MNet Blog

Games peoples play

In ancient times the Olympics were a time when all nations – all Greek nations, anyway – would put away their differences and compete in almost every human activity, from poetry to the ferocious, no-holds barred combat sport called pankration. Being the very best that humans could be was seen as the best way to honour the gods of Olympus.

Though we’ve dropped the poetry and the blood sports (not to mention the nudity), our modern Olympics retain much of the spirit of those games. No longer religious in nature, they nevertheless still have relevance. It’s a relevance that’s changed over time: from the internationalism that inspired de Coubertin, to its opposite, fascism, as exemplified by the 1936 Berlin games, and the Cold-War-by-proxy of the later 20^th Century, the Olympics have always meant something.

Relevance

This summer’s Beijing Olympics will be no different, and governments, journalists and activists have already begun trying to determine just what they will mean. For some, this will be the Olympics of new media: NBC, the network with American broadcast rights to the games, has stated that they will use the event as a “billion-dollar research lab” to experiment with different media platforms. For NBC, the Olympics represent an opportunity to establish what they call a Total Audience Measurement Index, which will determine how the viewership is divided between a variety of media such as streaming online video, mobile phones and of course TV screens. If successful, the TAMI may be adopted for use in measuring total viewership of TV shows and other content that is split between different platforms.

Of course, once people are online there’s no reason they have to go to NBC to get their Olympic coverage. NHK in Japan and CCTV in China will also be putting Olympic footage online, providing a wide variety of options for audiences. It’s a safe bet that much of this will wind up on YouTube and file-sharing sites, perhaps making the time difference between China and audiences in Europe and North America less of an issue. As well, this promises to be the first program-your-own Olympics: "Modern technology has the ability to deliver results or feeds of what people want to see, rather than the viewer seeing only what the broadcaster decides you want to see," Danyll Wills, a Hong Kong-based technology consultant, told Agence France-Presse.

Controversy

The choice of Beijing for the 2008 games was a controversial one, and this remains a part of both the news coverage and the games themselves. The most prominent story on this subject was the series of protests that accompanied the journey of the Olympic torch, aimed at drawing attention to China’s occupation of Tibet. This, too, points to the new-media aspects of these games: the protests were organized using tools such as social networks and text messaging, and footage of the protests were distributed on YouTube and Flickr. Despite the protests, however, China has cracked down more heavily on Tibetans leading up to the Olympics, not to mention other groups such as Uighurs and the religious movement Falun Gong. For the Western media, these events provide an extra angle to their Olympic coverage, beyond the games themselves. As John Walsh, an executive vice president of the American sports network ESPN, told the Aspen Daily News, “It is the most interesting Olympics in I can’t remember how long because there are so many possible stories. You have human rights versus sportsmanship, you have ... the people who are sponsoring, or putting up the dollars for the Olympics, and what will be their statement about human rights and China, and what will the story be outside of the venue.”

Censorship

It’s worth asking, though, how much coverage of such topics reporters will be allowed to do given China’s poor record of press freedom. The Organizing Committee has promised a “zero refusal policy” for media interviews, according to The China Post, but foreign journalists were denied access to part of the torch’s route that past through Xinjiang and Tibet. Melinda Liu, a reporter for Newsweek, received death threats for her coverage of the Tibetan riots in March, and Reuters correspondent Chris Buckley was beaten and robbed while investigating a citizen protest in Beijing.

In China, meanwhile, there are increasing signs that people are finding a voice online. Global Voices, a Web site that samples and translates blogs from around the world, has been publishing excerpts of Chinese opinion about the Olympics. These show a diversity of voices that may be surprising considering the prevalence of censorship in China. Despite a ban on unlicensed blogging about Olympic events, for instance, several citizen journalists have promised to provide coverage of the events. Other bloggers have reported on the forced evictions of Beijing residents in order to make room for various Olympic facilities.

What proved too much for the Chinese government, though, was the suggestion that there might be a curse associated with the five Olympic mascots, or fuwas: each of the images was thought to have heralded some disaster or crisis – the torch, protests around the Olympic torch; a Tibetan antelope, riots in Tibet; the panda, earthquakes in Sichuan (associated with pandas); and torrential rains associated with the final fuwa, a fish. These posts, however, quickly disappeared from the Chinese blogosphere, as censors moved to delete any suggestions that the games might be ill-omened.

While it’s too early yet to say how these games will be remembered, it’s safe to say that these will not be among those lost to history: whatever happens, these Olympics will mean something.

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Hooked on classics

A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly was devoted to a list of so-called “new classics,” a top one-hundred list of the best movies, books, TV shows, and so on, published since 1983. The lists themselves are liable to provoke discussion (Die Hard is #9, ahead of Goodfellas, Schindler’s List and Unforgiven?) but perhaps a more interesting question is whether, in the Media Age, the very idea of a “classic” still means anything.

The term “classic” has had any number of meanings, but it’s useful to go back to its origins: as a way of describing the art, and particularly the architecture, of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. It was first used in this sense during the Renaissance, where it became a byword for certain aesthetic principles: harmony, simplicity, symmetry and elegance. Based (sometimes inaccurately) on “natural rules” of art derived from the ancients – the Golden Ratio, the three dramatic unities – classical art aspired to be timeless and universal, and it is from that quality that our modern idea of a classic has emerged. A classic is something that retains its value; that may be used as a touchstone or a template for things that come after it. Simply put, a classic is something that lasts.

