applied them to projects which had real world consequences in which involved some forms of making things and then we've consciously built bridges between the research and the educational parts of MIT so that those things are integral to each other and it's not about just getting money to sponsor students to pay for their education, it's about creating a context, a lab context where we think about what humanistic research means in a way that prepares kids for a range of jobs, students for a range of jobs but also teaches you modes of thought that involve making and thinking together. So I think that's part of what I was satisfied about creating at MIT through the comparative media studies program and part of what I'm trying to figure out how to do in the USC context through the Annenberg Innovation Lab, some of the other kinds of projects that I've been invested in there. Thank you. Hi, Rojelle Alejandro Lopez, CMS alum. I wanna, first of all, thank you, Henry, for your talk. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned before the importance of looking into industry and CMS is very much structured in a way that acknowledges the importance of looking at both academia and industry when looking at these issues around media. I wanted to ask you what your opinion is around the public sector given that the acknowledgement of agency, the agency of people in industry is relatively recent whereas in a lot of public sector and nonprofit in community organizations, process and agency empowerment of people has been kind of at the forefront and a lot of the concepts that you work with are would be readily accepted and adapted to allow for community media and a lot of these different types of dynamics. So can you speak a little bit about how you see the future of these types of areas of study in the public sector? I mean, when I say 60%, 40% of our student division was 40% of the students go into PhDs and go into academia and 60% were elsewhere. I certainly think elsewhere includes the public sector. I certainly, and we've seen our students go into our curatorships, policy think tanks, you know, nonprofit organizations, educational reform groups, so forth. So I think there's nothing intrinsic to CMS which says you're gonna go into a corporate media job. I think we probably have done less to theorize that because there's less critique of that work, right? In the sense that once we launched CMS I found myself continually having to justify what it means for humanities to have a conversation with industry in a way that we don't get questions about what does it mean for humanistic trained people to go into nonprofit organizations. We should be theorizing it more deeply but CMS for the first 10 years at least and probably still was fighting for its existence and fighting to defend its model for what media studies education can look like and a lot of that was over where does our money come from and who are we beholding to if we accept checks from different groups and from the beginning the goal was to have a mixed portfolio and include money from industry because that's where the money is. Rob Banks because that's where the money is but you also, we were involved with foundations like the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation and the Markle Foundation and Spencer we've worked with and we were involved with governments like the Singapore Media Development Authority. So I think the vision was to prepare students for all of those directions and I think more than that what I was hoping we would do is by training people from those different career goals side by side was build a network that spanned across things that are siloed in everyday life that created a fluidity of conversation between the business community, the journalist world, the art world, education world, the public policy world that those people should be talking to each other that what they say about business school whether it's Sloan or the other place up the river is that the most valuable thing is the contact list you get of your classmates as you go forward in your career and I think what's happened with CMS is we've got people who are pursuing many different careers and are able to connect with each other in ways that are not on the maps that are not channeled by the silo structure that takes place. One of the ways one can see that embodied is in the media transition conferences which were intentionally targeted not only across academic disciplines but were intended to include people from business and the public sector. When those conferences have been successful I think most of them have been very successful. The conversation has been as Henry describes across borders that are usually not so easily crossed. I haven't fully answered your question because I haven't fully theorized what that relationship to the nonprofit sector looks like but I would encourage others to think deeply about how we might understand that relationship because nonprofits always fall through the cracks. I remind you of Yochai Binkler's Wealth of Networks book which I read just after Convergence Culture went to press in which he sort of argued against seeing a world where there is commercial and amateur media producers and focusing on a world where there are producers of many different motives including nonprofits, educational institutions, political activist groups, governmental agencies, religious agencies and so forth. I tried very hard with spreadable media to make sure we touched on all of those different dimensions of media because I think we need that more diverse picture of what the media scape looks like. Question. Hi Henry. Hi. My name is Derek Breen. I'm a designer on the Star Logo team here and I also do a curriculum development for Star Logo and Scratch. When I work with young students and varying age teachers with both Scratch and Star Logo, I often find myself reflecting back on the book Diamond Age. So where Neil Stevenson takes sort of the prince and popper approach of having a young girl and I'm sorry, a street urchin and basically a princess, Bill Gates' daughter and gives them each the same piece of technology and sees the course of their lives. I guess I'm asking if you could talk a bit about how you've reflected on ways that we have or haven't nurtured storytelling while we've been expanding the technological possibilities or the access to different mediums through these past 20, 30 years. Yeah, I think storytelling may be the most important civic skill of our time. And I see story, as I said, we did a webinar series for MacArthur in January. We brought together 20 young activists from everything from the Occupy movement to Anonymous, to the Dreamers, to environmental activism, to Iraq veterans against the war, to people, sex worker, to people against sexual violence and on behalf