 So good evening. Glad you all dodged the rain out there to get here. It's semi-dry. Some folks are probably still swimming in. My name is William Iricchio, and I'd like to introduce you to the communications forum. I'm director of the Comparative Media Studies program, and once upon a time, this was a program that had two heads. I still have phantom limb syndrome now that Henry has escaped to USC. Landmark legend, fixture colleague, dear friend. It's hard to know how to introduce Henry. And just looking in this audience, I can see so many communities that Henry intersected with, from senior house to, of course, colleagues in CMS, alum, folks in other departments, faculty, students, friends from outside the university. That's a real testament to the reach that Henry had. And it's not just students here at MIT. It's not just the vision that he helped to craft here at MIT. But Henry is a really key figure in the field as well, a seminal figure, probably the most cited person of his generation in academic terms, but also someone who's had a profound impact on media industry. And that is no small trick to be at the top of your game in one field, the academic, and be able to even talk to the other, let alone win their respect. And obviously, the work in popular culture and fandom that Henry has engaged in has won him yet another group of adoring fans in the fan sector itself. Again, a very hard trick when you're also respected by industry and also respected by the academy. Henry's 20 years here at MIT have been a crucible of sorts, it seems to me, where many of his ideas took form, or ideas that he came here with, developed, where those ideas met the world. So tonight, we're going to spend some time. We'll give some remarks. I'll open with that. Then we'll have a discussion, open it up to the floor, and then a special treat. And it involves Dr. Seuss. And I think something that only Henry and MIT can do in tandem. First, just a couple of announcements. One, as you can see up there, CMS, the program that Henry founded, is having its anniversary. This is a warm-up is too weak a word. This is kind of getting off to a bang. I think out of the lobby, when you're done, there's a hot off the presses copy of our newsletter, but it's the 10th anniversary edition. And in some ways, and in a lot of ways, sort of summarizes the work that we've done, that our students have done, that our researchers have done here in CMS over the last decade. It's a really don't miss it. It's a terrific issue. And tomorrow, pretty much all day, starting with opening remarks from our dean, Deborah Fitzgerald, at 10 o'clock. In the new media lab, top floor, sixth floor, we'll be spending a day sort of looking at CMS's impact in the world, talking with our alum, some of our researchers and faculty, across a spectrum of themes. If you go to the website, you'll get the details. And please try to come to that. It should be a fun day and a really illuminating day. And the day will end with a party at 7 p.m. Same space up there on the sixth of the new media lab. Before turning the floor over to Henry, I'd like to read a letter that David Thorburn, the director of the communications forum, sent in. Since he's the director and since he's probably watching or listening, I can't dodge this bullet, so I'm gonna read it. Not that I want to, David. David's in Amsterdam right now as a visiting scholar and couldn't come in, so. David. I deeply regret not being here for this tribute to Henry and for this celebration of CMS. I'm still having difficulty imagining an MIT without Henry Jenkins. From the moment the literature faculty set a precedent by hiring this unconventional media scholar with degrees in journalism and film, I felt we were on a course to boldly go where no English department had ever gone before. Henry's achievements over two decades at MIT as the visionary founding director of CMS and as a media scholar more than confirmed this expectation, of course. But his immense contributions to the institute were not limited to these stellar accomplishments. I think I will most treasure in memory and most deeply miss two other Henry's, the charismatic teacher whose classrooms were fiery, exhilarating places of intellectual discovery and housemaster Henry who, in partnership with his gifted and long-suffering Cynthia, led senior house so generously and intelligently despite continuing abject performances at wrestling competitions during the annual Steer Roast. Thinking across a range of Henry's writings and teaching is a daunting experience for most of us since he handles so many topics and cultural forms with such commanding authority. But there are throughlines in even the most disparate of Henry's writings and research projects. I hope today's forum will help identify this complicated coherence which begins in part, I believe, in Henry's fierce loyalty to the aesthetic experiences and culture of his childhood and to his respect for the intelligence and creativity of children, gamers, fans, fan communities, moviegoers, and so many others without credentials or official standing. We'll never replace Henry Jenkins at MIT, but as these next two days of celebration and commemoration will demonstrate, he leaves enduring achievements behind. CMS will continue and extend his legacy and let us be consoled as well by the expectation that he will return to MIT and I hope to the communications forum for many conversations in the future. So without further delay, I'd like to introduce Henry, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and the Cinematic Arts at USC. Henry, the floor is yours. I hate this fucking place. I hate this fucking place. This is an expression that has a deep history in the undergraduate culture of MIT. Going back, how many decades? I don't know. It's an expression that I've heard undergraduates present with a mixture of masochistic pleasure, pain, and pride. It's a phrase we etch on our chest as a tattoo to wear it to the world and it's a phrase that is scarred on our bodies and our brains by our experiences of going through the crucible that is MIT. When I was getting ready to leave senior house for the last time last July and I had to put my last blog together for this place, the last phrase I put on the end of the blog post was I-H-T-F-P, right? And that seemed to me to sum up the moment that I was at across roads in my life in terms of thinking about my relationship to MIT as all that it is. And a part of what I want to talk today is about MIT, what it's meant to me, what it means to me, and why that phrase continues to be probably the most appropriate way to signal one's love and hate for MIT. That Alex Chisholm, who was key to creating CMS, used to say, at the end of the day, take account. Every day there should be one new reason you love MIT and one new reason you hate MIT. And when that tally gets off or too many lays in a row, you should leave, right? And that's a set of calculations. We live with as we think about what it is to be at MIT. I have to say, I never expected to ever end up at MIT that I'm someone who is serious math anxiety. So to end up at a place where the buildings and the majors are all described by numbers was part of the weirdness to me as a humanities person at the world's leading technical institution. My father went to Georgia Tech. My brother went to Southern Tech. I was the non-technical person in the family. And the hits that I took for science and math classes as an undergraduate more or less knocked me out of receiving the honors I might have deserved for my grades in literature and history and social sciences. I would never have survived MIT. That I lived here for 20 years says something about the sort of flexibility this culture breeds and the opportunities it created for someone who never could have come through the door as a student who could never wear the brass rat but who was able to, I think, make some contributions during my time here. So as we think, I think about that phrase, I hate this fucking place. I think about a number of places that were here. And one of them is MIT as a mailing address. And I put it that way because when I was trying to struggle to decide, do I belong at MIT, a faculty member here who I don't even remember which one it was said to me, well, try it. If nothing else, it'll be a great mailing address for the next place you go. And so that's to describe MIT as a place, a place to be from rather than a place to be at. And for some faculty here, I mean, the interesting thing is anyone who survives as a faculty member at MIT for any length of time has made their peace in one way or another with MIT. And I think if you look at the humanities faculty who've been here the longest, you see impressions in their CVs of ways that they have embraced or struggled with the science and technological base of MIT. And it's reflected in the work that you do. The kinds of work that's produced here is work that can only be produced through MIT at the end of the day. There are some who come for whom they are essentially expats of the Ivy League, sitting in the American club, high above the place, thinking about a civilizing mission for the humanities, and being distrustful of the natives and whether they really get the magnificent thing that humanities are. Well, someone who lived with MIT students, they get it. I lived in the dorms and every dorm room had books in them. And the books that survive when you have tight space are books that are valued. And some of them might be comic, graphic novels, and some might be science fiction, and some might be middle-march. Some of them are a science textbook that they couldn't give away that they had to hold on to. But there's something that gets through that's absolutely fundamental to the experience of undergraduates at MIT. And so we sell ourselves and we sell this place short if we treat it simply as a mailing address. Also, though, is a mailing address at something else, which is it's a bully pulpit, that we as MIT faculty have the opportunity to speak to the world, that I had the experience during the time that I was here of being pushed forward onto world stages that I never would have had access to as a humanities faculty member and any other institution. And the question we have to ask ourselves is what do we have to say to the world and can we say it in a language the world can hear? And those are challenges that force us to think about the tradition of humanities, whether it's insular or public focused, whether it's speaking to ourselves or speaking to external audiences. I know that this sank through to me most powerfully when I wrote an email to some of the faculty and students at MIT about my experience testifying to the US Senate after Columbine and just said pass this along to anyone you think might be interested. And over the next 24 hours, I got hundreds of email from all over the world from people who'd seen the letter. We got email from major newspapers who wanted to reprint it and ended up in Harper's Magazine. We got letters from technology people and game executives from rabbis and prisoners. There was a whole array of messages. And even what I may cherish, I don't know which I cherish the most, the fan letter I got from Neil Gaiman or the fan letter I got from Brian Eno. But both of them sort of said, all right, we have your attention. We have the potential. The communication forum is very much part of this. And David Thorburn's leadership of the communication forum through the years has made this a place where industry, journalists, activists, artists, academics can sit down together and conduct a conversation that may matter. I had the opportunity to work with the MacArthur Foundation to write a white paper about the future of education that really grew out of what I'd observed from the best of our students here at MIT. And if I say that I came here expecting to leave, it was what kept me here for 20 years were the MIT students. And the quality of students that you see here are unlike anything that I've seen anywhere else. That that experience of working with the kinds of minds that MIT attracts. And I remember when I first arrived here thinking the difference between a traditional liberal arts classroom where everyone grabs a theory and rips at the shreds and bashes heads together for an hour. And the