That’s one definition, anyway. Fairly often “classic” is used with a negative connotation; Mark Twain famously defined it as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Sometimes it’s used in a face-saving way: when New Coke failed, its manufacturer, rather than admit defeat, kept it on the shelves while bringing the original back as “Coke Classic.” (The latter product soon went back to being simply Coca-Cola; New Coke was re-branded as Coke2 and slowly phased out, though for whatever reason it remains available in Micronesia.)

Probably the best example of the word’s flexible connotation is “classical music.” Originally used to describe the period where composers such as Mozart and Haydn applied classical values of simplicity and harmonious structure to music, in the 20^th Century it came to mean all pre-modern music. As a result, depending on the user’s point of view, it could mean “good music,” “longhair (intellectual) music,” or, perhaps most often, “boring music” or “music that’s supposed to be good for you.” (The series of Hooked on Classics records, which remixed works by Mozart and other pre-modern composers over a disco beat, was one of many attempts to get young people to listen to classical music.)

A classic, therefore, is something with enduring value: something that everyone agrees is good even if they don’t personally like it. The question is: does anything still fit that definition? Mike Dover, in his Wikinomics blog, points out that the very things that make something a classic to one audience can make it anathema to another: The Big Chill, a cultural touchstone for Baby Boomers, is presented in the Generation X movie High Fidelity as being so loathsome as to taint all the music on its soundtrack. His post led to a lively discussion about whether there are any classic movies that span the generations, or if each generation has its classics. What’s interesting about that discussion is that while a number of movies came up several times, there really was no consensus for any of the generations represented: some posters mentioned movies that had aimed to capture their generation’s experience (The Big Chill, Reality Bites, Juno), while many others suggested ones that spoke more to their own personal history: the Harry Potter series, Say Anything, and The Matrix were each referred to as having been important influences at different ages. Even the Bob and Doug McKenzie vehicle Strange Brew received a few votes, as did Entertainment Weekly’s #1 choice Pulp Fiction. One of the posters’ suggestions isn’t a theatrical movie at all: Star Wars: the Phantom Edit is a version of the first Star Wars prequel, re-edited by fans, that was distributed online.

What once were “cult” movies may be tomorrow’s classics. Poster Tammy Erickson described the Baby Boomer movie experience this way: “We ‘played’ at cult movies, ‘wasting’ as much time there as Xers later would on Dungeons and Dragons or Ys on World of Warcraft. I must have seen The Harder They Come nearly a hundred times. Others dressed up for and shouted along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show over and over again.”

With more and more choices available, with the expansion of the cable universe in the 1980s and the arrival of the Web in the ‘90s, movies – indeed, any single medium – became less important, as “narrowcasting” replaced “broadcasting.” Instead of being a work whose value is accepted, if not necessarily appreciated, by a broad population, a classic now may come to mean something that is deeply loved by a small number of people. When even a throwaway line from a Will Ferrell movie can inspire merchandise – you can buy T-shirts that illustrate Steve Carrell’s classic non-sequitur from Anchorman, “I love lamp” – “classic” may come to mean nearly the reverse of what it once did: something exclusive and esoteric, rather than universal.Perhaps that’s how we should read the Entertainment Weekly “new classics,” where Pulp Fiction is #1, Titanic is #3 and Blue Velvet is #4: not as being a ranked list, with each entry being slightly better than the one after it, but as being based on how noisy and vehement each movie’s fan club is.

Questions for classroom discussion

List two or three books, movies or TV shows you consider to be “classics.” What makes you think of them that way? Do you think that your friends would agree with you? How about your parents or teachers? Why or why not?

Is there anything you can think of that everyone might agree is a “classic”? What makes it that way?

How often do you think “classic” is used in a negative way? Why do you think it has both a positive and a negative meaning?

Do you think anything will be widely regarded as a “classic” in the future? Why or why not?

Can something be a “classic” if only a small group of people consider it to be one? Why or why not?

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Covering controversy

The hottest media story in the past week has been the instantly infamous New Yorker cover portraying Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as terrorists. Though the Obama campaign has been measured in its response, media outlets – and particularly bloggers – have been vocal in their disapproval. Some have suggested that the cover crosses the line from satire into hate speech, while others accuse The New Yorker of giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’ by visually depicting the smears and misconceptions that have been aimed at the candidate.

Because of the promotional value of a magazine’s cover – despite being told otherwise, we often do judge (and buy) books and magazines by their covers – editors often intentionally court controversy when commissioning them. What makes a cover controversial? What process went into the creation of the Obama cover, and why has it provoked so much more outcry than other satirical magazine covers?

Deconstructing a controversial cover

When looking at covers that are intentionally controversial– as distinguished from those that become controversial for reasons not intended by the editors, like the infamous doctored O.J. Simpson cover in which the football player and accused murderer was presented with darkened skin – there are a number of things that turn up again and again, that are more or less guaranteed to create controversy.

Sex

As the adage puts it, sex sells, and even such venerable institutions as Newsweek have used it in such covers as June 1989’s “Hurrah for the Bra” (no picture, sorry). For editors, though, sex is a problematic way of creating controversy: too little and there’s no story, too much and your cover won’t be displayed. One solution has been to use images that are relatively tame in terms of exposure but controversial due to context. The classic example of this is Vanity Fair’s August 1991 cover featuring Demi Moore naked and pregnant. Despite the relative tameness of the cover image – it is less revealing than the average Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover – it led to widespread debate and, in some cases, outrage; in many places the magazine was covered or even pulled from shelves. The issue was not that Moore was naked but that she was pregnant: a sexualized “glamour shot” of a mother-to-be proved to be too much for some readers to bear.