of sex workers in India, the invisible children, all of these organizations which have risen and fallen off the capacity to create compelling stories that tell about the world, that force us to rethink who we are and what our ethical commitments are and commitments for change. I'm not, you know, and this is the heart of what I call media literacy. It's not just critical consumption. It's not just critical production. It's critical participation of which the ability to articulate your story and dialogue with other people is an important part of that. I think there's storytelling traditions everywhere. I think, you know, it's not that storytelling per se is not about educational access that, you know, the poorest of the poor have narratives that they tell that make sense of economic inequalities, structural constraints, the other things that they're struggling with in their lives, that the oral tradition lives in the black church and Mexican talk radio and any number of other kinds of communities of diverse communities across America. The ability to create media that transmits that story and the understanding of how stories circulate in the network society is something that's unevenly distributed across all groups. And there's a report that the good participation team at Harvard that Howard Gardner heads Kerry James is leading is really looking at different political practices in a network society that involve forms of participation and what robust and weaker versions of those are and how those skills and practices are distributed across the population. So it's not do people participate. It's do some groups tend to participate in a way that has a robust understanding of not just the technology, but the communities, the social dynamics of participation and are others participating in a relatively trivial way grabbing information off Wikipedia, searching something on Google without going very deep into it and trivial is the wrong word there, but relatively simple way. It can be very profound in and of itself and I think that's something we lose track of but there are different degrees of sophistication and knowledge and skill involved in these different layers and we need to have a deeper understanding of how those are distributed. I would think stories are so fundamental to human beings that we by and large tell stories at every level of society in every segment of the population. But how to tell stories in a network society may be something that very few people fully understand and where we can do more to foster the critical skills that allow these voices to be heard effectively at all levels of the society. Thank you. They've actually been waiting longer. You've been waiting longer? No, no, let's stay with the people. We'll go on to this side next. All right, go. I want to answer as many questions as we can. I will try to be briefer maybe. So I'm Yukon, I'm a visiting student from Japan and I'm afraid my question is a little bit off the point from today's talk but I'm curious about media convergence. So while some media like Facebook and Twitter becomes global, but I think like some media like especially for fun community is still separated depending on language or ethnicity or something. So I wonder if the media or social networking service is heading for the convergence or are they still remain like segregated depending on the language or nation? Are they headed for convergence or will they continue to be dis-advocated? Yeah, depending on the thing. That's an interesting question. I mean if, you know, if they're, so that stake here is the question of whether a network society is necessarily a global society. I think it's very clearly transnational in that some centers of cultural creation around the world are interfacing with each other in a more robust way than ever before, right? But language is a key factor in that. So those that speak English language or connected with each other, those that speak Spanish or maybe connected with each other more deeply, those that come out of a Chinese diaspora are probably connected to each other, but how do we bridge that? And Ethan Zuckerman's new book says a lot to say about that question and it's one that I've still struggling with in my own thinking. It's deeper than language though and I think, which is to say that part of what I'm interested in exploring right now is what forms participation takes in different cultural, economic, and political traditions. So with social media is obviously going to operate differently in different social contexts. That's sort of a given. We may use it in different groups may use it, different ways it's used, but in the deeper sense of what's at stake is not Twitter, but participation. How do we understand what participation means in Latin America or in Eastern Europe or in Africa as compared to the United States? That's a core question. On my blog recently I featured a series of posts by Polish scholars describing how popular culture and participatory culture has taken shape in Poland after the fall of communism. And issues around collectivity are crucial for a country that was forced into collectivities and now is struggling to figure out how to form new social structures that have mutuality and reciprocity but are not governed by the kinds of categories by which communism organized things. Or if we're looking at China, the ways in which the two economies and the one child policy and other things that are going on there have consequences for how people are using social media, how people are forming social connections to each other. There's so much work yet to be done. And even the scholarship that's produced is blocked by the language barriers that you're talking about. So something is basic as I know there's incredible work on Otaku culture going on in Japan, Sini and out there, but very little of that has been translated into English. And as someone who spent a lot of my life studying fandom, I get snippets of things removed from context without understanding the larger debate. And really I'm eager to engage with that work but it is very, very difficult to do without the language skills that connect English and Japanese together. So we may have more opportunities than ever before, but it doesn't mean we know how to overcome some classic problems that make global exchange really viable or even transnational exchange really viable. And so something I struggle with, I'm not far, I'm trying to become more global myself, but I'm not far from successful role model for anyone to follow in that regard. Hi, my name is Jesse, first year CMS grad student. So early on in your talk, you mentioned that you had the feeling of being beaten up on the subject of violence in video games. And I was wondering if you would mind speaking a bit about kind of engaging in a public sector the idea