Henry Jenkins Media Studies PDF

Henry Jenkins
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Henry Jenkins
MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY
A traditional account of democracy might focus on institutions, policies, laws, and

systems. I am interested, however, in the ways that everyday citizens live in relation to
the principles and ideals of a democratic society. Early in my career, I majored in
political science, but found the field too abstracted from the everyday details of
political culture. I have found that studying popular culture gives me an alternative
way of addressing the issues that initially attracted me to political science. For me, the
study of media and the study of politics are inextricably linked. My approach,
however, contrasts sharply with writers like Noam Chomsky or Robert McChesney
who understand popular culture primarily as a distraction from political participation. I
see our relationships to popular culture as shaping our political identities in profound
ways and am interested in the ways that people mobilize the contents of popular
culture to understand the stakes in political struggles. Popular culture often expresses
ideas or perspectives that are outside the consensus framed by the news media and are
allowed to be expressed here precisely because popular culture is not taken seriously.
Many subcultural communities draw on those resources to inspire their own acts of
political resistance or to shape their own understanding of citizenship.
This approach represents a movement away from a traditional notion of public sector
politics and towards an engagement with the more domesticated conceptions of
citizenship that emerged through feminism, queer activism, and other identity politics
movements. I believe firmly that one reason why fewer and fewer people are voting is
that the realm of governance and elections has remained too abstract and removed from
the realm of their everyday lives. Increasingly, we are getting our knowledge about the
world around us from nontraditional sources and we are expressing our political
concerns outside the realm of government.
THE INFORMED CITIZEN

The informed citizen is a central ideal underlying any democratic society and that
means the study of information technologies and practices are strongly linked to the
study of political life. To be able to fully participate in the decision-making process,
one has to have access to core information, one has to be able to process that
information, and one has to have the right to share your insights with others.
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Henry Jenkins
"Media in Transition: An Introduction," which I co-authored with David Thorburn,

deals with many issues surrounding media change, but an important aspect of the essay
is an overview of a diverse range of theories and approaches to the issue of how digital
media is impacting democracy, approaches which range from top-down approaches to
governance, campaigning, and public opinion formation to bottom-up approaches to
the notion of informed and participatory citizenship.
The Boston Review recently asked me to respond to an essay written by political

theorist Cass Sunstein, titled The Daily We, which makes the case that net
communities may ultimately be less democratic than people have imagined because of
the tendency of discussion groups to become isolating and to filter out opposing ideas.
In my response, I offer my fullest discussion to date of how I think democratic
principles operate in the new media environment, making the case that traditional
intermediaries were far less neutral than Sunstein implies and that the new political
culture will be shaped through the interactions between old and new media. I also
include in the work an account of the circulation and political impact of my essay,
"Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington," to illustrate the ways that the act of
crossposting may embody the kinds of temporary tactical alliances between groups and
individuals which theorists of radical democracy discuss.
Some of the ideas in this essay first took shape in "Contact[ing] the Past," which I
initially wrote for an MIT student publication, but has enjoyed a much broader
circulation on the web. This essay used the opening of the film, Contact, to explore the
ways that the history of the participatory uses of early radio have been erased from our
popular memory of broadcast history and how these developments paralleled the
participatory spirit of the early internet.
"Information Cosmos," one of my Technology Review columns, deals with information

and citizenship from a different comparison -- seeking to understand what lessons the
modern world might learn from the history of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and
framed as advice to the librarians in Egypt who have just opened a new library on that
old location. Although the column is more evocative than definitive, a key subtext is
how structures of information reflect and in turn shape political cultures.
Another Technology Review column, "Good News, Bad News" extends this
exploration of the information structures in place within contemporary media culture to
consider the future of the local newspaper in a world where consumers can choose
between hundreds of news sources on-line. I argue that the United States is evolving
away from a culture centered on strong identifications with geographically localized
communities and towards a national information culture, more like those found in
Europe. The article also considers the issue of diversification of information sources in
an age of media concentration, making the case that a locally focused journalism may

Henry Jenkins
not, in the end, be any more diverse in the perspectives it offers than a rigorous
national news culture.
"Reading Popular History: The Atlanta Child Murders," which appeared in the Journal
of Communication in 1987, explored the issue of the relationship of documentary and
docudrama as vehicles for reporting on recent historical events -- in this case, on the
Atlanta child murders. At the same time, I depict the struggle between local and
national framings of the case, as I see how the Atlanta media responded to a disturbing
network representation of the city's handling of this case.
One of the writers who has most influenced my own thinking about media and
democracy is the Australian cultural critic and journalism historian John Hartley. I
have twice been asked to review Hartley's books and have used the occasion to delve
deeper into his ideas about democratic citizenship (not to mention to pastiche his
distinctive authorial voice.) My review of his book, "Popular Reality," for Continuum,
enabled me to develop some of my own ideas about the different ways that news and
entertainment television refract contemporary social and political developments and to
speculate about the Monica Lewinsky scandel.
ACCESS
The question of who has access to information technologies and who has the power to
express their ideas through these channels remains one of the most worrisome aspects
of the digital revolution.
I was one of the co-organizers behind a joint MIT-USC conference on Race in Digital
Space, which sought to shift this discussion away from the largely negative focus of
the debates about the "digital divide" and focus attention on successful efforts within
minority communities to exploit the political and community building potentials of
these new technologies. Conference participants argued that the digital divide rhetoric
can disempower minority activists by denying a history of innovative minority use of
communications technologies. Rather than seeing cyberspace as "race blind" or
exclusionary, the speakers focused on how minorities had pioneered alternative uses of
the media more appropriate to the interests of their communities. The conference, held
at MIT, was the first of two such events. The second one next year will enlarge the
conversation about race to include a more global perspective. The conference
organizers, Anna Everett, Tara McPherson, Erika Muhammed, and myself, are
currently in the process of editing a book based on the conference and the related art
exhibition for the University of California Press.
One of my Technology Review columns, "Digital Land Grab" examines the erosion of
fair use in the current moment of media in transition, suggesting the ways that the

Henry Jenkins
expansion of corporate control over media content through copyright and trademark
law had the potential to disenfranchise the general public's efforts to mobilize popular
myths for their own expressive and ideological purposes.
THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY

How are democratic principles embedded in the practices of everyday life? How do
democratic cultures produce democratic citizens? Can we understand democracy more
in cultural than institutional terms? How can we examine democracy as a "structure of
feeling" or a way of interrelating to people around us? These questions have been a
recurrent concern in my research, primarily refracted through a focus on the political
issues impacting children and youth. Running through this research have been three
major concerns: how do people use popular culture to explore and express cultural and
political identities; how has a discourse of culture war and moral panic sought to
silence critical voices in our society by regulating their access to popular culture and
communication technologies; and how might we develop a progressive discourse about
childhood and "family values" which sees the home as the birthplace of our political
identities.
POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

"Fandom, the New Identity Politics," originally posted to a fan discussion list and later
reprinted in Harpers, represents perhaps my most explicit discussion of the links
between popular culture and identity politics. I argue here that the category of cultural
preference may be increasingly important to the articulation of political beliefs and
commitments in contemporary society, discussing parallels between discomfort within
fandom about overt displays of identification and debates within queer politics about
whether gays, lesbians and bisexuals might gain "a seat at the table" if they tempered
the more flamboyant aspects of their identities.
COMBATING THE CULTURE WAR

These same assumptions about the links between cultural identity and politics run
through a succession of essays written in response to the Columbine massacres and
their aftermath. Some weeks after the shootings, I was called to Washington to testify
before the Senate Commerce Committee investigations of the potential links between
popular culture and youth violence. In my testimony, I sought to explain why popular
culture was increasingly the site of generational conflict and to point towards the
limitations of media effects as a language for explaining that conflict. I wrote about my
experiences in testifying before Congress in "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington,"
an essay widely circulated through the internet and posted on the web and ultimately
reprinted in Harpers. I discuss the circulation of this e-mail message in my response to
Cass Sunstein, seeing it as an example of the kind of short-term alliances and coalitions
that can emerge in the digital environment.