If there’s any doubt that sexualizing motherhood remains a taboo, the controversy over the August 2006 issue of babytalk should put it to rest. This cover led to nearly a thousand angry letters and e-mails from readers who called it “gross,” some saying they hid the magazine rather than let it be seen in their home. (Gayle Ash, who shredded her copy, explained that "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see.")

Religion

Most magazine editors tread warily when dealing with religion, an inherently controversial topic. For those courting controversy, though, it is invaluable. One of the most infamous Time covers is the one at left, both for the message and the format. In an unusual move for Time – which made its reputation presenting photojournalism – there is no image, only text. The text itself, red on a black background, is also unique. Most arresting, though, is the question it poses: Is God Dead? Writers like Richard Dawkins can still be provocative by raising similar questions today; in 1966 it was considered incendiary. Testament to the power of this cover is the fact that nobody remembers what the cover story was actually about: the Death of God movement, a loose group of theologians who were grappling in different ways with the apparent absence of God from the modern world. While the movement was quickly forgotten the cover was not, being widely referred to in such pop culture artefacts as the movie Rosemary’s Baby.

Race

In the United States, of course, race is guaranteed to be the most controversial topic (as The New Yorker’s editor has no doubt learned). Race alone, though (except racial caricature), isn’t enough to cause a stir. But when it is combined with one of the other controversial issues, such as religion (as seen at left, in the April 1968 issue of Esquire titled “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” where the boxer is portrayed as Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows) or sex (as in the April 2008 cover of Vogue showing LeBron James clutching white model Gisele Bundchen in a King Kong-like pose,) race seems to act as an accelerant: what might be mildly controversial becomes very controversial.

Too controversial

This may be where The New Yorker went wrong: underestimating just how much the messages about race, religion, patriotism and terrorism would add up to. There was no question they knew the cover would be controversial – as editor David Remnick told the Huffington Post, “What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's – both Obamas' – past, and their politics.” They likely did not guess just how controversial it would be, expecting it to draw the same amount of attention as some of Barry Blitt’s earlier satirical covers (the magazine has put a gallery of covers on its Web page, which you can see here.) Unlike the other covers, though – such as the one above satirizing George W. Bush’s relationship with Vice President Cheney – the cover combines controversial topics: besides the picture of Osama Bin Laden it brings religion into the picture by depicting Obama in a costume associated with the Taliban, and the issue of race is underscored by Michelle Obama’s Black Panther costume and the fist-bump greeting the two share.

That fist-bump points to the other reason why the cover’s controversy may have exceeded expectations: it was based on a news hook that did not remain news for long enough. Unlike in the issue at left, where readers could be expected to remember both U.S. Senator Larry Craig’s arrest for “foot touching” in a men’s room and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York, the Obama cover was based on something that faded quickly: Fox News host E.D. Hill’s referring to the fist-bump gesture – properly called, according to word maven William Saffire, a “dap” – as a “terrorist fist jab.” If that story had remained in the news it might have been clearer that it was Fox News, and other media outlets of a similar political bent, that were the targets of the cover’s satire.

It remains to be seen whether this cover will be good or bad for The New Yorker’s sales, though most analysts seem to feel the effect will be a negative one – that it is possible for a cover to be too controversial. Nevertheless, while editors will no doubt take a lesson and be careful in how they portray Obama (at least until after the election), there’s no doubt that they will continue to court controversy – because selling the magazine is what the cover is all about.

Questions for classroom discussion

Do you think the New Yorker cover went too far in courting controversy? Why or why not?
Do you think most people who see the cover will recognize it as satire? Why or why not?
How do you think that this controversy will affect The New Yorker’s sales? Why?
Compare the Obama cover to the two other New Yorker covers pictured above. Do you think Obama has been treated any differently from the subjects of the other covers? Why or why not?
How do you think this controversy will affect the Obama campaign? Why?
Why do you think covers involving pregnancy and motherhood are so much more controversial than those that simply involve sex?
There are few recent examples of magazine covers that use religion to cause controversy. Why do you think that is?
Why do you think race is the most controversial topic of the three? Do you think that would hold true for magazines published in Canada? Why or why not?

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Beyond the Screen

Media educator John Pungente’s series Beyond the Screen, airing on Bravo!, now has its own Web site, where teachers can find resources and tips on integrating the series into their classrooms. Father John Pungente, a longtime media educator and founding Board member of MNet, planned the series as a follow-up to his acclaimed Scanning the Movies. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Screen is intended as a way of teaching viewers to “read” movies. In Beyond the Screen Pungente uses clips from current movies and interviews with cast and crew to shed light on filmmaking techniques, genre, and theme. The Web site offers showtimes and previews of upcoming episodes and links to teachers’ guides. (So far the only guide that’s been posted is for Speed Racer, but the guide for The Dark Night should be up shortly; upcoming episodes on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should be popular as well.)

As a Canadian pioneer in media education, Pungente has had a long career of opening audiences’ eyes to the craft and the meaning to be found behind movies. As he puts it, "There are few people who have not seen The Wizard of Oz. One of my favourite moments comes toward the end of the movie when Dorothy pulls aside the curtain and reveals the truth about the wizard. In Beyond the Screen, we want to pull back the curtain on the movies we watch."