experience here where people grab a theory and say, you know, this is a little flawed. Why don't we fix this part? Let's tinker with this. And at the end of the period, the theory was stronger and better because of the problem-solving can-do attitude that MIT fosters in its students. If MIT's not just a mailing address, it's also the Institute, which is a sort of structured curriculum, a structure of disciplines and ways of learning and ways of thinking that I think is built into the concrete and marble of MIT. And the message we get so often as humanists at MIT is that we don't belong here. To wake up every morning and go to work, wait for the elevator, and watch some guy walking backwards sort of talk about what humanities means at MIT, and mumble something like, you wouldn't believe it, but there's actually some decent humanities courses at MIT. I even know some people who major in it. Of course, if you really don't want to take these courses, you can take them at Harvard. And that's the first message that most students get when they come here. And their parents get when they come here about what humanities does at MIT. And it's a deeply troubling message because it sells short the accomplishments of an extraordinary faculty that I was able to be part of for 20 years who have expertise in a wide array of different things. So it's a structure of disciplines that is structured to our disadvantage as humanities people at MIT. And we struggle with, we grapple with, trying to figure out how we fit, how we belong in this place. And again, that breeds both love and hate. It breeds both celebration and frustration on a daily basis as you try to figure out what it is to function in such an environment. And at the root of that is this question of disciplinarity and multidisciplinary. And I'm someone who struggled most in my career with the notion of a discipline. Because I get the idea that a discipline functions as a home base, as a foundation, as a grounding body of knowledge, as a set of texts you return to and learn new things from. But I also worry about the verb form of discipline, to be disciplined, to be told what to think and who to talk to and what subjects are worth studying and which ones are not. And that struggle with disciplinarity is, I think, at the roots of much of the pain and triumph that I felt at various moments during my time at MIT. Because I think MIT, at its best, shatters disciplines. It opens the way for new kinds of knowledge. It reconfigures fields. There's no reason to believe that disciplines created in the industrial age are going to be adequate to the information age. It doesn't mean the contents of those disciplines should be discarded, but it means they need to be reconfigured on a regular basis. And no place holds more potential for reconfiguring the humanities than MIT as an institution. MIT is also the myth, which is larger than any of us can occupy. What it is to be the brain from MIT, the MIT professor, is a myth we step into or we fail to step into, just as our students step into or fail to step into what it is to be an MIT student. And that struggle to try to understand what it is to be someone who could save the world with your laptop is part of the texture of what it is to be at MIT. And what our students, who have been valedictorians and get their first C, crumple under the gap between their own abilities and the myth. It's what drives us to be a workaholics almost across the board as faculty at MIT because we never feel adequate to MIT. And I was honored as a junior faculty member to be named one of the Doc Edgerton professors at MIT. And it's something that I will wear with pride for the rest of my life. And that message for me not only was he an incredible educator, an incredible scientist, but in my mind he was an incredible media scholar and media artist, which said to me at a very early point in my stay that we belong here, that we are part of MIT and that media and the tradition of media is fundamental to the way this place works, as fundamental as Doc Edgerton and Vandevra Bush are to the history of the Institute. Now the MIT is for me was also a community. And as a community there were so many communities I belong to and it's amazing to look out through this audience and it feels a bit like the end of eight and a half where all the people in my life come parading behind and sort of surreal combinations. But one of the first communities was a narrative intelligence reading group at MIT, a group of us who met in the basement of the media lab never authorized by anyone. People read a massive amount of stuff. The technologists and humanists taught each other and learned from each other. And it's an extraordinary generation of people who came out of the media lab who were part of my cultural training and who helped me to think about technology. I came to MIT never having used the internet before. And I remember coming home, having Amy Brukman set up my email account and coming back after a summer away and saying, oh my god, I've got 50 pieces of email. What am I going to do? And Amy started laughing in my face and said, wait and see, wait and see. But the narrative intelligence group was a place where ideas about technology and culture could be brought together and bounced off each other. And it's in some ways, I spent most of my time here trying to find my way back. I also joined this extraordinary film and media studies faculty that David Thorburn had helped to bring together that had people like Pete Donaldson, Marty Marks, Edward Turk, Edward Barrett, Jill Barrett, Firstenberg, an incredible group of people who I learned from and learned with about media as we thought together about what the future of the field was. And there would have been no comparative media studies, if I hadn't looked around, and seen all of the faculty here worked across media. That that's what we had in common, that they were already doing work. There was multidisciplinary and multimedia. And what we hoped was that comparative media studies would be a way that they could more fully realize the potentials of that work working together. And the biggest community, the most important community for me in many ways, was senior house. And to live in an undergraduate dorms for 14 years with an extraordinary group of students who were so creative, it's hard to even sum it up. The mud wrestling jokes are certainly famous. And that was sort of us, Cynthia and I getting in the mud literally for the students, which we had to do figuratively and literally many times in the course of our time at senior house. But I remember with great passion, the creativity of the dorm, the sort of unexpected creativity of the dorm. I remember one night about 2 AM being woken up by strange voices, you know, crowd sounds in the courtyard and strange bangings. And coming down, oh my god, what is going on down there? And well, they wake up the president, who's next door to us. And so Cynthia and I threw on clothes and raced down there. And there was a Polynesian dance troupe performing in the courtyard at 2 AM of senior house. And not what I expected. My first, speaking of students with books in their dorms, my first year as a house master, staying up late at night, early near the end of the fall semester with a group of students who were reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol Allowed to each other was an incredible memory that I will never forget about the culture of MIT. So the community is very much part of it. The process, having left MIT, what I see even more clearly are the two most precious parts of MIT culture, the Europe and IAP. And we underestimate those at our own peril because they're fundamental to the way this place works. That Europe got undergraduates working in labs, contributing actively to research, being part of a lab culture that it works at every level because the undergraduates are there and because they bring that imagination into the lab. And other universities don't have that. And I'm pushing that USC to create something that builds off that Europe system. And IAP does something almost the opposite. It says there's knowledge that doesn't fit within the curriculum. There's knowledge and ways of learning and things we want to do that there's no time for during the semester. Let's have a month to explore that, to experiment, to play with learning in new ways and new configurations. And so much great stuff comes out of that process. For me, MIT has also been a dream. And that dream is comparative media studies more than anything else. The dream that William and I built together. And it was a shared dream, or should we say a mutual hallucination? And it's a shared dream of many of you in this room. And I'm the one up here at the podium speaking, but William deserves every bit as much credit for what CMS has done through the last 10 years. I was the thunder and he was the lightning, and we were together every step of the way. And that dream at the heart of it was this notion of the contradictions and the connections between the words applied and humanities. And I think some of the times humanists here heard the word applied and thought it was a criticism of them. It was simply an observation that humanities has knowledge that is fundamental to everything else that's taking place around this. That in a moment of profound change, media impacts every aspect of our society. And for us to sit in the academy and not share that knowledge, not roll up our sleeves and work would be to fail to meet the challenge of our generation. But to be an applied field in humanities is not to say all humanities isn't applied, but there are special application opportunities for applied learning now that we have to take advantage of and that is the fundamental dream of this place. But it also matters it's humanities, right? That we bring history, we bring culture, we bring that whole tradition with us as we engage with those challenges. And we don't turn our back on criticism, we don't turn our back from asking the hard questions. We engage with the world from a humanist perspective. And that's the heart of what I thought CMS was about and what I think we've achieved at our very best over the 10 years of this program has been an operation. It's also, though, a bureaucracy, right? And the bureaucracy often crushes rather, constrains rather than sustains the dreams and hopes that we bring to it. It often, you know, there was a T-shirt at Steer Roast some years ago that's an only liability can kill you. And when the university becomes so preoccupied with liability that it loses the chance, the willingness to take risk, to experiment, to explore, to play, to make mistakes, to fail, then something goes out of the life of the institute. And so the threat is always, how can we use the bureaucracy to sustain and enable the dreams of its students and its faculty and its staff rather than to crush them? And that's a question I think we all, those of you who are at MIT have to struggle with and you have to think about what does that mean? How do we build that? I think about one of the most amazing things that come out of MIT came out of the basement of the old building 20. The Model Railroad Club at MIT built the first computer game. It wasn't done officially. They were probably breaking a lot of rules using the mainframe computer to build space wars, but they did it and it changed the world. Yet it always bugs me that there's nothing in the new building, the new Frank Gehry building, commemorating that that is the birthplace of computer games because it took place in the basement like the narrative intelligence group, like a lot of good things happen in the basements around here and it isn't on the wall. It's not carved in and we should remember that playing with technology is how you learn and how you grow. I think of this also as a crossroads for me. Right, a crossroads in the sense, at the beginning of my career, when I came out of grad school, there was a side of me that was deeply invested in film history and would have been a traditional historian. There's a side of me that was interested in cultural studies and fans and communities and beginning to be interested in technologies and I was up for two jobs. One at the Rochester where George Eastman house is, the other at MIT and the dean froze the job at