Henry Jenkins
I delved deeper into the politics of moral panic across a series of essays designed to
help educators better understand the place of popular culture in the lives of their
students. "The Uses and Abuses of Popular Culture" and "Lessons From Littleton"
grow directly from my Senate testimony itself. "The Kids Are Alright Online"
reflected an attempt to examine the ways teens were building a culture for themselves
in cyberspace which contrasted sharply with the problems they confronted at home and
at school. A fuller version of that talk can be found on the website for our MIT
conference, "We've Wired the Classroom -- Now What?"
Many people -- parents, teachers, religious leaders -- urged me to develop some models
and guidelines for how parents might talk with their children about popular culture. I
chose a somewhat novel way to approach this task, developing a dialogic essay with
my son, using episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explore the power relations
between parents and teens.
Jon Katz emerged as an important ally as I sought to break down the atmosphere of
moral panic that surrounded popular culture in the post-Columbine period. Katz, a
journalist for slashdot, offered up his column to high school students around the
country to report on the backlash against student rights and subcultural identities they
encountered in their schools. Katz came to MIT to participate in a public conversation
with me about the politics of adolescence, which was transcribed for the Media in
Transition website. Katz also asked me to write the introduction to a book based on his
"Voices From the Hellmouth" columns. What I produced is perhaps my most openly
autobiographical work to date, explaining how my own troubling high school
experiences shaped my political identity and led me to play such an active role in
responding to Columbine. Unfortunately, the book has never appeared, so this may be
the only place you will see this particular essay.
RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF CHILDHOOD

In "The Innocent Child and Other Modern Myths," the introduction to my book, The
Children's Culture Reader, I make the case that every major political battle in the 20th
century was fought through the trope of childhood innocence. In any given debate,
whichever side is the first to play the child card gains an enormous degree of moral
authority. The essay explores radically different accounts of the politics of childhood
as articulated at the 1996 Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
For the most part, the right has been far more effective at exploiting the concept of
"family values" than the left. In my essay, "No Matter How Small," which will appear
in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture (which I co-edited with
Tara Mcpherson and Jane Shattuc) I describe a very different formulation of the family
which emerged at the end of World War II as parents sought to develop more
democratic forms of childrearing which would prepare their young for future

Henry Jenkins
citizenship. In this essay, I explore how the writings of Doctor Seuss emerged from
this post-war discourse about the micropolitics of family life as well as from his own
public role as an editorial cartoonist for PM during the Popular Front period and as a
writer for the Frank Capra "Why We Fight" Propaganda films. How did Seuss
transform the categories of adult politics into simple fables intended to be read to
children in the context of the "permissive" home? What lessons might contemporary
progressives learn from examining this explicitly leftist discourse about parenting and
family life? How might it have foreshadowed the countercultural politics of the 1960s
as the children raised in these "democratic" homes reached maturity?

Henry Jenkins
GENRES OF ENTERTAINMENT
Genre is one of the essential categories for the analysis of popular culture. A
genre is a "kind" of work, suggesting an exercise in classification, but genres
are also formulas that artists draw upon for the production of artworks and
conventions that enable consumers to make sense of new works based on their
knowledge of previous works in the same category. Genres should not be
understood as rules or restrictions so much as enabling mechanisms that allow
popular culture to be easily consumed and broadly appreciated. All works are
born from a mixture of invention and convention. A work that is pure invention
is unlikely to be fully understood or appreciated; a work that is pure convention
is likely to be boring and uninteresting. Popular aesthetics centers around this
effort then to reach the right balance between invention and convention.
HYBRID GENRES
My own work has explored a broad range of genres -- comedy, science fiction,
melodrama, horror, exploitation films, erotica, children's films, and many others. In
this work, I have tended to emphasize the complexity of genre categories, looking at
works that straddle genre traditions and focusing on the ways that audiences negotiate
between competing genre framings of the same work. For example, my essay, "The
Amazing Push-Me/Pull-You Text: Cognitive Processing, Narrational Play and the
Comic Film", first published in Wide Angle, drew on cognitive theory to explain how
readers made use of genres in making sense of works of popular fiction and then
suggested some of the complexities of applying this approach to answer the question of
how we know that a film is intended to be taken as a comedy.
"It's Not a Fairy Tale Any More!': Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast", which first
appeared in the Journal of the University Film and Video Association and was later
expanded for publication in my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture, dealt with conflicting understanding of genre between the
producers and viewers of the television series, Beauty and the Beast, using genre
theory to better understand how fans fall in and out of harmony with commercial
media texts.
"Do You Enjoy Making The Rest of Us Feel Stupid: alt.tv.twinpeaks, The Trickster
Author and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery (Ed.) Full of Secrets:
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Henry Jenkins
Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, deals with Twin Peaks as a work which sparked a
high degree of audience speculation in part because it combined mystery and soap
opera, both genres which, in their own way, encourage readers to search for secrets
hidden within the narrative.
In "Monsters Next Door," written as a dialogue with my son, we draw tools from the
study of horror, melodrama, and youth media to explore what Buffy the Vampire Slayer
might tell us about how teens negotiate tensions with their parents and other adult
authorities as they seek to find their own place in the world.
"Shall We Make It for New York or For Distribution?: Eddie Cantor, Whoopee and
Regional Resistance to the Talkies", which was first published in Cinema Journal and
later in What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville
Aesthetic, I look at the commercial basis for genre mixing, suggesting that Eddie
Cantor's films were understood as musicals in New York and other major cities where
Broadway entertainment was popular and as comedian comedies in the hinterlands
where musicals were facing resistance from audience members and exhibitors.
"Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination Through Hollywood Film",

which will appear in a collection on Imaging the City, edited by Lawrence Vale for
MIT Press, deals with an unusual genre -- films which attempt to tell the story of
Manhattan. Here, I draw on the ideas of Kevin Lynch, a theorist of urban spaces, to
examine the ways that these works struggle to give coherent shape and narrative
structure to the complex experience of living in cities. The works discussed here cut
across different genres, traditionally understood, but they may ultimately have more in
common with each other than with other works in the same genre.
"Never Trust a Snake!': WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama", which appeared in

Adam Barker and Todd Boyd's Out of Bounds: Sports, Media and the Politics of
Identity, draws on the theory and criticism of melodrama to better understand the
particular appeal of wrestling as "sports entertainment." I argue that wrestling
constitutes a form of serial fiction for men, one which can trace its performance and
narrative practices back to roots in 19th century popular theater.
I have written two case studies of the ways that artists work with and against the
conventions of popular genres: one centering on the exploitation film director
Stephanie Rothman who struggles to insert her feminist politics into films intended for
a drive-in audience; the other centering on the ways that avant garde artist Matthew
Barney appropriates and reworks material from popular entertainment -- especially
horror.
FILM COMEDY