You can learn more about Beyond the Screen at www.beyondthescreen.com.

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The Most Toys

Summer is officially upon us, and with it comes the usual lineup of blockbuster movies. Along with the usual cast of superheroes, spies and sexagenarian, whip-cracking archaeologists comes a somewhat unusual hero: Wall-E, the nearly mute robot protagonist of the film of the same name.

The film, which tells the story of a lonely robot whose job is to tidy up the Earth after we humans have turned it into a giant landfill (and then abandoned it for condo living in space), has been received warmly by critics. One aspect of Wall-E that many critics have focused on is its relatively dark story and its topical slant; the New York Times’ Katrina Onstad describes it as “An Inconvenient Cartoon,” drawing links between its environmental message and that of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary.

Of course, there’s some irony in a summer blockbuster – especially one aimed at children – suggesting that we might be buying too much stuff. Exempted from Wall-E’s environmental message, presumably, would be the variety of Wall-E merchandise that will soon be gracing store shelves, such as the “Cube and Stack Wall-E,” “Construct-A-Bot Wall-E,” and “Dance ‘n’ Tap Wall-E” (you can see the whole list at http://pixarplanet.com/blog/thinkway-walle-merchendise). Similarly, we can assume that the anti-corporate elements of the film – in which a company called Buy ’n’ Large has turned the human race into obese, complacent drones – are not intended to apply to Pixar, its parent company Disney, or Pixar co-founder Steve Jobs’ other company Apple. (Wall-E’s girlfriend, EVE, actually looks a lot like an iPod; you can see a list of Apple references in the movie here.)

For his part Andrew Stanton, the film’s writer and director, says no messages were intended at all. As he told the New York Times, “I don’t have much of a political bent, and the last thing I want to do is preach. I just went with things that I felt were logical for a possible future and supported the point of my story.” He also expressed little interest in the accompanying merchandise, saying “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”

Pixar is unusual in the degree of creative freedom it gives its directors (most of whom also write their films), but even it can’t escape the pull of merchandising: with box-office revenues for its movies dropping off since 2003’s Finding Nemo, merchandising is increasingly important to its profitability. Cars (2006), for instance, was a commercial disappointment, but its boy-friendly concept allowed it to set a new record for merchandise sales, selling a billion dollars’ worth versus a mere $700 million in ticket sales. Naturally, a sequel has been announced in hopes of maintaining demand.

For other would-be blockbusters, merchandising is a way of getting around age restrictions. All of the summer’s big superhero movies, for example – Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight (the latest Batman sequel) – are rated PG-13 in the United States, requiring children under 13 to be accompanied by an adult. As the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has pointed out, however, each one of these films has merchandise associated with it that is both aimed at and advertised to much younger children. This includes an Iron Man Nerf Blaster (for ages 6 and up), a “Hulky Pokey Hulk,” (for children as young as 18 months) and nearly five thousand Batman items. According to Paul Gitter of Marvel Comics, which owns the characters of Iron Man and the Hulk, toys are a kind of advertising as well as a revenue stream: "Especially for kids, they'll see the toys before they'll see the movie ads. If they want the toy, they usually want to see the movie."

It wasn’t always this way, of course. A long time ago – in what may seem like a galaxy far, far away – merchandising rarely outlived its parent movie. What changed everything was Star Wars. Before that time, merchandising was thought to be of so little value that 20^th Century Fox, the studio that produced Star Wars, let director/producer George Lucas keep the merchandising rights – a decision that cost them $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Star Wars merchandise, from sheets to action figures to cake pans (I still have the cake pan), was inescapable from the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s. The Star Wars lesson was not lost on other producers, or toy companies: children’s television in the ‘80s was littered with shows that began life as toys (Smurfs, G.I. Joe) or where the show was created to sell the toy (Gummi Bears, Masters of the Universe).

Like Pixar, Lucas has maintained demand for merchandise by periodically producing more screen content, starting with the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire (the first to be set after the last movie of the original trilogy), then finally releasing the long-promised “prequel trilogy” of films in 1999. While those movies were poorly received by both critics and fans – one fan told the Toronto Star he’d been so disappointed in them he sold off all his action figures – they kept the merchandising sales alive, and Lucas has announced an animated series (set between the second and third films) to keep the taps flowing.

Like all of today’s blockbusters, Wall-E owes a significant debt to Star Wars: its producers know that even if kids find the movie’s nearly wordless opening act hard to get into, they (or their parents) will still buy enough products with Wall-E and EVE on them to make the movie profitable. That debt is acknowledged by having the voice of Wall-E provided by Ben Burtt, who gave R2-D2 his distinctive beeps and whistles. Should you find yourself nostalgic for the original, of course, you can always buy a life-sized, voice-activated replica of the little ‘droid – just $169.95 from Hammacher-Schlemmer.

For tips on dealing with advertising to kids, check out MNet’s resources on “How Marketers Target Kids” and “Dealing With Marketing: What Parents Can Do.” Parentline Plus also has a page of “Tips On Tackling Pester Power.”

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Sleeping with the elephant

The galaxy changed when you weren’t looking.

Formerly a largely peaceful and orderly place, inhabited by craftspeople, entertainers and wise Jedi, the galaxy – that is to say, the world of Star Wars Galaxies, the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) based on the movie franchise – is now a world of ruthless bounty hunters and blaster-happy fighter pilots. Where success could once be achieved by a number of paths, it now consists of, in the words of the game’s senior director Nancy MacIntye, “instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat.”