Rochester and somewhat reluctantly I came to MIT and I think of that as the moment that my life changed, right? Everything I've done for the last 20 years has been shaped in one way or another by the fact that I have been at MIT, that I was of MIT, that MIT got underneath my skin and became a part of who I was and I would have been a totally different person if I had ended up in Rochester. And at a certain point, I started to think, well, who would I be if I ended up someplace else? What is that road not taken? And so, David Thorburn said nicely, the place would not be the same without me and that's flattery. But often as I announced I was leaving, most people said I can't imagine you any place other than MIT and that was not flattering to me because it meant, there's only one place I belong, there's only one place I can fit in and I sort of said, well, I can imagine myself other places than MIT and I can imagine me doing other things and what I've done at MIT and like Captain Kirk, I wanna go out there and see what that is and see what that opportunity looks like and to explore and enable new opportunities for new kinds of learners and that's really at the end of the day what this is about. I spent 20 years at MIT during the digital revolution, the most transformative moment in our society and now I have the potential to spend 20 years in Hollywood during the trans-media revolution that is gonna change how we tell stories and how we experience them and that's really powerful for me. So when I arrived at USC, one of my former MIT students who's now at USC gave Cynthia and I a gift. It was a beaver with a Trojan scarf and I keep that next to my desk and it tells me that I am still a beaver, I will always be a beaver, but I'm also a Trojan now, right? That I have a hybrid identity, I'm capable of being more than one person. I am multitudes and that sense of bringing that identity with me is fundamental to thinking about the experience of MIT and what it's given to me and so many others here. We always carry it with us. I don't have the brass rat, I don't have the ring but I carry that beaver with me as a mark of who I am. The scars and the tattoos of I hate this fucking place. Now you are still here and you face the challenge of how do you preserve what is best about MIT? How do you protect the creativity from the bureaucracy? How do you protect the community from the liability? How do you define a space for yourself here that holds together what is most vital and most important about MIT culture and MIT students and MIT faculty? And I don't envy you that challenge. These are difficult times for America and for MIT and a variety of levels. So I hope you will continue to fight the battle. I hope for you, the phrase I hate this fucking place still is said with pleasure as well as pain, with optimism as well as despair, with at the end of the day you can count and say there's still one more thing I found today I loved about MIT and one more thing I found today. I hate about it. It's a good day. Let's keep going. Thank you. Great to hear you in action again, Henry. Really great. Yeah, it's a hard thing to discuss because one of the weird things with our relationship is the stylistic difference. I'm a historian. Henry's really engaged in the present. I'm really Euro focused and Henry's totally American focused. And you would think with all those sort of profound differences it wouldn't work and it worked brilliantly. And somehow we would finish one another sentences or it's just a little hard to interview. It's like talking to yourself. So I think I'm going to start off with something that I don't know a lot about. I mean, I know about in a way. But this was your first job after grad school. And you went to Madison and you worked with two luminaries in the field at that time who worked in totally different ways. But I don't think intersected very well as individuals. Although I don't know. One was David Bordwell, a fantastic scholar, really the benchmark of high end scholarship in film studies to this day, I think. His work is superb. And John Fisk, who really forged new ground in thinking about popular culture, the empowerment of not just the fan, but the reader, the participation side of the media equation. And you worked with both of these luminaries. And I'd love to know more about what lessons you learned, what came from that with you in your baggage to MIT. What helped you to make you the scholar you are. That's been a very interesting process. John Fisk retired a little over 10 years ago from the field, really walked away, literally gave his books away out of his library. Students came in with grocery bags and took his books and he moved to Vermont to run an antique store. So I mean, it's about as emphatic an exit as possible. This year, Madison is holding an event called Fisk Matters that's in honor of John. And he's appearing academically for the first time in more than a decade. And in getting ready for it, Routledge is reprinting his books from the 80s and 90s. And I was honored to be asked to write the general introduction to Fisk's work, which meant going back and rereading all of the things that he had written over the time that I was a student, first in Iowa and then in Wisconsin. And discovering how many strands there were of my own work that I had thought was totally my own, that I had acquired it through him. The ways in which a framework and a ways of thinking shaped the trajectory of my work in profound ways. And stuff that I'd completely forgotten about in his work still speaks to me and speaks in really powerful ways about what the field was. I had been a fan and I ended up in grad school at a time that was particularly pessimistic and particularly negative about the role of the audience and the potential of our processing of media. Media was the enemy for most people in media studies at that time. And John had a more optimistic side. He believed in people, the power of the public. He said that every activity we do with human beings means something. We may not understand what it means to another person, but we have to get deep enough into it that we understand its meaning and its significance. And then something powerful emerges from that process and dialogue. And that was something, I think, that left a very deep mark on me. But reading Fisk now, what I also see is the pessimism in Fisk, which no one talks about. Everyone thought today's access if he's a naive optimist. But one of the things he said about new media at the end of his career writing was there's two things that stuck in my mind. One was people here talked about universal access to computing. He said that everyone in the Middle Ages had a larynx, but not all of them were able to speak. And that was a pretty interesting comment, that having the technology wasn't enough. And the other thing he said was new media constitute new space for struggle, new opportunities for struggle, he said. And that, I think, is something we don't talk about enough here in particular, not the promise of new technology, but the new opportunities to struggle over social justice and cultural equality, over diversity, over inclusion. Those struggles are real. And struggles about power still matter. And not I carried with me, but it sort of got pushed down by my excitement over the agency of audiences and over the discovery of meaning in unexpected places. Now, Bordwell was more of the aesthetic. Bordwell loved style and was interested in really understanding the form of media, how media constitutes an expressive function. But for Bordwell, style is not separable from industry. It wasn't there's culture and there's commerce. Those are completely intertwined. How media is produced is fundamental to understanding the meaning and the style that emerges from that media. And so the idea that we could bracket off industry and only focus on culture would be strange to me coming out of that background. And so what David taught me to do was look for style in the most unlikely spaces. And they're things I wrote about video games and things I wrote about professional wrestling and whatnot, where I looked at them as aesthetic objects. And that was still David's voice speaking through me and still his influence on me down to the present day, the stuff I do on comics now, would not have been done without David Bordwell's influence on my work. There's another name, another figure in the field, long since departed. But Howard Reingold on the back cover of Convergence Culture talks about you as the Marshall McLuhan of our age. And I know that in terms of philosophies of media, you couldn't be farther ends of the spectrum from a kind of technological determinist or at least a soft one in a way. But there is some truth to that in the sense that if I think of terms like Convergence Culture or spreadability or transmedia, words that capture dynamics, words that have caught on like wildfire in both the academic field and the industry, there's a sense in which that's something that McLuhan is probably the only other figure I know of in the academy who was able to do that. And I know in your theory class, you always used the McLuhan interview in Playboy Magazine. I'm just wondering, is that? Yeah, I mean, McLuhan, I don't think like McLuhan. But McLuhan was a role model for me in a lot of ways. So Howard is not wrong to make the analogy, although I'm humbled by that analogy. I don't think there is a Marshall McLuhan for the 21st century because Marshall McLuhan spoke at a moment where there were no other media scholars in the public domain. And so we could speak as the voice of a whole discipline. And no one could do that today. But what I learned from looking at McLuhan's life was that he was someone who took his intellectual ideas wherever they led him, who was utterly fearless in pursuing his analysis, wherever it took him. And that meant to new and unexpected places. He consulted with political candidates. He went and spoke in corporate boardrooms. He was involved in collaborations with artists like Buckminster Fuller, that he chose to communicate with the public in really interesting ways. One of the things you discover was he issued records every month to subscribers. So he put his ideas into what we would now think of as podcast. And he wrote newsletters when he wasn't recording the records, that he's put his ideas down in prose to send out to the world like a blog. And so I think as a model of a public intellectual, McLuhan is probably as good as you're going to get. And that's why I teach him in Playboy Magazine. What other theorists can you think of who's ended up in media theorists has ended up in Playboy Magazine in the interview section? What other theorists gets a gag sequence in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, who got a joke on Laughin that maybe Lawrence Lessig gets a character named after him on the West Wing? That's a kind of monument. But the Greta, which McLuhan pushed his ideas out to the public through every available channel is something that I think academics should learn from. And we are at a moment now. McLuhan did it when it was hard, right? When you had to record an album on vinyl in order to do this. Now we have podcasts, and it's easy. He did it when you had to print it on Mimeograph and send it out to the world. Now we can do it on a computer, and it's easy. So my commitment to blogging, to the webcast we've done through CMS, really reflects that vision of how do we do it now? How does the academic world continue to communicate with people beyond the university and all different disciplines? And not just how does it speak, but how does it listen? And that's the essence of what I think an intellectual is in the 21st century, and it's what McLuhan did before any of us. So just to continue that, during your comments you talked about the need for academics to speak in a language the world can hear. And certainly that speaks to the issue of public intellectualism. But your background, I mean, your first degree is in journalism at Iowa, I think you were, or was it in Georgia? No, in Georgia State, there's journalism, yes. And you worked as a journalist for a while? For a very short while. Or maybe a very long while, I mean maybe. Well, it depends on how we define our terms. Yeah. No, it's very funny to me, I'm now at