of media effects more generally and maybe with avoiding the quagmire that is the violence in video games debate, just talking about recommendations on how to engage with that subject or maybe coming to the aid of fans, gamers or any subculture who's kind of demonized through use of a certain type of media. Sure. I mean, then this is something that I've struggled with in a different way since coming to USC because I'm now in a program where some of the leading media effects scholars in the world are my colleagues that I sit across from at faculty meetings. And it's helped me to focus more on the fact that my quarrel is not per se with media effects as a research tradition, but the way media effects research gets deployed in public conversations. The ways in which it used to shut down discussions about the value and meaning of cultural experience rather than to deepen them. The ways in which media effects scholars often have not taken responsibility publicly for the ways in which their research has been taken up and used by policymakers and politicians troubles me a great deal. The ways in which when I go to Washington I'd be sat on one table and Stacy Smith, my USC colleague would be sat on an opposite table when in fact we probably agree on 75 or 80% of the topics and the interesting stuff would come if we could establish that common ground and then drill down on the 20% where there is really substantive substantive disagreement, but that's never gonna happen. That what Washington does to research is to bifurcate it into two parties in much the same way that itself is structured around two parties and the finding the middle ground, finding the ways those things come together is not in anyone's interest. So if I have a quarrel with the media effects tradition it's the way it's allowed itself to be taken up and not be critical about the process that's going on. That would be a concrete example of what you mean about the way it's been appropriated as against what they- Well I think if you look at some- Behaviorist say, which I am much more dubious about- Well I mean I'm not saying that I, let me separate out. So when Edward Donnerstein did research that talked about porn and sexual violence, when that stuff was taken up by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon as a legislative agenda, which simplified and reduced the findings that he had made, he publicly spoke out against the use of his research in ways that he felt distorted its finding. When media violence research has been used in public policy debates in this country, the Craig Anderson's remain deadly silent on the subject of how their work is being done. And it's not that I totally agree with Craig Anderson, it's that I think his work is more subtle than the public presentation of it is. So the Craig Anderson says that video games are one risk factor among many that might result in young people becoming more aggressive. And it's translated into the causal connections between video games and real world violence are undeniable by a public advocate. I think he should speak out that those are not the same statement whatsoever. That those are very different arguments that, and to remain silent in terms of that and not to engage critically with that use of your stuff is not scientifically responsible. If you're gonna say you're a scientist and you don't wanna be involved in partisan politics, I get it, but a scientist whose work was fundamentally distorted, let's think about Kerry Emanuel here at MIT in terms of the area of climate research and storms. The Kerry Emanuel who was deeply apolitical in his research eventually is forced to speak out about some of the claims that are being made on the behalf of his research in a way that I think is what a responsible scientist does. And I don't think the media effects people working on violence have been prepared to do that. And I think that has an enormous effect on public policy because in Washington, people who can claim to be scientists get heard differently than people who claim to be humanists. And so the fact that we can criticize and talk about the cultural role and the meaning and transgression and all kinds of words that describe how this stuff can be used in ways that are meaningful will be trumped by research that claims scientific authority. And what we're being trumped by is not the research itself where I have methodological criticisms and I don't always agree with the conclusions but the way that research has been deployed. So how do we find a voice to advocate effectively against that I think is a really interesting challenge. I think we've made ground on the games in violence debate. I think games as a, and what I wanted to do there was first of all challenge, fight against censorship of games and regulation of content. Not to defend what games are doing but to prevent us from imposing constraints that would prevent games from growing and maturing as a medium that could do more than they were currently achieving. And the analogy I would draw us to the comic book code in the 1950s where word them attack on comic books results in self-regulation that stunted the growth of comics as a medium by about 15 years and dramatically decreased the readership of comics and its cultural significance. If games were gonna ever achieve something more than being shooting galleries then what we needed to do was not to silence them but to push them to take greater creative responsibility over the choices they were making. So that's battle one and battle two was as long that the government was never going to take regulatory aim at the media industry but the effect of government hearings on media violence was to stigmatize gamers and schools who were being punished for playing games, who were being punished for adopting gamer identities at school and more at risk from other regulatory structures, other repressive sectors in their society. So the only way to protect those kids I felt was to challenge first of all that whether we should even be having government authorities where there's no legislation being proposed whether the hearings are even legitimate if there is no clear path to legislation should our legislature be investigating things? When the whole goal is to intimidate people into self-regulation is that an acceptable goal for governmental action? That to me is a really interesting question but beyond that the question, the conclusion that simply links people who are stigmatized who are outsiders to claims about violence and aggression that are unfounded and then to use that as a stepping stone in which to challenge the industry to make more interesting games. And that's where, as I talked earlier about the fact that I think games of content have largely been stagnant, have not explored the potentials I and other people thought were