Henry Jenkins
My dissertation dealt with the impact of vaudeville on the development of the

comedian comedy genre during the early sound period and was later converted into the
book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.
Here, my focus was on the relationship between genre and performance, a topic I have
returned to a number of times in subsequent writings. For example, "That Keaton
Fellow Seems to Be the Whole Show': The Interrupted Performance in Buster Keaton's
Films", which appeared in Andrew Horton's Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior,
expanded my ideas about comedy and performance to examine the silent screen
comedian, Buster Keaton, while "You Don't Say That in English!': The Scandal of
Lupe Velez" explores the performance of racial identity within early sound comedy,
seeing Velez as a "wild woman" caught somewhere between the scandalous erotic
fantasies of the Tijuana bibles and the glamorous ideals of female stardom. Her
Mexican identity made it impossible to fully assimilate her into Hollywood standards
of beauty and was often used to naturalize the more transgressive aspects of her female
comic performance.
Classical Hollywood Comedy, co-edited with Kristine Karnack, provided me with an

occasion to outline key aspects of the theory of film comedy, including genre history,
gag and narrative, performance, and ideology, each of which was the topic of
substantive introductory essays. In "Laughing Stock of the City: Male Dread,
Performance Anxiety, and Unfaithfully Yours," I used concepts of comic performance
to examine the representation of male dread of women in Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully
Yours.
SCIENCE FICTION
Written with John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences: Star Trek, Doctor Who and
Their Followers explored why different audience groups were drawn towards science
fiction as a genre and how this shaped their rather different experiences of Star Trek
and Doctor Who. My interest in science fiction as a genre led me to organize a reading
series at MIT that explored how science fiction authors have dealt with issues of media
change. Transcripts of these conversations are posted on the Media in Transition
website, along with an introductory essay which made the point that science fiction has
been one major source of vernacular theory about the cultural and social impact of
media change.
GENRES OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Several of my essays examine the emergence of and the long term consequences of
gender specific genre categories in children's literature, categories which carry over
into more contemporary media works targeting young consumers.
In "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Playspace", which

appeared in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, I

Henry Jenkins
suggested that the genre of the boy's adventure story and the boy's computer game
drew on similar kinds of "blood and thunder" elements and represented attempts by
adults to produce works consistent with boy's backyard play culture. I then draw on
other works in the girls book tradition to understand some of the directions being taken
within the girls game movement.
"The All-American Handful: Dennis the Menace, Permissive Childrearing and the Bad
Boy Tradition", which appeared in Lynn Spigel and Mike Curtin's The Revolution
Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, I discuss how Dennis the
Menace emerged from the bad boy genre in children's literature and contrast bad boys
with the sentimental representation of femininity in children's books of the same era.
"Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie", which

appeared in Marsha Kinder's Children's Media Culture, shows how one could examine
animal stories to better understand the sentimental construction of childhood.

Media In Transition Archive
note: the media in transition project ended in the fall, 2000. this site is
an archive of those activities. current forums and conferences continue
under the auspices of the mit communications forum.
media in transition book series - http://web.mit.edu/transition

mit communications forum - http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum
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media in transition book series
media in transition
book series from the mit press
David Thorburn, editor
Associate editors:
Edward Barrett
Henry Jenkins
The Media in Transition series provides a forum for humanists and social scientists who wish to
speak not only across academic disciplines but also to policy makers, media and corporate
practitioners, and, most of all, their fellow citizens.
click on images or titles for tables of content and sample chapters
Rethinking Democracy and New Media Neo Baroque

Media Change New Media 1740-1915 Aesthetics
| Comparative Media Studies | Communications Forum
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Neo Baroque Aesthetics
media in transition
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NEO BAROQUE AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA
Angela Ndalianis, author
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Introduction: The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque 3. Hypertexts, Mappings, and Colonized
(complete) Spaces
1. Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque 4. Virtuosity, Special-Effects Spectacles,

Narrative Formations and Architectures of the Senses
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2. Intertextuality, Labyrinths, and the (Neo-) 5. Special-Effects Magic and the Spiritual
20% DISCOUNT FROM Presence of the Technological
Baroque
MIT PRESS
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The Baroque and Neo-Baroque
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Introduction to Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2004) by Angela Ndalianis
The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque
Angela Ndalianis
Postclassical, Modern Classicism, or Neo-Baroque? Will the Real Contemporary

Cinema Please Stand Up?
Once upon a time there was a film called Jurassic Park (Spielberg 1992), and on its
release, audiences went to cinemas by the millions to be entertained by the magic that had
to offer. On the one hand, the film's story enthralled its viewers. Recalling that other
monster, King Kong, in Jurassic Park, genetically engineered dinosaurs were brought to life
by an entrepreneur who was determined to place them within a theme park habitat so that
they could become a source of pleasure and entertainment for millions. On the other hand,
the computer effects that so convincingly granted filmic life to these dinosaurs that inhabited
the narrative space astounded audiences. Then, once upon another time soon after, the
dinosaurs migrated to another entertainment format and roamed the narrative spaces of the
Sony PlayStation game The Lost World: Jurassic Park. To engage with this fictional world,
audiences inserted a PlayStation disk into their consoles and a different, yet strangely
similar, narrative scenario emerged. Dinosaurs were still genetically engineered; however,
now the game player became integral to the way the narrative unraveled. Trapped on an
island inhabited by various dinosaur species, the player now "performed" by interacting with
this digital entertainment format, in the process progressively adopting the roles of
dinosaurs and humans alike in a struggle that culminated in the final survival of one
dominant species.
And yes, once upon yet another time, there was a land called "Jurassic Park," but this was
no film or computer space. This was a geographical locale with which the audience
physically engaged, one of the many lands in Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park
in Orlando, Florida (figure I.1). Here the audience experienced an alternate version of the
Jurassic Park story by traversing a land that was littered with animatronic dinosaurs.
Literally entering the fictional space of Jurassic Park, the participant
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Click image for detailed view.
Figure I.1 The Jurassic Park Ride, Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida. By permission of
Universal Studios.
now experienced the narrative space in architecturally invasive ways by taking a ride
through a technologically produced Jurassic theme park. Traveling along a river in a boat,
participants floated through a series of lagoons (including the "Ultrasaurus Lagoon") whose
banks were inhabited by animatronic versions of hadrosauruses, dilophosauruses,
triceratops, and velocitators. Soon after, however, the wonder of seeing such deceptively
real spectacles of extinct beings was destroyed, and the participants of the fiction found
their wonder turn to terror when they were stalked by raptors and a mammoth
Tyrannosaurus, barely escaping with their lives by plunging to their escape down an eighty-
five-foot waterfall.1 Although each of these "tales" can be experienced and interpreted
independent of the others, much can be lost in doing so, for these narratives belong to
multiple networks of parallel stories that are all intimately interwoven. Each "tale" remains a
fragment of a complex and expanding whole.
In the last two decades, entertainment media have undergone dramatic transformations.
The movement that describes these changes is one concerned with the traversal of
boundaries. In the film Jurassic Park (and its sequels The Lost World: Jurassic Park II and
Jurassic Park III), film technology combines with computer technology to construct the
dinosaur effects that are integral to the films' success. Like the Jurassic Park films, the
Terminator films and the Spiderman comic books find new media environments in the
theme park attractions Terminator 2: 3D Battle across Time and The Amazing Adventures
of Spiderman (both at Universal Studios). Computer games2 like Phantasmagoria I and II
and Tomb Raider I, II, and III cross their game borders by incorporating film styles, genres,
and actors into their digital spaces. And the narratives of the Alien films extend into and are
transformed by a successful comic-book series. All these configurations have formal
repercussions. Media merge with media, genres unite to produce new hybrid forms,
narratives open up and extend into new spatial and serial configurations, and special effects
construct illusions that seek to collapse the frame that separates spectator from spectacle.
Entertainment forms have increasingly displayed a concern for engulfing and engaging the
spectator actively in sensorial and formal games that are concerned with their own media-
specific sensory and playful experiences. Indeed, the cinema's convergence with and

extension into multiple media formats is increasingly reliant on an active audience

engagement that not only offers multiple and sensorially engaging and invasive experiences
but also radically unsettles traditional conceptions of the cinema's "passive spectator."
Additionally, many of the aesthetic and formal transformations currently confronting the
entertainment industry are played out against and informed by cultural and socioeconomic
transformations-specifically, the contexts of globalization and postmodernism.
In "Modern Classicism," the first chapter of Storytelling in the New Hollywood:

Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (1999), Kristin Thompson asks the question
"Just what, if anything, is new about the New Hollywood in terms of what audiences see in
theaters?" (2). For Thompson, it would appear that the answer to this question is "very
little." In this book, however; my response to this question is "a great deal." Disputing claims
to a "postclassical" or "postmodern" cinema, Thompson argues that, essentially, post-1970s
cinema has continued the storytelling practices of the classical Hollywood period. I agree
that, fundamentally, Hollywood has retained many of the narrative conventions that
dominated its cinema between the 1910s and the 1940s: the cause-and-effect patterns that
drive narrative development; the emphasis on goal-oriented characters; the clear three-part
structure that follows an Aristotelian pattern of a beginning, middle and end (wherein
narrative conflict is finally resolved); and psychologically motivated characters with clearly
defined traits.3 Indeed, I would suggest that; with respect to its narrative, a film like Jurassic
Park is not only a classical narrative, but a "superclassical" narrative: the goals of the
narrative and characters are spelled out explicitly and economically, and the cause-and-
effect patterns pound along at a gripping pace until narrative disequilibrium (the threat of the
dinosaurs and the planned theme park) is removed. In this respect I agree with Thompson
when she suggests that Jurassic Park has as "well-honed [a] narrative as virtually any film
in the history of Hollywood" (1999, 9). In Storytelling in the New Hollywood Thompson has
contributed a fine body of research that seeks to locate the continuing relevance of the
classical narrative tradition; the creature that now is (or, indeed, ever was) "Hollywood"
cannot be limited to its narrative practices alone, however, especially when some of these
narrative traits are also being transformed.4 The cinema, like culture, is a dynamic being
that is not reducible to a state of perpetual stasis. In the words of Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin, "media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed
best in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms" (1999, 9).5
While revealing contemporary cinema's connections with the classical era of storytelling,
Jurassic Park also highlights a great many of the radical transformations that have occurred
in the film industry in the last three decades. Thompson claims that, although the "basic
economic system underlying Hollywood storytelling has changed . . . the differences are
essentially superficial and nonsystemic" (1999, 4).6 The fact is, however, that the economic
structure of the industry today is fundamentally different from that of the pre-1950s era. Our
society, technologies, audiences, and cultural concerns have altered dramatically in the
interim. Conglomeration of the film industry since the 1960s has reshaped the industry into
one with multiple media interests. One outcome of this conglomeration has been new
convergences between diverse entertainment media-comic books, computer games, theme
park attractions, and television programs-that have also had formal ramifications.7 The
advent of digital technology (and the economic advantages it offers) has altered the film

industry's production practices, with the result that new aesthetics have emerged. The home
market saturation of VCRs, cable, and DVD technology has produced not only what Jim
Collins calls new forms of "techno-textuality" (1995, 6), but also alternate modes of
audience reception and an intensity of media literacy never before witnessed in the history
of the cinema.
Although she acknowledges the new synergies and emphases on spectacle and action that
the contemporary film industry favors, Thompson states that industry features such as tie-in
products, publicity, and marketing have been a part of the industry since the 1910s and that
currently the industry is involved merely in "intensifications of Hollywood's traditional
practices." It is all, says Thompson, a matter of "degree" (1999, 3).8 Yet this matter of
degree is surely an important one: "Intensification" can reach a point at which it begins to
transform into something else. In the instance of the contemporary entertainment industry,
this "something else" has embraced classical storytelling and placed it within new contexts,
contexts that incorporate a further economization of classical narrative form, digital
technology, cross-media interactions, serial forms, and alternate modes of spectatorship
and reception. "Hollywood filmmaking," states Thompson, "contrary to the voices
announcing a `post-classical' cinema of rupture, fragmentation, and postmodern
incoherence, remains firmly rooted in a tradition which has flourished for eighty years and
shown every sign of continuing" (336). I agree. Not only does the classical still persist, but it
is also integrated into alternate modes of media discourse. A new order emerges. This book
is concerned with this new order, an order that I call the "neo-baroque." As I will stress later,
the terms "baroque" and "classical" are not used in this book in any oppositional sense: The
baroque embraces the classical, integrating its features into its own complex system.
In this book I argue that mainstream cinema and other entertainment media are imbued with
a neo-baroque poetics. Points of comparison are identified between seventeenth-century
baroque art and entertainment forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to
establish continuous and contiguous links between the two eras. In suggesting parallels
between the two periods, I do not propose that our current era stands as the mirror double
of the seventeenth century. Different historical and social conditions characterize and
distinguish the two periods. There are, however, numerous parallels between the two that
invite comparison in the treatment and function of formal features, including an emphasis on
serial narratives and the spectacular: forms that addressed transformed mass cultures:
Throughout this book, therefore, "baroque" will be considered not only as a phenomenon of
the seventeenth century (an era traditionally associated with the baroque), but also, more
broadly, as a transhistorical state that has had wider historical repercussions.
I am especially concerned with evaluating the transformed poetics that have dominated
entertainment media of the last three decades. It is suggested here that, as a result of
technological, industrial, and economic transformations, contemporary entertainment media
reflect a dominant neo-baroque logic. The neo-baroque shares a baroque delight in
spectacle and sensory experiences. Neo-baroque entertainments, howeverwhich are the
product of conglomerate entertainment industries, multimedia interests, and spectacle that
is often reliant upon computer technologypresent contemporary audiences with new
baroque forms of expression that are aligned with late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-