the, one of my parts of my title is journalism, so I'm back at the, in the journalism school at USC. And at the seat at the table are Pulitzer Prize running journalist from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. And some people say, well what paper did you write for? And it's the Smyrna Georgia Neighbor News. So, you know, I was an award winning high school journalist in college, won awards in college, but after that I worked, I lasted six weeks at the Smyrna Georgia Neighbor News, so. So David talks about how pleased he was that you were hired in literature given this kind of eclectic background, at least as read through the lens of traditional literary studies. And so what was that, what was the tenure dance like for someone who was at a pretty early stage of the game a public intellectual, someone who was always speaking to multiple constituencies? Hey, you did the requisite academic work and in spades, was it, was that your construction that got you through or was the other stuff? Well, I, who knows, what happens in closed doors around tenure is a mysterious process and the scariest part is your entire life is in someone else's hands to argue about your work. But my philosophy was always if you're highly productive, usually you're not gonna end any bumps. And so I wrote what I wanted from the junior forward and I just wrote a lot of it. And I wrote, and I was lucky that some of my early work had influence and had been balanced. I was careful about building my reputation. I mean, I was probably one of the first academics to build my reputation via online communities, right? That when I first got out of grad school and started in MIT and went on the internet, I discovered that there were more people participating in the film studies mailing list than the subscription rate of probably all of the top film studies journals combined, right? If you said smart things there on a daily basis, you probably made your reputation as better than publishing a couple of peer-reviewed articles in journals. You also could destroy it. And there were plenty of people in my generation who just act like assholes and destroy the reputation really quickly and went down in flames, but I didn't. And so by the time my first book came out, it was read by a lot of people. It had more readership than the average first book by an academic. And from there, it was just about pursuing opportunities and accepting. Phone would ring and I'd say yes to something that I never imagined doing before. And you'd tremble in your boots and you'd go out and do it. Because that's what it is to be at MIT. And getting the call to come testify before the US Senate Commerce Committee after Columbine, I said to Cynthia, I should have my head examined and I just said yes to this. This is a totally thankless job, but it built the public side of my reputation in really powerful ways. And there's still people who've followed my career ever since that. And what it felt at the time, like a deeply humiliating experience, turned out to be the opening for other things. And so when I talk to junior colleagues, the advice I have is take the unexpected risks, take advantage of opportunities, be programmatic, understand your body of work, what questions you're pursuing, but veer off it enough that you're coming in contact with new publics and new ideas on a regular basis. So this speaks to the issue of sort of a language people can hear and make sense of and to reach. But there's also a bit of, I mean a bit, there's a lot of fire and passion behind it. There's a lot of commitment. David's letter spoke, David's note spoke about these marginalized publics that you've been really wonderful in terms of empowering. Does that come from the project of cultural studies? Does that come from the sort of advocacy journalism? Does that come from the upbringing as a good old Southern Baptist? Where does that fire? We're revealing all of my sources here. So, I mean there's a lot of that, right? First of all, I am Southern and was raised a Southern Baptist. And so people always say we don't have a Southern accent and my usual response is that I don't speak with a Southern accent, I just write with one. And I think it's true, right? That the writing style that I write comes out of the tradition of Southern arts and letters. It's informal, it's down to earth, it's pragmatic, it has a storytelling impulse behind it and that's really important to me. And when I'm up there, like I was just a minute ago, the cadences of the Southern Baptist tradition start to take over. And that was a bit of a sermon, I'm afraid, but it, you know, and I don't, the content starts to fade but the rhythms of being raised in a Southern Baptist tradition really comes through at moments of passion and you can pour it on when you need to do it. My father ran a construction company, right? And he was a deeply pragmatic person and he, but he valued everyone who worked for them and everyone he worked with and insisted on being taken seriously. He ended up his career working for the Georgia Board of Regents, supervising construction and physical plant for the university system and he was deeply frustrated by the fact that because he didn't have a PhD, he couldn't advance to the level that he might have. His capabilities would carry him and so that sense of not overvaluing the PhD, of knowing that knowledge comes from many different places is fundamental to the way we thought about CMS, that we had things to learn from industry. It's not we were gonna go in and teach them. It's that there are things they understood about the present moment of media change that we needed to hear. Thomas McLaughlin talks about vernacular theory, the theory of people outside the academy. I don't make a split between academic theory and vernacular theory, but I accept his core premise that all of us make theories that make sense of a world that's changing and if we can learn from each other's theories, we can get insights from each other and that was the essence of the colloquium programming that we did together when I was here was bringing those various voices together so our students could hear them and our vision was that we would train out of the master's program about 40% would go on to PhDs and the other 60% would go to other jobs. We were training not intellectuals, not academics. We were training thought leaders who would have the ability to communicate their ideas effectively in whatever context they found themselves and to be asking the long-term hard questions that companies usually don't allow themselves to ask and that that was more than anything else. Looking back over the last 10 years, the legacy of CMS is that we've created thought leaders for industry, for education, for ed tech, for games, for advertising, for museum curatorships, for journalism, for policy think tanks and we taught them side by side. But what we taught them was to respect and listen to each other and so you leave, people say about Sloan, your best valuable thing is the Rolodex. We now, those guys are connected to each other across fields, across professions. The powerful network we created here will continue to strengthen over the next decades and that's the biggest force that will make a difference in society. It's not an individual mind we trained but all of those minds together and the connections they have between them is the most vital thing that any of them could have gotten out of this place and that means being capable of communicating across the silos we put ourselves in. And I have to say the thing each year that was really the high point, at least for me the high point of the year was the admissions process. Sifting through 100 plus applicants to find the right 10 people. The mix, it was always the mix and it really, I always felt like the students taught one another, not even taught, but the encounters that our students have had with one another was really, as every bit is important, probably more important than the stuff we did in the classroom. It was really, the mix, it's all about the mix. That's the secret sauce. One of the things when we were starting off, I mean an analogy you used a lot it hadn't heard of before and it was such an apt one that I'll bring it up because it speaks to this idea of reaching out across communities, of bringing in different constituencies and really the core, the core logic of CMS was the recipe for stone soup. How do you make stone soup? Yeah, so this is an old children's fable, right? The man who says I'm gonna teach the town how to make stone soup and says to one person, all you gotta do is you bring some lettuce, I mean you bring some carrots, you bring some celery, you bring some radishes, you bring some potatoes, and we're gonna chop them all up and put them in the pot with the stone and we cook it up and we got a soup. And it was, sometimes called the Andy Hardy principle. I've got costumes, you've got a barn, let's put on a show that the parts are here, right? The parts are scattered across the institute, across the school of humanities, it's connections with every other part of the institute. The parts are here, can we put them together to create something that none of us could make by ourselves? It's the essence of collective intelligence in a way that if you bring all these ingredients together, and so that was the pitch that we made across the school when we were building comparative media studies was we don't have a media studies program in the humanities at MIT, we have scattered people in multiple disciplines who are doing interesting work that could be put together in a way that allows us to cook something we couldn't cook by ourselves. And can we put those pieces together in a way that there was something came out of it? And can we put it together in the heat of MIT? Because one of the things I always think back on was turning point for CMS was we were in front of one of the last review bodies talking about improving the masters. Needless to say there were not a lot of humanities faculty in that review body. And they said, you keep talking about a masters. Now, do you mean a master of science or do you mean a master of arts? And no one had ever asked that at any level. All of us in the school had thought, of course, master of arts. That's what we all had. And he said, now, before you answer that, no, that you'd have to rewrite the charter of MIT to become a master, give a master of arts. And I said, oh, we've always wanted to be master of science. Right? And so the sex thing was, well, what does that mean? And so we had to go back and think, what does that mean to be a master of science in media? And we said, it's because we're combining theory and practice. We're combining making and thinking, which is the essence of MIT. That we can put together the skills at making things and thinking about things in a way that are mutually governing and shaping something amazing will come out. And so having our students not just take workshop courses that taught them skills, but embedding them in research activities that required them to put those skills in action toward real-world problems was the heart of what made CMS work. That was the combination that made it really work for students, was that ability to combine theory and practice together in new ways. And we're from student after student. Well, I could go to this school if I want to do practice, I could go to this school if I want to do theory. And frankly, there are places at MIT right now that just want to make things. Let's just tinker, make things, we're going to make things, we're throwing them out to the world, and let the world figure out what they're good for. And I can respect the technical skill of that, but I don't respect the impulse because to me, you make things for people. You make things to do things. And theory governing practice is a fundamental part of the way we think about things. And I'm not sure that everyone in MIT necessarily always comes around to that. And I think it's something we built into the program. The stuff we did was humanistic to the core. It was also applied. Steve Tapscott years ago, at the inauguration of Chuck Vest, read a poem in which he talked about the two figures on the MIT seal, the humanist and the technologist, have their backs to each other. And that was a really interesting statement about MIT culture. And what we tried to do for a brief period of time was get them to turn around and talk to each other. And it's hard in every direction. But if they talk to each other, there's something that comes out of it again that's more powerful than each of them going off and doing their own thing. And so, yeah, stone soup is key to how we built what we built in CMS. We had no resources. We built something by combining what was here and convincing everyone of their best interests to put their potatoes and their carrots into the pot. It's funny, when you look back at the history of the Institute, I'm sure many people have many views about the moment that made MIT. And from my perspective, it's when the Rad Lab was really at working at full steam back in the late 30s, early 40s, preparing for war. But it was a completely interdisciplinary mix, a mix of theory and practice, something that was applied as well as thoughtful. But it's that robust interdisciplinarity that yielded so much, that really just yielded so much of the technology that we now take for granted. And, of course, they did it with a lot of money thanks to the event of our Bush, and we did it with water and stones. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that struck, we're reading through, McMuffin has a really great collection of the writings of that period all the way to the present in terms of his new media reader. And there's a passage in there from some of the people of that generation that we're dealing with the reality that as an academic, as a professor, they had an obligation to profess, right? That the obligations profess is the obligation to speak the truth to the world. And when they entered in the Rad Lab, they were entering into a world of the military industrial complex which had certain things had to be secret. And the contradictions of struggling with that choice, are there things that have to be secret or are there things we are obligated to say? They went into it with the greatest of patriotism but also with a great deal of reluctance over the secrecy that was bound into it. And it's a struggle down to the present day. How do we do sponsored research and profess? How do we share what we know with the world openly and transparently and provide secrets to companies and government bodies that want us to produce knowledge for them and are willing to pay us for it? And that's the bargain we make, right? When we accept money from some outside entity in order to do the good stuff we wanna do for our students, we make a set of deals that include not being able to profess everything we know at that point. And we've lost, I think, as an institution sometimes that ability to reflect on those choices. We now naturalize them, we take them for granted. In humanities there was a certain shock when we entered into that process because that's not the way humanities works elsewhere but it's part of the reality of funding education in MIT. But we need to hold on to the idea of what it is to profess. And that obligation that that generation felt is something that moved me deeply as I read through the writing of that period. So just to jump to a very different topic, legacy. What do you see as the legacy? Your legacy, program's legacy, how would you like that? I mean, you alluded to some dimensions of it during your comments but any, I mean, our legacy is, I think back about Fisk and the imprint he left on me and the degree to which I am a fulfillment of his legacy. And I know that the legacy that I fulfilled will be fulfilled by the students. They're what kept me here and they what will allow me long after I'm in retirement to still feel like I had an impact on the world, whether the students who came through the dorm or the students who came through the program, they were people that I had some impact on. And I don't say that egotistically, I just know that's what you do it for. That's why you teach, that you teach because your students will do things you would not be capable of doing yourself. They're gonna take your ideas further than you're ever gonna be take them in your own lifetime. And so first, that's the legacy more than anything else that we graduated almost 100 students through the CMS program over the last decade. That's extraordinary. When I was in grad school, it was a demolition derby and we lost like half of the students along the way. And our ability to get our students through the program and get them on the way. And if you look at the brochure and what our students are doing today, that's what fills my heart with pride. That's what it's for. Everything else, yeah, I promoted some ideas. Transmedia, you mentioned earlier, I'm bursting with pride right now that the Hollywood, the producers Guild in Hollywood just created a job title as Transmedia producer, right? This is the word I coined and it's now a job category in the Hollywood system. The federal government, Department of Education just issued a massive call for research on Transmedia education. The Canadian Film Board has announced that Transmedia, that every project funded by the Canadian Film Board will have a Transmedia component. And the European community has been doing the same. This was a conversation. I didn't create the conversation. I recognized it because we were listening to industry and we're engaged in discussions with people on the field who were grappling with issues on the ground and we heard the faint tinkering of stuff and we put into words and we described it and that empowered other people to reflect on it. And part of what I was trying to do was move it from a purely economic question. We have horizontal integration in the media industry which means media is gonna flow across media channels to an artistic question. What opportunities does it open for human expression? How can we keep more meaningful works in that context? And the people who took that and carried it and been part of it, the people in dialogue we've had through the Futures of Entertainment Conference and elsewhere have been people who were artists, who wanted to tell new kinds of stories and saw the opportunity of a new media environment to tell them and the things that have happened were their success in the end of building something that achieved that dream. And it's still a long way from being fully realized. It's a set of experimental works still but it's experimental works within popular culture that's driven by aesthetic goals that have happened to be coupled with economic opportunities because that's what you do when you're in an industry. You've got to take advantage of the economic opportunities. If you run against them, you're not gonna get anywhere but if you take advantage of them and build something exciting, then the culture grows. And so that's one of the legacy. And the other is the new media literacy movement which I don't take credit for. Lots of people were doing it but again it was a conversation. When I was in school, the last thing you wanted to do as a media scholar was talk about education. You didn't talk about media literacy. No one at a serious media studies program did anything about media literacy. I mean it was the bottom of the totem pole. But as I went along and because of the opportunities that we created through CMS and I got into conversations, I discovered that people in education were turning to cultural studies, to media studies and asking new questions that pushed our field forward. And I reached out to people like Kurt Squire and James Paul G and then gave them dialogue and out of that we became tied to this MacArthur Initiative digital media and learning and it's gaining momentum and it's having an impact on schools all over the United States. It essentially looks at the kind of informal learning that takes place in popular culture communities and said how can we change the institutions of education, of museums, of libraries to reflect the way kids are learning outside of school. And that's a powerful legacy of what we helped build at MIT. That we were part of the early push for educational games. We've been part of the early push for new media literacies. We've been part of the early push to think creatively about the interface of industry and the consumer. We've been part of the early push for transmedia entertainment. These ideas have had an impact over the last decade because of those of us in this room have done. We didn't do it alone, but we were a center for it at every step along the way and we should all be proud as a community of what we created with that stuff. That's our legacy, not my legacy, but our legacy as a population. So now you're in California and I have to say when I say you look about a thousand times more relaxed than when I used to see it around here with a little bit of a glow from the sun, I guess. You're working with really different elements of the industry now, right? When on the East Coast we tend to have the analysts, we'd have the sort of business guys, the development, the strategists. West Coast, I imagine, I mean you work with them, but I imagine you have a lot more creatives, a lot more producer types. Is that changing the kind of conversations you're having? Is it changing some of your thinking? How has that shift in your interlocutors? Yeah, a lot going on there. I arrived at one of my first, the first day of class I'm walking across campus and suddenly submerged in a wave of about 200 sorority girls in sundresses and fruity smelling suntan lotions and long blonde locks almost to a one and said, you know, I'm not at MIT anymore. I wake up every morning and stand at a bus stop and one bus goes by going to Disneyland and the other goes to USC. And I have to decide every morning which bus I'm getting on. But what I'm finding is USC is my Disneyland in a lot of ways. I mean, it's an extraordinary playground to be with. Media studies is core business of USC. So whatever peripheral experience we may have had here, I used to joke that I was a walking, talking ex oxymoron, a humanist from MIT. You know, now I, as a media scholar at USC, you are in the position of being a computer scientist or an engineer at MIT is that that's just what it is. And I'm, there's a beautiful balance between theorists and practitioners in both of the schools that I'm in. Annenberg, the journalist are trying to figure out desperately how they survive, how newspapers survive, how journalism survives. And they're alongside communication theorists. And in the film school, they're production people alongside critical theorists involved in dialogues. And both of them are trying to figure out how to think across media as they enter the next phase of their work. And so, you know, I was walking to the USC campus under the sign of Felix the cat. Because if you go to USC, there's a car dealership just outside the campus where the giant Felix the cat on it that dates back to the 1920s. And that's sort of my trickster God that I bow to every morning on the way into work. I go past that. And if I go to the cinema school, the names on the buildings are Zemeckis, Spielberg, and Lucas, right? And I think about what was the impact of cinema school on film, right? There was a generation that grew up through the guilds that knew one part of the production process well and next to nothing about the rest of it. There was a place by generation that trained together in film schools, the technical people and the directors and the writers trained side by side and they had a shared language and we got the Spielberg's Lucas's. Well, the next challenge is how do they get those people to think across media platforms? And it requires the same thing. We train game designers and comic book writers and filmmakers and TV producers and web designers side by side through this film schools and they develop a language and vocabulary and skill that's the next generation. And that's the point I can put pressure. So I said I moved from being part of the digital revolution in MIT for 20 years to being part of the transmedia revolution that's affecting Hollywood. Inside the school I'm shaping and by critical dialogue people who will change the industry in a fundamental way and outside the school the industry is calling me on a regular basis trying to get me into talk and think to them. So I'm in and out of Hollywood studios and production