there to the degree to which they've deepened what the potential of that medium could be. And yeah, around the edges I see interesting indie games that are exploring that space. I don't mean they haven't done it at all but I mean the commercial games industry has not been forced. So I was hoping to be in a world where we could talk by this point about games the way we talk about Morton Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. We can have a debate about the role of violence in their work but we don't have a debate about the fact that it has artistic merit and social significance. I don't know that I can have a debate about whatever Rockstar released this year that goes to that level of depth because I think that they've continued to exploit the controversy for their commercial interests rather than rise above it and try to explore what the medium could do on a deeper web. Thank you. Sasha. Hi, Sasha Costanzichok, faculty in CMSW. So I was really excited to hear about the project that you're working on with students at USC that by any media necessary, it definitely resonates with the framework that I've used around transmedia mobilization. Absolutely, we quote you extensively. But in the last couple of years as I've looked at this process of, so social movement actors have always used every media that they have access to tell their stories, amplify their voices and gain adherence. In the context of moving that type of activity online in the midst of the Snowden revelations and the conversation about surveillance not only from private actors but also from the state and also peer-to-peer surveillance, I am trying to rethink that argument and I wonder, sort of invoking James Scott, we might say that the hidden transcripts that social movements have previously produced and circulated cultural materials through known networks. Now that it's moved online, it's become visible and it's a tool that's easily accessed by those who would repress the movements. And so I wonder what contribution media scholars who are attuned to the complexity of participatory culture as a space for politics, we have to make both in public conversation but also specifically to those who are within industry who will need to take stances about how they're gonna relate to state agents making requests and everything from the level of how they develop and deploy the technical protocols that govern how easy or difficult it will be for that to happen, how their business models are structured and the legal responses that they'll make to state agents who want them to hand over the data so they can repress the movements. So I wonder what you think about that new wrinkle. It is, I'm not sure it's even a new wrinkle but it is a wrinkle one has to grapple with when you talk about participatory politics. You're absolutely right in identifying some of the crisis points there. So I'm one of the things that many things frustrating me about Malcolm Gladwell's piece about Twitter revolutions. One is what you alluded to, the fact that he's what I call, he compares a platform with a movement. So the comparison ought to be with the telephone revolution of the 1950s and 60s. Now we often have a slide I often show of King talking on the telephone and knowing that the telephone was pretty crucial for organizing it where we know we would never reduce the civil rights movement to the telephone and we should never reduce contentury media activism to Twitter or any other platform that it is precisely that it travels across media and your work on transmedia mobilization has been really helpful to me as I think about how that travel takes place and how different travels takes place differently for various groups. But what we talk about is these publics as precarious as a word we use a lot and we talk about risk and that's the other side of Gladwell as he downplays the risk of digital activism. Well as anyone who works on the Dreamers knows there are kids who've been deported based on materials they put on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook which is a significant risk and some of these kids are going into INS headquarters cameras attached to their bodies and announcing they're undocumented and recording until the cameras are confiscated or they're tweeting on the plane as they're being thrown out of the country rather than going quietly into the night and those are behaviors that involve considerable amount of risk and surveillance is one of those kinds of risks. So Sangeeta Shrestova on our team has been really issued a white paper about the American Muslim experience post 9-11 and the paradox is of struggling to gain visibility in order to challenge negative representations of their culture and yet being more subject to surveillance at all levels the more deeply they get involved in that form of media expression the more public they become the more exposed they become and more exposed they become to risk and for them that can be everything from governmental surveillance and from the NSA or the New York Police Department to surveillance within their own community and conservative Muslims critiquing them, attacking them people finding them online and using them as the bully boy for their hostility toward terrorists that kind of attack and so surveillance there is part of a larger picture of all kinds of ways in which being visible is to be exposed and the question is how then does the community rally to support and protect its members as they're daring to speak out against that and King and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s had practices in place to prepare them so that if you see the footage of the freedom riders in the North being trained to go to the South to sit at lunch counters and face that the amount of training and how to withstand abuse and preserve nonviolence that those students went through is very different from the kind of lack of structures you see for some of the undocumented youth going to the INS credit quarters with webcams a false sense of security in some cases that they're gonna be protected by the web that I don't think will protect them as deeply and as profoundly as the kind of organizational structures that previous generations had so I worry about do we see the digital and visibility on the web as a substitute for some of the community building activities that other generations did in addition to making sure that the television cameras of CBS, ABC and NBC was turned to face them. You know, in an email to me, Henry noted that one of the announcements about his event had the wrong time on it, it said AM instead of PM and he quietly remarked that, of course, he was perfectly capable of beginning at 7.30 AM and continuing through 11 PM and you can see that that's really true. I wanna thank Henry and thank the audience. Thank you. Thank you.