century concerns. The neo-baroque combines the visual, the auditory, and the textual in
ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque form, but that dynamism is
expressed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in technologically and
culturally different ways. Importantly, underlying the emergence of the neo-baroque are
transformed economic and social factors.
This book belongs to an expanding set of works that position the cinema and new media in
relation to earlier forms of representation and visuality. Because I adopt a baroque model,
my ideas are especially indebted to the research of Barbara Maria Stafford, Jay Bolter, and
Richard Grusin, who, from alternate perspectives, discuss the inherent "historicity" of media.
As Stafford states in Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
Education, "we need to go backward in order to move forward" (1994, 3). By our going
backward, various parallels between epochs may emerge, thus allowing us to develop a
clearer understanding of the significance of cultural objects and their function during our
own times. Stafford establishes these links specifically between the eighteenth and late
twentieth centuries. For Stafford, the audiovisuality of the baroque was transformed and
given an "instructive" purpose in the eighteenth century to usher in a new era of reason that
came to be associated with the Enlightenment. With specific attention given to the
dominance of digital media in our own era, Stafford posits that our culture is undergoing
similar pivotal transformations. Our optical technologies-home computers, the Internet,
cable, and other information technologies-provide a means of using the image in ways that
may transport users to a new period of technological reenlightenment (1994, xxiii).
In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are more
expansive in their historical focus. They argue that all media, no matter how "new," rely on a
media past. New media always retain a connection with past forms. Like painting,
architecture, and sculpture, which have a longer history of traditions to draw upon,
contemporary media such as the cinema, computer games, and the Internet "remediate" or
refashion prior media forms, adapting them to their media-specific, formal, and-cultural
needs. In short, according to Bolter and Grusin, "No medium today, and certainly no single
media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media" (1999, 15). This
interdisciplinary, cross-media, and cross-temporal approach remains integral to the ideas
that follow.
Although this book focuses on diverse media such as computer games, theme park
attractions, and comic books, as well as mainstream cinema, following the works of John
Belton (see, in particular, his 1992), Scott Bukatman (1993, 1995, 1998), Jim Collins (1989,
1995), Vivian Sobchack (I987, 1990), Janet Wasko (1994), and Justin Wyatt (1994), this
book considers the cinema's continuing relevance in a world that has become infiltrated by
new media technologies and new economic structures. In its combination of narrative,
image, and sound, the cinema remains paradigmatic and, as is evident in the works of the
above-mentioned historians and theorists, much of the best analysis of new media emerges
from cinema studies. Likewise, the writings of Sobchack (1987), Bukatman (1993, 1995,
1998) and Brooks Landon (1992) have been especially influential in the priority they give to
science fiction and fantasy cinema as fundamental vehicles that offer insight into the impact
of new media technologies in the context of postmodernism. The new historical poetics that

this book explores are particularly evident in these genres. As Bukatman (1998) has noted,
since the release of Star Wars in 1977, not only has science fiction become paradigmatic of
the cross-media and marketing possibilities of conglomeration, but the films narrativize the
implications and effects of new technologies as well as implementing new technologies in
the construction of the films' special effects. Science fiction and fantasy films, computer
games, comic books, and theme park attractions become emblematic of changing
conditions-cultural, historical, economic, and aesthetic-as played out across our
entertainment media. In my efforts to delineate the transformations that the entertainment
industry has undergone in light of economic and technological shifts, I have reconsidered
the research of the academics mentioned above from alternate angles, considering and
elaborating on their arguments from the perspective of the neo-baroque. Before we travel
the path of the neo-baroque, however, a brief overview and clarification of the usages of the
term "baroque" is in order.
... Of Things Baroque
"The baroque" is a term traditionally associated with the seventeenth century, though it was
not a label used by individuals of the period itself to describe the art, economics, or culture
of the period. Although when the term "baroque" was originally applied to define the art and
music of the seventeenth century is not known, its application in this way-and denigratory
associations-gathered force during the eighteenth century. During this time, "baroque"
implied an art or music of extravagance, impetuousness, and virtuosity, all of which were
concerned with stirring the affections and senses of the individual. The baroque was
believed to lack the reason and discipline that came to be associated with neoclassicism
and the era of the Enlightenment. The etymological origins of the word "baroque" are
debatable. One suggestion is that it comes from the Italian "barocco," which signifies
"bizarre," "extravagant"; another is that the term derives from the Spanish "barrueco" or
Portuguese "barrocco," meaning an "irregular" or "oddly shaped pearl."9 Whatever the
term's origins, it is clear that, for the eighteenth and, in particular, the nineteenth century,
the baroque was increasingly understood as possessing traits that were unusual, vulgar,
exuberant, and beyond the norm. Indeed, even into the nineteenth century, critics and
historians perceived the baroque as a degeneration or decline of the classical and
harmonious ideal epitomized by the Renaissance era.
As stated, the life span of the historical baroque is generally associated with the
seventeenth century, a temporal confine that is more often a matter of convenience (a
convenience to which I admittedly succumb in this book), as it is generally agreed that a
baroque style in art and music was already evident in the late sixteenth century10 and
progressed well into the eighteenth century, especially in the art, architecture, and music of
northern Europe and Latin America.11 Until the twentieth century, seventeenth-century
baroque art was largely ignored by art historians. The baroque was generally considered a
chaotic and exuberant form that lacked the order and reason of neoclassicism, the
transcendent wonder of romanticism, or the social awareness of realism. Not until the late
nineteenth century did the Swiss art critic and historian Heinrich Wolfflin reconsider the
significance of the formal qualities and function of baroque art. Not only were his
Renaissance and Baroque (1965; originally published in 1888 and revised in 1907) and

Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1932;
originally published in 1915) important in their earnest consideration of the key formal
characteristics of seventeenth-century art, but they established the existence of a binary
relationship between the classical (as epitomized by Renaissance art) and the baroque12
that has persisted into the twenty-first century.13
Although I draw on the studies of Wolfflin, Walter Benjamin, Remy Sasseilin, and Jose
Maravall on the seventeenth-century baroque, one of the most influential works on my own
deliberations is Henri Focillon's The Life of Forms in Art, originally published in 1934.
Focillon's arguments diverge from those of the above-mentioned authors. Despite his strictly
formalist concerns and lack of engagement with cultural issues beyond an abstract
framework, Focillon understood form in art as an entity that was not necessarily limited to
the constraints of time or specific historical periods. Quoting a political tract from Balzac;
Focillon stated that "everything is form and life itself is form" (1992, 33). For Focillon, formal
patterns in art are in perpetual states of movement, being specific to time but also spanning
across it (32): "Form may, it is true, become formula and canon; in other words, it may be
abruptly frozen into a normative type. But form is primarily a mobile life in a changing world.
Its metamorphoses endlessly begin anew, and it is by the principle of style that they are
above all coordinated and stabilized" (44).
Although the historical baroque has traditionally been contained within the rough temporal
confines of the seventeenth century, to paraphrase Focillon, I suggest that baroque form
still continued to have a life, one that recurred throughout history but existed beyond the
limits of a canon. Therefore, whereas the seventeenth century was a period' during which
baroque form became a "formula and canon," it does not necessarily follow that the baroque
was frozen within the temporal parameters of the seventeenth century. Although the latter
part of the eighteenth century witnessed the dominance of a new form of classicism in the
neoclassical style, baroque form continued to have a life, albeit one beyond the limits of a
canon. For example, later-twentieth-century historians and theorists of the baroque have
noted the impact of the baroque on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art movements.
Sassone, for example, has explored the presence of a baroque attitude to form in the
artistic movements of surrealism, impressionism, and neo-gongorism (Overesch 1981, 70,
citing Sassone 1972). Buci-Glucksman (1986, 1994) equated what she labeled a baroque
folie du voir with the early-twentieth-century modernist shift toward abstraction. Similarly,
Martin Jay (1994) liberated the baroque from its historical confines, stating, like Buci-
Glucksman, that the inherent "madness of vision" associated with the baroque was present
in the nineteenth-century romantic movement and early-twentieth-century surrealist art. In
associating it with these instances of early modernist art, the word "baroque" is being
adopted by historians and theorists who recognize the modernist and abstract qualities
inherent in the baroque; the baroque becomes a tool critical to understanding the nature of
these early modernist artistic movements.
With respect to the cinema, the baroque is often conjured up to signify or legitimate the
presence of an auteurist flair in the films of specific directors. In most cases, the term
"baroque" is used rather loosely to describe a formal quality that flows , "freely" and
"excessively" through the films of particular directors, the implication being that to be