We mentioned Star Wars Galaxies in an earlier column, looking at the Busby Berkeley-style production numbers that had been staged by its players. In 2005, however, the game was changed in several fundamental ways. Among these changes, which were made in hopes of attracting a broader player base, was the elimination of many of the game’s character types – such as the entertainers who had staged those production numbers – as well making the gameplay focus more heavily on combat. Many of the game’s players cried foul. What right did LucasArts and Sony have to change the game they had spent so much time and effort on? Whose world was it, anyway?

While the issue is most prominent in cases like this, where users are working with a previously created property like Star Wars, it runs through all examples of Web 2.0. The essential definition of 2.0, after all, is that users create some or all of the content. What follows from that is the question of just who that content belongs to. It also brings to light a broader idea of “owning”: none of the players of Star Wars Galaxies would have suggested that they held copyright to anything they had created there, but still they had a definite sense that the world they had collaborated on was theirs – and felt betrayed when they learned the game’s creators did not share that belief.

What may have brought Star Wars Galaxies to that flashpoint was that in its early days – including the development period, before the game was actually playable – the design team took an entirely opposite tack. Henry Jenkins, in From Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, describes the two approaches media owners can take to user-created content as prohibitionist and collaborationist: prohibitionist companies seek to retain total control of their properties, whereas collaborationists try to harness the users’ desire to get involved. Of course, nothing prevents a media owner from using both strategies at different times – a band might take a prohibitionist stance on file-sharing, for instance, while releasing some tracks to be used in remixes.

In the case of Star Wars Galaxies, the collaborationist approach used early on came about because its initial lead developer, Raph Koster, had his roots in the world of multi-user dungeons, the non-commercial forebears of today’s massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Recognizing the tremendous investment Star Wars fans had in the material, he created an online forum where the fans could be kept up to date on development of the game and give suggestions and feedback. This attitude carried on into the game itself: nearly everything that existed within the game – including the weapons, clothing and other equipment the characters used – was created by the players themselves. Koster recognized that fans did not so much want to play Star Wars as to live it, and the world he created for them was one in which every niche – from craftsperson to entertainer to politician to Jedi – was available.

Commercially, though, Star Wars Galaxies was not the smash its creators were hoping for. Although it won a respectable number of subscribers, it lagged well behind industry leaders like World of Warcraft – an embarrassing position for a game built around what is, after all, the crown jewel of media properties. When subscriptions failed to rise, the decision was made to target a different group of users, those too young to have seen Star Wars in the theatre (or even on VHS). It was assumed that these players would prefer Star Wars Galaxies if it had simpler, more combat-heavy gameplay – if it were, essentially, World of Warcraft with light sabres and Jedi knights. The backlash was powerful and immediate, with many of the original users saying they felt betrayed by the changes in the game. The comments made by Nancy MacIntyre to The New York Times on the issue made it clear that the old users’ opinions no longer mattered: the day of Koster’s collaborationist approach was over. No longer would Star Wars Galaxies be a game where you decided what “winning” was: Sony and Lucasarts would tell you how to play.

The tension between the collaborationist and prohibitionist approaches is found again in one of the fan-made films discussed in an earlier column, the aptly titled Fanboys. Again taking the Star Wars universe as its jumping-off point, this film imagined a group of diehard fans taking a road-trip to Star Wars creator George Lucas’ ranch in 1998 to see the then-unreleased prequel The Phantom Menace. The subject matter was problematic: while no Star Wars characters appear in the film, recognizable (and trademarked) images do, as characters appear wearing costumes from the original movies. In the case of Fanboys, though, the conflict was not with the property owner; Lucas decided on a collaborationist approach, giving the filmmakers access to a number of locations as props and, more importantly, allowing the use of his intellectual property. It was the film’s backers, the Weinstein Company, who offended the fans’ sense of ownership. In the original script, and the first cut of the movie, the fans are motivated to see The Phantom Menace because their friend, who has cancer, may not live to see its official release; in the final cut, however, all references to cancer have been removed. Just as with Star Wars Galaxies, fans who had followed the creation of the film from script to screen, who considered it in some ways “their” movie, reacted with outrage – organizing a boycott of Weinstein Company films and expressing their anger through Web sites such as Stop Darth Weinstein. While the eventual fate of Fanboys remains to be seen – no release date has been announced – it’s likely that both Lucas and the Weinstein Company may be wary of taking the collaborationist approach in the future.

The future of Web 2.0 seems likely to be one of tension between property owners (movie studios, authors, television networks) and user-creators. Beyond issues of perceived ownership and loyalty come questions of legal ownership: how much user-created content can a property owner allow before their ownership comes into question? Here, again, the prohibitionist and collaborationist approaches appear. Paramount, which owns the Star Trek franchise, was a vigorous defender of its sole copyright in the early years of the Web, sending cease-and-desist letters to fan sites, but more recently it has chosen to take the opposite tack. World Enough and Time, the Star Trek fan movie, was explicitly authorized by Paramount as an amateur production. By making the permission formal, Paramount guaranteed that the use of its property won’t undercut its ownership. As the number of user-created works grow, with many, if not most, involving using copyrighted materials in some way, will property owners be able to keep up? Moreover, not all user-creators produce material that the property owner will approve of. As we saw in examining Star Wars Galaxies, fans may hold very different views on the nature and values of a property – and they may feel they own it, on a moral level, every bit as much as the legal owners (some, indeed, insist the fans are the “real” owners – easier to justify, perhaps, in the case of a property like Star Trek, which is owned by the corporation that bought the company that financed the original series, than in the case of a creator-owned property such as Star Wars.) The rise of the transmedia business model – in which the same property is used simultaneously in a variety of media, so that there might at any given time be a Star Wars movie, comic book, computer game, and so on – makes the prohibitionist approach difficult, since the transmedia approach relies on a high degree of consumer loyalty and involvement.