companies and a chance to really make a difference critically in terms of how do these people think about what the stories of the 21st century are going to be. And I thought that I'm going to change Hollywood. But I think that collectively USC can change Hollywood in a way that MIT changed the digital media. And so to me it's the right place to be at this moment in my career. OK, we're going to open it up for questions. So if you want to ask something, please come to one of the mics. And while we're waiting for folks to get there, just an observation. Henry referenced those blondes and mini skirted fruity smelling blondes out there at USC. But I read one of his blog posts that made me misty-eyed. And I think Henry was as well when he wrote it. And it was about geeks in love at MIT. I think it was a kind of a run. No, I think one of the things I will miss the most about this place is that wonderful fumbling awkwardness of geeks in their first love. Where everyone in the room recognizes they're in love with each other well before they figure it out for themselves. Because they lack the social skills to be able to do it in the kind of awkward ways they position their bodies in relation to each other, trying to figure out how the things come together. And not being quite sure. It's a bigger problem set than most of them face on a weekly basis. And one of my most vivid memories of senior house, and I want name names, was I was walking across campus. A guy in pajamas and no top is bicycling down campus desperately saying, do you know where I can get a condom? And that will be part of what I remember and value about this place in a deep level. But again, living in this undergraduate, you see this beautiful first blush of geeks in love. And I have to say that there is something way too polished about the USC students to ever show that side of themselves to anyone, I think. So I was making a portrait of Bill Gates yesterday. And so I asked him, I'm a CMS student compared to media studies, do you have any advice? And he said to me, well, media is a very interesting industry. It's a very high growth at the moment. The business models are changing rapidly. But the big challenge that's coming up is how to compensate content creators, the people that actually make the art. What do you think about that? I think that is the biggest challenge right now. And it's not because I think at the end of the day, students want to steal money from artists. But I think we're in a moment of really fundamental shift in the economics of the media industry, which makes it really hard to put the pieces back together again. So years ago, I read works by E.P. Thompson on the moral economy of the British crowd, the British mob. And he was talking about peasant risings. And he introduced the idea of moral economy. What he basically said is behind any economic structure is a moral structure, which people have to rely on in order to do business with each other. That is, it's a set of trust, a set of reciprocal relationships which allow commerce to unfold. And during times of dramatic change in technology and social structure in economics, the moral economy breaks down and has to be re-legitimized. And the different sides make appeals for legitimacy in trying to frame what the new system will look like. So we could see the languages of pirate and file sharing for example, as two very different ways of legitimizing a set of social practices. Different moral values get attached to them. So we are at a moment when all of those changed. The economics changed, the technology changed, the cultural system has changed, and we have to put the pieces back together. And again, it probably requires changing the relationship of the artist to the consumer. And it's probably not that the labels or the studios or the networks are going to be able to rebuild that relationship. It's going to be built through social ties that artists have. And I see Ian up there. And Ian pointed out to me something interesting. When he talked to his students, he said that they rarely had a moral argument why they shouldn't steal content. But if you turn it around and ask, is there content you would always pay for, there was always had an answer. There was something they would pay for. And you build by asking that question. What content will you pay for? Who will you pay for content? Who do you want to build a relationship to? And figure that out from the bottom up. But it's right now, everyone's stomped off to the separate corners. And we have a copyright crisis, and we have a fair use crisis, and we have a lot of names throwing around. And I think at the moment, we use the word piracy as if it referred to a moral failure of consumers. And at the end of the day, it refers to a business failure, a gap between supply and demand, a gap between what people are willing to pay and what people are being charged. And until we sort that out and build a moral system around it, then I think piracy is going to be the order of the day. And artists are going to suffer for it. So you think we've already hit that point of explosion, and now it's a matter of putting things back together? Or do you think the point of explosion is still coming? I think we're in a period of transition where things are unraveling and things are coming together. And that's that negotiation that Thompson talked about, where the structures that held British society together at a certain point had to be rethought as a gateway from feudalism and began to enter in another kind of cultural system. And that, I think, is where we're at in mass media terms. So Henry, you spoke about interdisciplinarity and virtues of breaking down these boundaries between disciplines, and also about MIT and the uniqueness of our crucible-like institution here, which we're also happy to hear about. It means no one else is suffering quite the same way. But I thought it would actually be good to ask, given your current position in California, about how, if you have just ideas or general advice about how we might make connections and have collaborations across universities and working with people, reaching out to industries, also something you spoke about. But the idea of cross-campus collaboration, it's certainly among funding agencies. It's certainly coming to the fore, and a lot of big projects are being funded that incorporate experts to different places. But I'm wondering, other than, of course, we can go take classes at Harvard instead of taking humanities classes here, but are there other ways that we can make connections to other places? Well, as I travel around the world, when I travel around the world with MIT as my mailing address, I got offers from institutions all over the planet that were desperate to work with us. It's a question of, what are you willing to do within the MIT contacts to enable that collaboration? And it means getting out of your safety zone and engaging with other groups of people. And lots of bureaucratic challenges there to doing that. They're great collaborations that MIT has with many places around the world. For us in the humanities, though, I think it probably means breaking out of disciplinary silos. I'm on a MacArthur Foundation research hub right now that's looking at youth, new media, and civic engagement. And it's got philosophers. It's got education researchers. It's got political scientists. It's got media scholars on it. It's got anthropologists on it. And one of the first things to make it work is we have to acknowledge what we know and what we don't know. We have to be willing to listen to each other and accept fundamentally different kinds of expertise. And what I love about Annenberg right now is that I'm in a place that has radically different methodologies, existing side by side in the same department. And I've never heard a single faculty member there say, you shouldn't be doing what you're doing. You shouldn't be studying that. That's the wrong way to do it. There is mutual respect. And that's the foundation. And you have to build it in your school and you have to build it across fields and across disciplines. MIT literature people collaborating with literature people elsewhere, that's easy. But MIT literature people collaborating with anthropologists or political scientists is a bit more of a challenge. And I think that's what's needed as the fields of knowledge get reconfigured during this period of transition. That I think this period of median transition, the user phrase very evocative of the CMS tradition that we are in right now. Maybe just to add to that, if I think of some of our projects, I mean, Gambit would be a great example of the Singapore MIT Gambit Game Lab where we work with RISD. We work with Berkeley School of Music. But we also work with I think virtually every institution of higher education in Singapore as well. I mean, that's a C3 has wound up with a terrific network of consulting researchers from business schools to media schools. So those have been for us sort of very instrumental ways of trying to reach out and work with other institutions. It's been pretty productive. Ian. Thank you very much. I want to hear more about this transition from the digital revolution to the transmedia revolution. And I guess one of the reasons I ask is that I remember you saying years ago a little skepticism about the revolution part of the equation. And so maybe that's probably not the underscore under that, but rather transmedia. I guess what I'm also curious about, though, is that people are talking about social media. It is, in fact, the new revolution. And I'm curious how you see them connected or different or what's going on there. Well, first of all, you're absolutely right. The revolution in this context is a rhetorical flourish at best, right? Because we don't. Media hasn't brought about revolutions. There wasn't a Twitter revolution in Iran. There wasn't a Twitter revolution in Moldavia. There wasn't a digital revolution in the United States, right? These are myths that we construct in our moments of exhilaration over change. We construct myths about radical change. And if we know anything, it's that change has been gradual, that culture both races ahead and holds back the future of technological change. The changes we've seen in technology, we're not just about technology, we're about culture. And in many cases, the culture was way out in front of where the technology was, something we don't say at MIT often enough. And in other places, we retarded the development of that technology and held back its full potential. And I think, so the idea of revolution or negotiation is a word I use a lot. We're negotiating between tensions in a society that bring about media change. And that change has to be absorbed gradually. You can't bring along people faster than they're ready. And so when we talk about whether it's a digital revolution, a transmedia revolution, or the social media revolution, we're really talking about a gradual change that suddenly becomes visible to us. It's been building over a longer period of time. So if we're talking about a social media revolution, the hunger for social ties to each other is scarcely new, right? Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock in the 1960s that Americans would have more and more disposable relationships. They wouldn't know the people across the hall from them. They wouldn't invest in social relations because they were moving too often to build those ties, that there was too mobile a society for us to feel that sense of social connection. It didn't mean with human beings we didn't hunger for community. It meant we didn't know how to find it. And so as social media has come in, it serves a deeply felt need in American culture that we can carry our friendship networks with us wherever we go and that our ties then can become deepened. We can invest more in our relationships and we can recover things from the past that we have lost. And so through Twitter, through Facebook, I've reconnected with people from high school and even elementary school that I've never in my wildest dream could I imagine we'd find each other again. And that connections in some cases are very vital to me. And so that is transformative. It may not be revolutionary as a model of how change is taking place, but it's transformative. And I would argue that trans media seems to be transforming some aspects of the aesthetics of how stories work in the 21st century in ways we still don't know. We're in the early days of putting the pieces together in new ways, reconfiguring them, but their implications for human creativity and expression and knowledge that excite me to my core. And I want to be part of that transformation. Again, probably not a revolution, but a transformation in the way the culture operates. Michael. Hey Henry, I'm happy that things are sunny and less stressful out west. My question is also about trans media. It's a huge word that's blowing up, especially in Hollywood where you are. And I was just wondering if you could be a little specific about wonderful examples you see happening or going to happen using that word and then maybe the epitome of the worst use of that word that you've seen so far in conversation or in things that have come out. And just a little addendum too, now that you're not at MIT anymore, can you deny or confirm rumors that you're using performance enhancing drugs during all that mud wrestling at Singer House? Trust me, if I was using performance enhancing drugs, I would have been a lot more effective at it. I'm a 90-pound weakling who's put on some weight. But, you know, so there's no Rory it's here, I have to say. But no, the question of what's good and bad, I mean, during the time of change, we're still developing an aesthetic criteria for it. I'm not sure there's been any totally successful trans media franchise to date. There are moments of brilliance and moments that show real interesting potential. At its worst is when people don't understand it and see it as just a cynical move to manufacture more stuff that's loosely tied in that we buy, right? And that that's the corrupting side of the process where it's just like putting more stuff out there and I put the widget on it and I hire the intern to write it and it's more crap. And Hollywood has always produced enough crap that it doesn't need to produce crap across all media channels, right? And it's like the dung heaps tall enough, right? If you're gonna do it, do it well and do it creatively and use it to expand our understanding. And when it's done well, it does a couple of things. It creates a richer world where the story is taking place and allows us to experience it. It gives us the backstory of character, of the backstory and fills in the gaps and holes and the serial in ways that adds more drama and intensity to the elements we've been given in the past. It creates a deeper understanding of the characters as this expands the range of point of views and perspectives we get on the story. It immerses us in the world and it immerses us in the world in a certain way and it allows us to create and contribute. You know, and I think that's what excites me about it is all of those possibilities. It puts in our hands as consumers the ability to put together the information in new ways and to create and share things with each other in new ways. And so for me it's not just about what does industry do, it's what does industry enable us to do. And all of us believe, I've always believed that our culture is gonna become more and more predispatory, but the terms of participation are up for grabs and they're negotiated daily by the terms of service debates and the decisions about creative openings and the ways we think about the user-generated content. That's where the struggle over the terms of participation in our culture is gonna be fought and trans-media is part of that. And so both if I care about diversity and expression and I care about the right to participate, that's the place you have to put pressure if you're gonna think about the future of media. Yes, I have a number of concerns, particularly the media gap, the problems that are created by development in new media, but I grew up in Detroit and used to buy a Temptations album and you would ultimately buy that album with the intent that you were going to go see the Temptations and when you saw them live, you love that album that much more or you saw them live and you were so much more willing to buy that album because you had a relationship with the Temptations. It seems as if so much leaning toward technology now that I'm not hearing a lot of conversation about how is the human element and humanities being moved forward in this progress because the best way to get rid of eliminate pirating is to create an experience, a living experience that can't be replicated of then by the human elements. So my question I guess is where is that human element being forwarded in a way that technology enhances it but is not the primary focus? I mean, I think that's a key question. I would say for me it was Patty Smith that sort of had that experience of hearing the album, seeing Patty Smith live and never hearing that album the same way again, but that combination of the live and the recorded is a fundamental part of the world we live in. In Japan, the media mix strategy, which is sort of one of the roots of transmedia often leads to the theater. The theater and live performance is essentially part of the circuit. Anime shows get translated into stage shows. I guess we've done it with animated films in Broadway but the sense of that being, and stage show adds to the circuit of the story. There's something this theater adds to that experience. We're starting to see that here. I'm interested in, Alec here at CMS has been doing work on Glee and the ways in which Glee has led to revival of Glee clubs at schools around the country, the ways in which people are going on and recording their own versions of the songs they heard on Glee and putting them out on YouTube means that people are reporting in their homes that the Glee going on tour again may get people to see live performances that they would not have seen it otherwise. And I think that's part of a process. I'm following the rise of a group called Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, which is to combine extreme sports and professional wrestling and comic book superheroes but most of all they're dancers that can put any dancers. I've ever seen the shame and they draw on the roots in hip hop and street dance and they're going to communities across the country, recruiting kids, getting them to show off their dancing. They're gonna be doing this live stage show and they're gonna be doing things on the internet and that's a place where I think the internet will enhance our understanding of dance and our appreciation of dance. I'm someone who never paid any attention to dance would learn how to appreciate lots of different kinds of dances and so you think you can dance. And I'm totally turning on the idea of Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and what it could mean to making an awareness of a kind of physical performative art that we, most Americans had no exposure to before and changing how we think about it. Making it as hip and cool as YouTube and Facebook but as immediate as any live performance has been before because it's there in the streets, in your neighborhood and you're seeing something you can't believe your eyes and I think that's part of it. We've got to think creatively about it. We can't have theaters over here and technologies over here, it's got to engage with each other because I know you've thought about and done through your work Ricardo that's part of what gives me help for this working is I know people like you. So, when I first got the announcement for this talk I started trying to catalog in my head all the ways that your writing and teaching has influenced me and I still haven't finished the list. So I wanted to say thank you first of all. Thank you. But I wanted to get you out of reflective mode and maybe to think a little forward. One of the things that I think is interesting about your moving to a journalism school is that journalism itself is in this weird transitional state and I wanted to know if you've thought about or are thinking about or planning to do work in the area of what is the transmedia future of factual storytelling. So we're in a mode right now where the traditional means of journalism which is the newspaper is essentially dying or dead. For the most part you can consider it a dead medium. On the other hand, documentary films are incredibly popular, they're making more money than ever before. Is that the future of factual storytelling? I mean who's gonna tell the next Columbine story? Is it gonna be a legion of people on Twitter? I mean how is the story, how do you see the next important factual set of stories getting told? I mean it's a good question and one that I'm this fall teaching a course at USC called Civic Media which will be taught through the journalism school but it's intended to be a crossroads between communication, cinema and journalism as most of my courses have been and it's inspired in part by Civic for Future, Center for Future Civic Media that we help build here at MIT but it's also inspired by Passage and Clay Scherke who says the world looks different if we ask what's the future of newspapers or if we ask what's the future of journalism. And so what I'm trying to do in the course is go back to roots and say what do we want journalism to do? What are the functions of journalism? What role has journalism played in our lives? And then what institutions have done those functions beyond newspapers, right? Newspapers are great, I love newspapers but they may not be with us all the way. They may certainly will not fulfill all of the things we want from journalism in the future. So what I'm hoping to do is read historical stuff, pieces of cultural theory, work on civic engagement, look at projects and try to just explore what does the future of journalism look like and to what degree is it citizen driven and what degree is it professionally driven to what degree is it in digital or what degree is it in print? Trying to explore those questions and I don't know the answers yet. I mean that's what excites me about teaching the course is I'm pulling a lot of stuff together I've been wanting to read and think about and throwing open to a room full of PhDs who have a future arrest on the answer to this question and we'll see what we can figure out together but again like everything I try to do in the classroom it's about breaking down borders between disciplines and between communities and seeing what we can learn from each other and ask me the question a year from now I'll probably have a better set of answers than I have now. Okay last question. I'm just picking up on Facebook was mentioned briefly and just personally I hate Facebook. I think there's, I just log on and there's like 10,000 pieces of random tidbits out there that I don't really care about and there's no tools to organize it or find what's useful and I'm just curious, I mean there's lots of people who love it, there's lots of people who don't use it and what happens, I don't know, do you have any thoughts about what's the next step maybe in how Facebook or similar tools might evolve to reach that audience or is that maybe, I don't know, not gonna happen or is that just. Big question, I mean I personally don't like Facebook and the aggregate but I love the individual encounters that I have on Facebook. That I read, same with Twitter, right? I read so much banality every morning but I see so many nuggets of things that I wouldn't see before that it's to me on whole worth it but it's gonna continue to evolve and be redesigned and I think the question is how, the big question is how do we create meaningful context? How do we build on the connections we have and not be drowned, not be swamped by the social networks we participate in? And again, I don't know the answer but I urgently hope we find it because it does affect the social life of the world we live in and how we connect to each other as human beings. I wouldn't trade some tweets I've gotten for anything in the world and others, I can't believe they put that in writing, right? You know, the jokes you're off to, did I just say that out loud? Well, more than saying out loud, you just send it out to 5,000 people, you know? A top academic I know sent out something about finding dog poop on the bottom of her shoes and I'm going, why? And I understand the meta communication piece that by sending banalities back and forth, we say to each other, I'm here. Someone asked me in the McLuhan question about Twitter and sort of what's the, if medium's the message, what's the message of Twitter? My answer was two message, here it is and here I am. That here it is is all the interesting links I get and here I am is the banal chit chat that says I'm alive and you're alive and we're in the same world with each other and those two functions build on the back of each other in really profound ways and the result of hearing through a medium that we use to talk about what we had for breakfast, what's happening in the streets of Tehran, gave an immediacy and to that experience, made people change the way they thought about people in Iran after 20 years or 30 years of Iranians being totally estranged from us. People chose to turn their face green and create an identity with Iran. It's a trivial gesture politically except that nothing in the history of Iranian-American relations over the last 30 years prepares us for it but the social dynamic of a platform that we connect through, create a space where it was possible for that to take place and that's what leaves me hopeful about social networks. Okay, one more and then we're gonna switch over to the reading of the cat in the hat, yeah. Hey, Henry, this question actually just made me think of something. You've spent so much of your career theorizing participation and what it means to participate in a whole variety of ways, giving light to all of that. Now we get to this interesting point where we have people who have made a conscious decision to not participate in all sorts of different places. How do we start theoretically thinking about non-participation and how that actually intersects with all of the work that you've been thinking in terms of participation? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you have the right to remain silent, right? And that's a fundamental right as human beings. The right to participate includes the right not to participate. But I also, we're gonna read Dr. Seuss in a minute and I always think that Horton here's a who has really interesting things to say, I think, about this issue because it has, on the one hand, it's about the need to listen to the smallest of voice in the society and to amplify it and to ensure that it gets heard. On the other hand, there's a tension in that book between the Wickersham cousins and brothers and so forth who force conformity at all cost and JoJo the shirker, the smallest of the who's who's until he contributes his voice, the entire community can't be heard. And so the tension in the book between what demands can society make on its individual members, what are our obligations to contribute and participate is a fundamental one that I think Seuss was thinking about in the post-war period and I think there's a lot to speak to it in terms of the question we're thinking about now. Yes, you have the right not to participate but in a society where we pool our knowledge and you know things that has impact on the society, do you have the right to withhold that knowledge or do you have a certain obligation to what you know and how you know it and the community you're part of to speak? So what are our obligations to speak and what are our rights to remain silent? I think of the fundamental questions we have to think about and I don't think we've spent nearly enough time thinking about either side of that when it comes to the digital. Right, so just to say, Henry talked about the importance of IAP and this is really one of the, for me, high points of the IAP each year was Henry's reading. So we get to do it off season and great. So yeah, so the last 18 years I done the salute to Dr. Seuss which is one of my contributions to the culture of MIT and we showed 5,000 fingers of Dr. T and the summer I will be doing, showing that movie and being part of a discussion around it at the Egyptian Theater in downtown Hollywood so I'm very excited to be part of that and I thought as a parting words to this community maybe reading from Dr. Seuss was a way of continuing that tradition and sharing with you how much the light I've taken in Seuss's writing and how much it characterizes to me that creativity and imagination which is so vital at MIT and that we turn our back on at our own peril. So the sun did not shine, it was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day. I sat there with Sally, we sat there with two and I said, how I wish we had something to do. Too wet to go out and too cold to play ball. Actually a good day to read this, isn't it? So we sat in the house, we did nothing at all. So all we could do was to sit, sit, sit, sit and we did not like it, not one little bit. And then something went bump, how that bump made us jump. We looked and then we saw him step in on the mat. We looked and we saw him, the cat in the hat and he said to us, why do you sit there like that? I know it is wet and the sun is not sunny but we can have lots of good fun that is funny. I know some good games we could play, said the cat. I know some new tricks, said the cat in the hat. A lot of good tricks, I'll show them to you. Your mother will not mind at all if I do. Then Sally and I did not know what to say. Our mother was out of the house for the day. But our fish said, no, no, make that cat go away. Tell that cat in the hat, you do not want to play. He should not be here. He should not be about. He should not be here when your mother is out. Now now have no fear, have no fear, said the cat. My tricks are not bad, said the cat in the hat. Why we can have lots of good fun if you wish with a game that I call up, up, up with a fish. Put me down, said the fish. This is no fun at all. Put me down, said the fish, I do not wish to fall. Have no fear, said the cat. I will not let you fall. I will hold you up high as I stand on a ball with a book on one hand and a cup on my hat. But that's not all that I can do, said the cat. Look at me, look at me now, said the cat, with a cup and a cake on the top of my hat, I can hold up two bucks. I can hold up the fish and a little toy ship and some milk on a dish. And look, I can hop up and down on the ball but that is not all. Oh no, that is not all. Look at me, look at me, look at me now. It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how. I can hold up the cup and the milk and the cake. I can hold up these books and the fish on a rake. I can hold up the toy ship and the little toy man and look with my tail, I can hold up a red fan. I can fan with a fan as I hop on the ball but that is not all. Oh no, that is not all. That is what the cat said. Then he fell on his head. He came down with a bump from up there on the ball and Sally and I, we saw all the things fall and our fish came down too. He fell into a pot. He said, do I like this? Oh no, I do not. This is not a good game, said our fish, is he lit? No, I do not like it, not one little bit. Now look what you did, said the fish to the cat. Now look at this house. Look at this, look at that. You sank our toy ship, sank it deep in the cake. You shook up our house and you bent our new rake. You should not be here when our mother is not. You get out of this house, said the fish in the pot. But I like it here. Oh, I like it a lot, said the cat in the hat to the fish in the pot. I will not go away. I do not wish to go. And so, said the cat in the hat. So, so, so, I will show you another good game that I know. And then he ran out and then fast as a fox, the cat in the hat came back in with a box, a big red wood box. It was shot with a hook. Now look at this trick, said the cat. Take a look. And then he got up on the top with a tip of his hat. I call this game fun in the box, said the cat. In this box are two things I will show to you now. You will like these two things, said the cat with a bow. I will pick up the hook. You will see something new. Two things. And I call them thing one and thing two. These things will not bite you. They want to have fun. Then out of the box came thing two and thing one. And they ran to us fast. They said, how do you do? Would you like to shake hands with thing one and thing two? And Sally and I did not know what to do. So we had to shake hands with thing one and thing two. We shook their two hands. But our fish said, no, no, these things should not be in this house. Make them go. They should not be here when your mother is not. Put them out. Put them out, said the fish in the pot. Have no fear, little fish, said the cat in the hat. These things are good things. And he gave them a pat. They are tame. Oh, so tame. They have come here to play. They will give you some fun on this wet, wet, wet day. Now, here is a game that they like, said the cat. They like to fly kites, said the cat in the hat. No, not in the house, said the fish in the pot. They should not fly kites in a house. All the things they will bump, all the things they will hit. I do not like it, not one little bit. Then Sally and I saw them run down the hall. We saw those two things bump their kites on the wall, bump, bump, bump, bump, down the hall, wall in the hall, thing two and thing one. They ran up. They ran down. On the string of one kite, we saw mother's new gown. Her gown with the dots that are pink, white, and red. Then we saw one kite bump on the head of her bed. Then these two things ran about with big bumps, jumps, and kicks, and with hops, and big thumps, and all kinds of bad tricks. And I said, I do not like the way that they play. If mother could see this, oh, what would she say? Then our fish said, look, look. And our fish shook with fear. Your mother is on the way home. Do you hear? Or what will she do to us? What will she say? Oh, she will not like it to find us this way. So do something fast, said the fish. You hear? I saw her. Your mother, your mother is near. So as fast as you can, think of something to do. You have to get rid of thing one and thing two. So as fast as I could, I went after my net. And I said, with my net, I can get them. I bet with my net, I'll get those things yet. Then I let down my net. It came down with a plump. I had them at last. Those two things had to stop. Then I said to the cat, now you do as I say. You pack up those things, and you take them away. Oh, dear, said the cat. You did not like our game. Oh, dear, what a shame, what a shame, what a shame. Then he shut up the things in the box with a hook, and the cat went away with a sad kind of look. That is good, said the fish. He's gone away, yes. But your mother will come. She'll find this big mess. And this mess is so big, and so deep, and so tall. We cannot pick it up. There's no way at all. And then who was back in the house? Where the cat? Have no fear of this mess, said the cat in the hat. I always pick up all play things. And so I will show you another good trick that I know. Then we saw him pick up all the things that were down. He picked up the cake, and the rake, and the gown, and the milk, and the strings, and the books, and the dish, and the cat, and the cup, and the ship, and the fish. And he put them all away. Then he said, that is that. And then he was gone with a tip of his hat. Then our mother came in, and she said to us too, do you have any fun? Did you have any fun? Tell me, what did you do? And Sally and I did not know what to say. Should we tell her the things that went on there that day? Should we tell her about it? Now, what should we do? Well, what would you do if your mother asked you? So if I have any parting words to this crowd, it is to keep on doing fun that is fun, and don't listen to the damn fish. Words of wisdom, Henry. Words of wisdom. So again, just to remind you folks that tomorrow, all day up in the sixth floor of E-14, the new media lab building, we'll be having a set of discussions tomorrow, and then tomorrow night at 7, a party. Normally, we have a reception after the communications forum, but it will be displaced till tomorrow evening, 7 o'clock. And it's beautiful. If you haven't been up there, it's really exquisite. So hope you can join us. And please don't forget to pick up your copies of the 10th anniversary newsletter, where the achievements of Henry and CMS, and our students, and our researchers, and faculty are all present. Henry, thanks very much. Thank you so much.