baroque implies losing control (whereas on the contrary, as will be explained later,
seventeenth-century baroque often revealed an obsessive concern with control and
rationality). To be baroque is (supposedly) to give voice to artistic freedom and flight from
the norm. Classical Hollywood, contemporary Hollywood, and art cinema directors alike
have been evaluated from the perspective of the baroque. The films of directors Federico
Fellini,14 Tim Burton,15 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Tod Browning, James
Whale, Michael Curtiz, 16 Raul Ruiz,17 and Peter Greenaway18 have been discussed as
reflecting baroque sensibilities. When the word "baroque" is used to describe particular
films, again the term carries with it connotations of something's being beyond the norm or of
a quality that is in excess of the norm. Thus the Soviet film Raspoutine, 1'Agonie (Klimov
1975) is analyzed as baroque given its emphasis on themes of aberration, the mystical, and
the fantastic (Derobert 1985). The Italian film Maddalena (Genina 1953) is defined as
baroque because of its melodramatic style and its focus on the excess spectacle of the
Catholic church.19 Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Miller 1995) may be understood as
baroque because of its "mythic proportions," its grandeur, and its sense of the hyperbolic.20
In interviews, Baz Luhrmann repeatedly refers to the baroque logic-the theatricality,
lushness, and spectacle of the mise-en-scene and editing-that inspired his trilogy Strictly
Ballroom ( 1997), Romeo + Juliet ( 1999), and Moulin Rouge! (2001 ). And Sally Potter's
Orlando (1992) has been described as a postmodern, neo-baroque film that draws upon
baroque devices, including intertextuality, parody, and a carnivalesque attitude that
transforms Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography (on which the film was based)
into a "staged" world of stylistic excess and performativity.21
To return to Focillon's argument regarding the simultaneously fluid and stable properties of
art form, in all the instances cited above, baroque traits flow fleetingly through various art
movements and films but retain their freedom of motion: the baroque, in this case, is not
"frozen" or "canonized" as a style. With the exception of the seventeenth century, it was not
until the twentieth century that baroque form underwent a series of metamorphoses that
resulted in the stabilization of the baroque as a style. Throughout the twentieth century,
baroque form altered its identity as a style in diverse areas of the arts, continuing restlessly
to move on to new metamorphic states and cultural contexts.22
The "Baroque Baroque" and the Hollywood Style: The 1920s and 1930s
Whereas art-historical and historical research on the seventeenth-century baroque came

into its own only in the latter part of the twentieth century, the impact of the baroque on
early-twentieth-century culture made itself felt in even more immediate ways within the
public sphere. While the Western world was experiencing a modernist revolution in art
through postimpressionism, cubism, surrealism, constructivism, and German
expressionism, the baroque also experienced a stylistic resurgence.
In Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess, Stephen Calloway traces the direct impact of
seventeenth-century baroque design, art, and architecture on twentieth-century culture.
Labeling the self-conscious fascination with the baroque in the twentieth century the
"baroque baroque" (1994, 15), Calloway traces its influences in the worlds of theater,

cinema, architecture, interior design, and haute couture fashion. The 1920s and 1930s in
particular can be characterized as stabilizing a new baroque style. In London, an elite and
influential group of upper-class connoisseurs in the 1920s formed the Magnasco society
(named after a rather obscure seventeenth-century painter Alessandro Magnasco, who was
known for his "fantastic" style) with the intention of exhibiting baroque art (48). Soon, what
came to be known as a "neo-baroque" style was all the rage. As Calloway states,
"magazines of the day decreed that the neo-baroque was in," especially in interior design
(50). As early as 1906, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens's Folly Farm residence (West
Berkshire, 1906-1912) introduced decorative schemes that included trompe l'oeil illusions
influenced by the seventeenth-century baroque. In the 1920s Lord Gerald Wellesley's
bedroom in his London townhouse displayed the "Magnasco society taste," and a neo-
baroque form was evident in his bizarre and spectacular bed, the paintings that hung on the
walls, and other baroque-inspired schemes in the room's decoration (48). Likewise, Cecil
Beaton's neo-baroque house, Ashcombe-which included baroque furniture, door cases,
putti sculptures, trompe l'oeil effects and mirrors, as well as light sconces on the walls that
were cast in plaster in the form of human arms (a feature that was to reappear in Cocteau's
La Belle et la Bete of 1946)-set many trends (86-90).23
A taste for things neo-baroque was also filtering into the exuberant and "dandified fashions"
of eccentric characters like Cecil Beaton and Sacheverell Sitwell (whose book on the
seventeenth-century Spanish baroque also contributed to an understanding of earlier
baroque culture) (Calloway 1994, 32). These more eccentric tastes were soon to enter a
more mainstream market when fashion designers like Coco Chanel, Helena Rubenstein,
and Elsa Schiaparelli chose to market the "new concept of Chic" by producing stage salon
shows and fashions that were marked by a baroque extravagance (79-81).24 This renewed
interest in the baroque was also evident in the theater and ballet of the period. For example,
the entrepreneur Seregei Diaghilev greatly influenced the look of the Ballets Russes,
reigniting a concern for the spectacle of the baroque through the inclusion of exotic
costumes of baroque design, baroque settings, and spectacular firework displays
traditionally associated with seventeenth-century theater.25
In the United States, the young film industry began a love affair with baroque flair and
monumentality. The sets, costumes, themes and designs of grand Hollywood epics like
Intolerance (Griffith 1926), Queen Kelly (von Stroheim 1928), The Scarlet Empress (von
Sternberg 1934), and Don Juan (Crosland 1926) (whose interiors were modeled on those of
the Davanzanti palace in Florence) reiterated the spectacular grandeur of baroque style
(Calloway 1994, 52-59). According to Calloway, the "visual richness of film culture" and the
evident success of the star system by the 1920s shifted the cinema's evocation of fantasy
and glamour off the screen and onto the private lives of its stars and the public sphere they
inhabited (56). Film culture nurtured an environment that allowed baroque form to infiltrate
the space of the city (specifically Hollywood and Beverly Hills). A baroque opulence the
likes of which had never been seen since the seventeenth century soon exploded, and what
came to be known as the "Hollywood style" emerged. Following the likes of stars like
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, whose palatial abode, Pickfair, was constructed on
the outskirts of Hollywood, a spate of movie moguls and film stars commissioned grand
mansions that often explicitly imitated the seventeenth-century palazzi of European