Ownership, in both the legal and moral sense, is fundamentally what Web 2.0 is about. From collaboratively reviewing books and hotels to building a community news platform to telling stories about beloved movie characters, user-created content has led to a shift in our traditional views of the relationship between producers and consumers. It may be too early to say what that relationship will eventually look like, or to know how many users are really interested in producing content, but it seems certain that many of our assumptions about media are destined to change.

Questions for Class Discussion

Why were players of Star Wars Galaxies upset about the changes in the game?

Many fans feel like they “own” the properties they watch and play. Why do you think they feel this way? Should fans have any rights of “ownership”? Why or why not?

Do you have examples of friends or peers who create collaborative media based on copyrighted property? If so, did they seek permission? Do you think that they should? Why or why not?

Which do you think will be more effective in dealing with user-created media – the collaborationist or the prohibitionist approach? Why?

Do you think that user-created content will change the relationship between media producers and consumers? If so, how will it change? If not, why not?

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The DIY Newsroom

Note: this is the fifth in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0

The user-participation culture of Web 2.0 has begun to change the worlds of music, movies, animation, games and even encyclopedias, but in no area does the change promise to be as deep and fundamental as in the world of news. While other aspects of user-created content blur the line between authors and audiences, the line remains there: it still takes tremendous skill and effort to make a mashup or a fan movie, even if Web 2.0 has made those things easier to distribute. Some have suggested, though, that it will change journalism in a much more radical way – perhaps altering our idea of what journalism is entirely.

Like other media, journalism has essentially two functions: to create content and to distribute it. Where journalism differs from the other media we’ve looked at is that its content is created in two distinct steps, which we might call collection and processing. News, after all, does not come from nowhere: it has to be found and researched before being reported.

It is in this first area, the collection of news, that Web 2.0 has so far had the most impact. A good example is the recent riots in Tibet. In an area that is kept under a tight lid at the best of times, most news outlets would have had little hope of getting footage of these riots under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities. Thanks to the widespread use of camera cell phones, though, unfiltered images of the riots made their way to the press, providing a powerful counterpoint to the state-authorized footage the Chinese government had released. User-contributed photos and videos like these have become so common that CNN has even set up a site, iReport, to feature them; many of those which are ranked as “newsiest” (a word that sounds as though it was coined by Stephen Colbert) are used on the air. This sort of thing is hardly new, of course: many of the best news photographers, such as Weegee, were freelancers, and amateurs have been providing important footage at least as far as the Zapruder film. What is different now is the scale on which it is happening, the sheer number of potential photographic witnesses to any event.

Some, though, are looking to Web 2.0 to change the processing side of the news as well – or even change the definition of what news is. EveryBlock is a site that focuses on local news that tends to fly “under the radar” of the commercial media. As they put it, “Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs… We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas.” So far available only in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, EveryBlock has a mission similar to that of Front Porch Forum, examined in our last instalment; unlike that site, though EveryBlock uses a mix of user-contributed content and more formal news sources such as crime reports, building permits and restaurant inspections. Essentially, EveryBlock lets its users decide what is “newsy,” providing raw information and trusting the readers to choose what is important to them.

A site that is in some ways the opposite of EveryBlock is Live News Cameras, which provides live news feeds from a variety of stations in the United States and around the world. Rather than providing information that has traditionally not been regarded as news, as EveryBlock does, Live News Cameras gives its users access to news sources they might not otherwise have, such as Al Jazeera or CCTV China. The site also allows users to embed these feeds on other sites, allowing them to incorporate these news sources into a larger work. This allows users to control the third aspect of journalism, distribution.

The ultimate goal of 2.0 journalism may be the adoption by users of all three roles – collector, processor, and distributor of news. This idea has given rise to the term “citizen journalist” to describe someone who does some or all of these things, either as an individual or part of a group. Citizen journalists have been front and centre in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign, mostly working for small organizations such as PurpleStates.tv and the Huffington Post Web site, although both PBS and MTV have also sponsored them. In some ways these citizen journalists challenge the notion of what a journalist is: though some are paid, none are professional journalists, and the use of the term “citizen” implies that journalism can be viewed as a kind of civic duty – akin to serving on a jury. This meshes with EveryBlock’s ethos: that citizens should be providing news as well as consuming it, though most of that site’s news items still come from either government or established news outlets.