aristocrats and monarchs. The designs of Hollywood picture palaces followed suit. An
aristocratic style was reborn to herald a new aristocracy, one engendered by the Hollywood
film industry. The most famous fantasy mansion of the period was, of course, William
Randolph Hearst's San Simeon (figure I.2). Adorned with booty plundered from throughout
Europe, this mansion (which approached the size of a city) also included a cinema in the
style of Louis XIV (57).
The monarchs in this new Hollywood aristocracy were the movie stars and media moguls,
and they asserted their power and starlike qualities through a baroque visual splendor. The
cultural space of Los Angeles was imbued with a new identity, one that would resurge with
a revised fervor at the end of the century, when the neo-baroque was to become canonized
within a radically different cultural context.26
The Latin American and Spanish Neo-Baroque
Omar Calabrese (1992), Peter Wollen (1993), Mario Perniola (1995), and Christina Degli-
Esposti (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) have evaluated (from different perspectives) the affinities
that exist between the baroque-or, rather, the neo-baroque-and the postmodern. It is as a
formal quality of the postmodern that the neo-baroque has gained a stability that emerges
from a wider cultural context. Initially, the strongest connection between the postmodern
and the baroque emerged in the context of Latin American literature, art,27 and criticism, in
particular, in the writings of the Cuban author Severo Sarduy, who consciously embraced
the baroque as a revolutionary form, one capable of countering the dominance of capitalism
and socialism (Sarduy 1975; Beverley 1988, 29). From the 1950s, in Latin America, the
baroque was revisited as the neo-baroque, becoming a significant political form in the
process. Particularly in literature, the seventeenth-century baroque's obsessive concerns
with illusionism and the questionable nature of reality was adapted to a new cultural context,
becoming a formal strategy that could be used to contest the "truth" of dominant ideologies
and issues of identity, gender, and "reality" itself.
Generally, literary historians have associated the Latin American neo-baroque with the rise
of the metafictional new-historicist novel that flourished during the boom period (1960s-
1970s) and particularly in the postboom period of the 1980s. Although which authors are to
be considered part of the boom period and which are part of the postboom is much
debated, the tendency to equate both (and in particular the latter)

Figure I.2 William Randolph Hearst's California estate, San Simeon.

By permission of The Kodak Collection.
with the neo-baroque is a point rarely debated. Novels such as Fernando del Paso's
Noticias del Imperio (1987), Roa Bastos's Yo, el Supremo (1975), and Carlos Fuentes's
Terra Nostra ( 1976) are viewed as simultaneously emerging from a postmodern context
and as reflecting neo-baroque formal concerns (Thomas 1995, 170). Emphasizing the
radical and experimental possibilities inherent in baroque form (as also outlined in the
writings of Buci-Glucksman and Jay), Latin American writers such as Luis Borges, Severo

Sarduy, Fernando del Paso, Jose Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Carlos Fuente
developed a deconstructive style that owed a great deal to philosophical writings of theorists
such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Fredric Jameson. Embracing the
postmodern, these novelists also consciously melded theoretical concerns with stylistic
strategies adapted from the seventeenth-century baroque tradition: the instability and
untrustworthiness of "reality" as a "truth"; the concern with simulacra; motifs like the
labyrinth as emblem of multiple voices or layers of meaning; and an inherent self reflexivity
and sense for the virtuosic performance. The movement that emerged as a result came to
be known as the neo-baroque.28 Additionally, many of the writings of these authors also
invested in a Bakhtinian concern with the carnivalesque, intertextuality, dialogic discourse,
and "heteroglossic, multiple narrative voices"; as Peter Thomas states, in all, a "neobaroque
verbal exuberance . . . [and] . . . delirious" style ensued ( 1995, 171 ).
In "The Baroque and the Neobaroque," Severo Sarduy suggests that, whereas the Latin
American baroque (of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was simply a colonial
extension of the European (and, in particular, the Spanish) baroque, the neobaroque
embraces a more critical stance by returning to the European (as opposed to colonial)
origins (Thomas 1995, 181; Sarduy 1975, 109-115).29 The aim was to reclaim history by
appropriating a period often considered to be the "original" baroque thereby rewriting the
codes and "truths" imposed on Latin America by its colonizers. By reclaiming the past
through the baroque form, these contemporary Latin American writers could also reclaim
their history. 'The new version of history that resulted from this reclamation spoke of the
elusive nature of truth, of historical "fact," of "reality," of identity and sexuality. According to
the neo-baroque, truth and reality was always beyond the individual's grasp.
In Spain, the baroque transformed along similar formal lines, becoming associated in the
second half of the twentieth century with the literature of the period and with
postmodernism. Freeing themselves from the oppressive censorship of the Franquist
regime, in the 1960s and 1970s Spanish writers began to experiment with modernist and
antirealist literary styles.30 Critics labeled the emerging Spanish style, which was influenced
by the Latin American boom authors who had deliberately embraced the styles and
concerns of Golden Age writers such as Miguel de Cervantes and Calderon de la Barca,
"baroque" or, more often, "neo-baroque" (Zatlin 1994, 30; Overesch 1981, 19). Following
the lead of many Latin American authors, Spanish writers such as Jose Vidal Cadellan,
Maria Moix, Jose Maria Castellet, Manuel Ferrand, and Juan Goytisolo adopted stylistic
features integral to seventeenth-century Spanish baroque literature.31 Francisco Ayala's El
Rapto (1965), for example, retells one of the stories recounted in Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Reflecting on the layered nature of the baroque, Ayala travels back in time to the
seventeenth century to comment on Spain of the present, particularly on the "disorientation
pervading contemporary Spanish society" under the post-Franco regime (Orringer 1994,
47). As with the Latin American neobaroque, particular features of a baroque poetics
emerged:32 minimal or lack of concern with plot development and a preference for a
multiple and fragmented structure that recalls the form of a labyrinth; open rather than
closed form; a complexity and layering evident, for example, in the merging of genres and
literary forms such as poetry and the novel; a world in which dream and reality are
indistinguishable; a view of the illusory nature of the world-a world as theater; a virtuosity

revealed through stylistic flourish and allusion; and a sell-reflexivity that requires active
audience engagement (Overesch 1981, 26-60).33 For these Latin American and Spanish
writers, the neo-baroque became a potent weapon that could counteract the mainstream:
They embraced the neo-baroque for its inherent avant-garde properties.34 The
contemporary neo-baroque, on the other hand, finds its voice within a mainstream market
and, like the seventeenth-century baroque, directs its seduction to a mass audience.
The Spatial Aspect of the Cultural System
In recent decades, the neo-baroque has inserted its identity into diverse areas of the arts,
continuing restlessly to move on to new metamorphic states and contexts, nurtured by a
culture that is attracted to the visual and sensorial seductiveness integral to baroque form.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we have experienced the reemergence
and evolution of the baroque into a more technologically informed method of expression. A
baroque mentality has again become crystallized on a grand scale within the context of
contemporary culture. The spectacular illusionism and affective charge evident in Pietro da
Cortona's ceiling painting of The Glorification of Urban VIII (Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 1633-
1639), the virtuosic spatial illusions painted by Andrea Pozzo in the Church of S. Ignazio
(Rome, 1691-1694) (figure I.3),

Figure I.3 Andrea Pozzo, The Glory of S. Ignazio (detail) Chruch of S. Ignazio, Rome, 1691-
1694. © Photo Vasari, Rome.
the seriality and intertextual playfulness of Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), and
the exuberant and fantastic reconstruction of Versailles under Louis XIV have
metamorphosed and adjusted to a new historical and cultural context. Specifically, I follow
the lead of Omar Calabrese (1992), Peter Wollen (1993), and Mario Perniola (1995), all of
whom understand (from different perspectives) the neo-baroque and the postmodern as
kindred spirits. Although I recognize the multiple and conflicting theoretical responses to the
postmodern condition, however,35 postmodern debates do not constitute the primary
concern of this book. A specifically neo-baroque poetics embedded within the postmodern
is my primary point of reference. Although some postmodern tropes and theories underpin
the analysis to follow, I am not concerned with reiterating the immense body of literature
and analysis that has already been articulated so admirably by numerous writers, including
pioneers like Fredric Jameson, Jean Lyotard, Robert Venturi,36 Jean Baudrillard, Perry
Anderson, and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. It is within the context of the postmodern
that the neo-baroque has regained a stability that not only is found in diverse examples of
entertainment media cultures but has exploded beyond the elite or marginalized confines of