The deprofessionalizing of journalism may have its downsides. For one, news readers and viewers will likely need to become more sceptical consumers as it becomes easier to be a news broadcaster. Given the amount of disinformation already present on the Net, it seems certain that some will seize upon the rise of citizen journalism to spread hoaxes and lies. (It’s hard to say whether the popularity of “fake news” outlets such as The Daily Show means consumers will be more or less likely to tell real news from false.) As well, some of the experiences of citizen journalists throw into question one of the core tenets of traditional journalism, objectivity. Of course, the objective press is a fairly new idea – most newspapers were solidly partisan for most of their histories – and even today this is a questionable proposition. In nearly all cases, though, traditional news outlets maintain at least a semblance of objectivity – something that is rarely found in citizen journalists. Instead “citizen” is often a synonym for “activist”; for example, in the case of the Media Mobilizing Project, an organization devoted to putting the tools of journalism into the hands of mostly immigrant low-income Philadelphians, journalists may not even be citizens or legal residents of their country. “We are uncomfortable with the term ‘citizen journalism,’ ” Todd Wolfson, one of the project’s organizers, told the New York Times, saying that he prefers the term “community journalism.” A similar site is The Hub, which describes itself as “an interactive community for human rights.” The Hub is an explicitly issue-driven site that aims to use citizen journalism to promote human rights worldwide; users can contribute and view videos, three of which are selected by the editors as the “most urgent” of the week.

Are Everyblock and The Hub the future of journalism? It’s certainly likely that the ideas each represents – unfiltered news access and transparent advocacy – will transform the news business. After all, the partisanship of news organizations like Fox News or Xinhua are largely open secrets; in an age of scepticism, or at least cynicism, where more than half of Americans say they don’t trust the press, being open about your biases may be the best way to win trust.

For Classroom Discussion

How do you think the spread of digital cameras and camera cell phones might change how the news is made? Will it have different effects on different news media (newspapers, TV, Internet, etc.) or have different effects in different parts of the world? Why?

Sites like EveryBlock try to let the users filter their own news, deciding what is newsworthy and what is not. Do you think that most people would have a different view of what is newsworthy than the news media does? If all news was user-selected, would it look different from the news today? Why or why not? If so, how would it be different?

Do you think everyone has a duty to be a journalist? Why or why not?

Do you think that “citizen journalists” will change journalism? Why or why not? If yes, how will journalism be changed?

Do you think that journalists should try to be objective, or should they be transparent about their views and agendas? Why? Is it possible to have both objectivity and advocacy in the news? If so, is it desirable?

Why do you think so many people report that they don’t trust the news media? A Pew Research Center study reported that people who get their news mostly from the Internet are less likely to trust the media; why might this be so? Do you think that an increase in citizen journalism, in any of the forms described above, will make people more or less likely to trust the media? Why or why not?

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New classroom resources on media and global development

Much of what we believe about the world comes from the media products we see and hear. This is especially true of places and things we might not have actually experienced, such as developing nations and global development efforts. Beyond Media Messages: Media Portrayal of Global Development looks at how the media influences our views of developing nations and global development efforts, how we can learn to read or view media portrayals critically and how we can become media authors to promote democratic citizenship.

To help educators address this issue in their classrooms, Media Awareness Network has developed a series of lessons, in English and in French, to give students a better understanding of how media portrayals affect our view of global development issues. Beyond Media Messages: Media Portrayal of Global Development comprises the following:

Beyond Media Messages: Media Portrayal of Global Development
Grades 7-12

In this three-day unit, students assess media coverage of natural disasters and their aftermath. Students explore how sensationalism plays a role in determining what is newsworthy, and how that can distort our perception of issues in developing nations. What makes a story newsworthy? What positive results follow the natural disasters and how, where and when are those reported in the media? How do distorted perceptions of developing nations affect our attitudes and behaviours toward them?

Celebrities and World Issues
Grades 7-12

In this four-day unit, students will examine the role of popular culture celebrities in creating awareness of world issues. Students will debate whether celebrity involvement is important and positive, or whether such involvement brings too much attention to the celebrities themselves, overshadowing the central messages of a campaign, organization, program or issue.

Finding and Authenticating Online Information on Global Development Issues
Grades 7-12

In this two-day unit, students learn strategies for using the Internet effectively to research global development issues. Students discover how to determine the truth and accuracy of online information and learn effective ways to obtain balanced sources of information. Students learn to ask, and search for answers to, the questions: Who is presenting this information and why?

Making Media for Democratic Citizenship
Grades 11-12

In this five- or six-day unit, students create a video podcast to present balanced, unbiased perspectives on global development issues. They voice their perspectives through the language, codes and conventions of a visual medium.

Partners

Beyond Media Messages: Media Portrayal of Global Development was produced with support from:

Canadian International Development Agency

Canadian Teachers' Federation

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One's a crowd

Note: this is the fourth in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0

In our last instalment we contrasted the “hard path” of user-created media – which requires would-be creators to be highly talented, skilful, committed, or all three – with the “easy path” of services which make it possible for more people to create media. In this column we’ll be looking at a method which aspires to make everyone a creator: crowdsourcing.

As with other aspects of Web 2.0 we’ve examined, the origins of crowdsourcing go back to the beginnings of computer culture – and betray a split within that culture. In this case the split, which began in the early 1980s when personal computing began to become a commercial industry, is between those who viewed computer code as a proprietary possession and those who believed that it should be accessible to all. As the industry became more and more profitable, the former camp was in the ascendant – both Microsoft and Apple maintained corporate control of their operating systems – but the other side never entirely went away. Instead it evolved into the Open Source movement (named after its assertion that source code, the programs that made up an operating system, should be open to all) and spawned a series of alternative operating systems, culminating in 1991 with Linux.

What made Linux different from either the Mac or Microsoft operating systems was that it was collaborative – while its development had begun with one person, Linus Torvalds, it was completed by any number of programmers who debugged, refined and improved it. Because of this Linux was more easily customizable to various applications than other operating systems, and many believe that it is debugged and updated more quickly. More relevant to Web 2.0, though, is the way that Linux became almost a totem for many people in computer culture: proof that great things could be done by a community instead of a corporation.

The early 1990s were, of course, the beginning of the Internet era as well, and it was there that the Open Source movement found its spiritual home. The two-way nature of the Internet – more like a telephone than a television, as Scott McCloud has pointed out – made it a natural forum for collaboration right from the beginning. Nearly all Web services that survive from that period involve some degree of user creation, such as the customer reviews on Amazon. As a larger number of people began to go online some sites began to use open source principles in unexpected ways – sites like TripAdvisor, for instance, which compiles customer reports about hotels and other travel amenities. In 2006 Wired writer Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing (by analogy to outsourcing) to refer to a business model in which the content is created, either for small payments or for nothing, by a large number of users not formally affiliated with the company.

Today new experiments are pushing crowdsourcing in ways unforeseen even two years ago. For one thing, many of the new crowdsourcing sites are non-commercial. Front Porch Forum is a site that aims to use the Web as a “virtual front porch” – in fact it’s a bit more like a community newspaper or bulletin board, with messages such as “Looking to borrow a car seat” and “Yes to new sidewalks.” The makers of Front Porch Forum provide nothing but the forum itself; all of the content is provided by the residents of the town or neighbourhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Front Porch Forum originated in Vermont, not the most urban state in the union; how it will work in urban neighbourhoods, when it expands beyond its pilot city of Burlington, remains to be seen. If nothing else, though, Front Porch Forum provides a model for a non-commercial crowdsourcing, as well as a means of using the Internet – so famously able to connect us with people from around the world – to put us in touch with our neighbours as well. Whether this will lead to actually talking to our neighbours face-to-face is another matter. (Given the incredible boom in online worlds aimed at children, can the virtual play-date be far off?)

A site that takes crowdsourcing in a different direction is Patients Like Me, a site that allows sufferers of a variety of diseases (at the time of writing ALS, HIV, Multiple Sclerosis, mood disorders and Parkinson’s Disease) to connect with one another. Like Front Porch Forum, Patients Like Me has its antecedents in the world of bulleting boards and discussion groups; what makes it different, beyond the scale on which it operates, is the focus not just on sharing experiences but on compiling data on treatment options. By allowing patients to compare the effects of various treatments, it also allows them to advocate on their behalf – to ask to be given treatments that seem to be more effective based on the data they’ve seen on the site. To make this work, members are required to submit not just subjective accounts but specific information on drugs, dosage, strength and duration of effects, which the site then compiles into a common database. So much data is involved, in fact, that two significant concerns have arisen. One is the loss of privacy about medical information – a crucial matter in the United States, where disclosing medical information can lead to a denial of insurance coverage; the other issue is that users will begin to use Patients Like Me as a substitute for professional medical advice rather than as a supplement. The site tries to address both concerns in their “small print” pages: their Privacy Policy says that “PatientsLikeMe will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes,” but admits a line later that “We do, however, provide Personally Identifiable Information and non-Personally-Identifiable Information to approved vendors for PatientsLikeMe email communications and other PatientsLikeMe internal programs.” The User Agreement, meanwhile, is careful to note (in capital letters) that the site does not provide medical advice. Nevertheless, it’s clear that many users are relying on the site for exactly that: The New York Times reported that more than a hundred ALS sufferers on the site had begun to use Lithium, a drug not normally prescribed for that condition, on the basis of an unpublished Italian study whose early results were being published on the site.

Perhaps the ultimate example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia. Wikipedia is, in fact, more open-source than either Patients Like Me or Linux – more akin to Front Porch Forum, in fact, in that the site provides only the architecture, none of the content. All of that is left to the users, who create, alter, edit and occasionally delete entries. Its accuracy is a matter of debate: a study reported in the magazine Nature stated that it compared favourably to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that study – which has been accused of being flawed by the Britannica’s publisher – looked only at science-related articles, which tend to be less subjective. In more controversial topics, such as the presidential nomination race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, “editing wars” erupt as each side tries to promote its own position, or at least keep the text neutral.

Interestingly, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has stated that he dislikes the term “crowdsourcing,” contrasting the businesses that were originally described by the word with his non-profit venture. Wikipedia describes itself not as “the crowdsourced encyclopedia,” or even “the open-source encyclopedia,” but “the free encyclopedia.” Though Wikipedia is free to use, it is also free of corporate oversight or control; while not all users are equal, all do have a voice. For Wales, and for most open-source loyalists, that freedom is worth whatever loss of accuracy it may cost. In our next instalment we’ll look at whether user-created content can succeed in an area where accuracy and trust are the most valuable currency: the news.

For Classroom Discussion

Why do you think the question of whether computer code should be “open” or “closed” has aroused such strong opinions? How does this question relate to some of the issues raised around user-created content in DIY Media: Mashups, fan movies, and machinima?

How successful do you think Front Porch Forum would be in a large city? Why?

What do you think doctors and medical relationships would think about Patients Like Me? Why?

How reliable do you consider Wikipedia to be? Why? Does its reliability relate to the way users create and edit content? If so, how?

Which term do you think is more appropriate to describe the examples discussed in this column, “crowdsourcing” or “open source”? Why? What different messages does each term imply?

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