eccentric European aristocrats, Hollywood film stars, and closed literary circles and into our
social spaces.
That which distinguishes earlier phases of the twentieth-century baroque from its current
guise is the reflexive desire to revisit the visuality associated with the era of the historical
baroque. The "baroque baroque" deliberately reintroduced variations of seventeenth-
century fashion, theatrical, and architectural designs, grand-scale spectacle, and baroque
historical narratives in the context of the cinema, theater, and ballet. The Latin American
and Spanish neo-baroque emerged from a conscious effort on the part of writers to
manipulate seventeenth-century baroque techniques for contemporary, avant-garde
purposes. The late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century expression of the neo-baroque
emerges from radically different conditions. As was the case with the seventeenth-century
baroque, the current expression of the neo-baroque has literally emerged as a result of
systemic and cultural transformations, which are the result of the rise of conglomeration,
multimedia interests, and new digital technology. Cultural transformation has given birth to
neo-baroque form. The neo-baroque articulates the spatial, the visual, and the sensorial in
ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque form, but that dynamism is
expressed in guises that are technologically different from those of the seventeenth-century
form. In the last three decades in particular, our culture has been seduced by visual forms
that are, reliant on baroque perceptual systems: systems that sensorially engage the
spectator in ways that suggest a more complete and complex parallel between our own era
and the seventeenth-century baroque. In this respect, my concern is with broader issues
and general tendencies that give rise to dominant cultural sensibilities.
As history has shown us, human nature being what it is, we cannot resist the drive to locate
and label such dominant sensibilities: baroque, Renaissance, medieval, modernist,
postmodernist. Underlying all such categories is a desire to reduce and make
comprehensible the complex and dynamic patterns and forces that constitute culture. In his
study of German baroque tragedy, Benjamin raises a significant query with regard to issues
of categorization, in particular, the typing of "historical types and epochs" such as the
Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque (1998, 41). The problem for the historian lies in
homogenizing the cultural phenomena (and, indeed, the culture) specific to different
historical epochs:
As ideas, however, such names perform a service they are not able to perform as concepts:
they do not make the similar identical, but they effect a synthesis between extremes.
Although it should be stated that conceptual analysis, too, does not invariably encounter
totally heterogeneous phenomena, and it can occasionally reveal the outlines of a
synthesis. (41)
Systematization of cultural phenomena need not preclude variety. Likewise, categorization

of dominant and recurring patterns need not reflect the revelation of a static cultural
zeitgeist. The value of historical labeling and searching for a synthesis of dominant forces-
ranging from the thematic, to the stylistic, to the social-is that it enables critical reflection. As
Benjamin notes, the "world of philosophical thought" may unravel only through the
articulation and description of "the world of ideas" (43). Like Benjamin, I do not seek to

defend the methodological foundation that underlies the arguments in this book; I do,
however, draw attention to my reservations with "zeitgeisting" and reducing the complex
and dynamic processes in operation in cultural formations to simplistic and reductive
conceptual observations, and I hope that what follows does not travel that path.
In recent years, a number of historians, philosophers, and critical theorists, including Omar
Calabrese, Gilles Deleuze, Mario Perniola, Francesco Guardini, Peter Wollen, and Jose
Maravall, have explored the formal, social, and historical constituents of the baroque and
neo-baroque. Deleuze understood the baroque in its broadest terms "as radiating through
histories, cultures and worlds of knowledge" including areas as diverse as art, science,
costume design, mathematics, and philosophy (Conley 1993, xi). Likewise, in his historical
and cultural study of the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque, Antonio Maravall observed
that it is possible to "establish certain relations between external, purely formal elements of
the baroque in seventeenth-century Europe and elements present in very different historical
epochs in unrelated cultural areas. . . . [Therefore] it is also possible [to] speak of a baroque
at any given time, in any field of human endeavour" (1983, 4-5).
Maravall, who is concerned with the seventeenth century, is interested in the baroque as a
cultural phenomenon that emerges from a specific historical situation. Maravall also,
however, privileges a sense of the baroque that encompasses the breadth of cultural
diversity across chronological confines. His approach is a productive one. While exploring
distinct centuries that have sets of cultural phenomena particular to their specific historical
situations, it is nevertheless possible to identify and describe a certain morphology of the
baroque that is more fluid and is not confined to one specific point in history.
The formal manifestations of the baroque across cultural and chronological confines also
concern Omar Calabrese in his Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (1992). Dissatisfied with
postmodernism as a consistent, unified framework of analysis that explains aesthetic
sensibilities, Calabrese suggests that the neo-baroque offers a productive formal model with
which to characterize the transformations of cultural objects of our epoch (1992, 14).
Recognizing, like Maravall before him, that the baroque is not merely a specific period in the
history of cultures situated within the seventeenth century, (though with greater focus than
Maravall on the twentieth century), Calabrese explores the baroque as a general attitude
and formal quality that crosses the boundaries of historical periodization. For Calabrese,
therefore, "many important cultural phenomena of our time are distinguished by a specific
internal `form' that recalls the baroque" in the shape of rhythmic, dynamic structures that
have no respect for rigid, closed, or static boundaries (5). The protean forms that he locates
in blockbuster films, televisual serial structures, and the hybrid alien or monstrous hero are,
in turn, placed (briefly) within a broader cultural sphere in which chaos theory, catastrophe
theory, and other such "new sciences" reflect similar fluid transformations that contest prior
scientific "norms" (171-172).
According to Calabrese, neo-baroque forms "display a loss of entirety, totality, and system
in favour of instability, polydimensionality, and change" (1992, xii). Following Yuri Lotman's
organization of knowledge according to "the spatial aspect of the cultural system,"
Calabrese suggests that space must have a border:


Henry Jenkins
COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES

Comparative Media Studies represents a new paradigm in media scholarship,
one which merges together the best conceptual models from a range of different
disciplines to address issues of media content, context, and change. It is
comparative in multiple senses -- comparative across media, across historical
periods, across national borders, and across disciplinary perspectives.
HISTORICAL POETICS
Much of my early work dealt with points of intersection between different media,
though I did not yet have a fully developed understanding of what comparative media
studies might look like. For example, my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early
Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic dealt with the development of a new
aesthetics of popular performance in vaudeville which had an enormous impact on film
comedy as Broadway performers were recruited by Hollywood in order help make the
transition from silent to sound cinema. In this book, I explore what aspects of the
vaudeville style could work in the context of classical Hollywood narrative and which
were rejected and reworked as cinema restabilized its own norms after the end of that
transitional period.
In a later essay, "The Fellow Keaton Seems to Be the Whole Show': The Interrupted
Performance in Buster Keaton's Films", which appeared in Andrew Horton's Buster
Keaton's Sherlock Junior, I go back to an earlier period of interaction between popular
theater and cinema, exploring the different performance strategies that emerge at
different moments in Buster Keaton's career to negotiate between competing aesthetic
norms.
This research was informed by an approach, known as historical poetics, which seeks
to map the aesthetic norms and implicit assumptions that shaped the production of
media texts at particular historical junctures. This approach was developed by David
Bordwell and Kristen Thompson as they applied and adapted the ideas of the Russian
formalists to study cinema. My essay, "Historical Poetics and the Popular Cinema,"
published in Mark Jancovich's Approaches to the Popular Cinema, I outline and
expand upon their framing of historical poetics, suggesting its relevance to a larger
understanding of popular aesthetics and the politics of taste cultures.
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Several of my Technology Review columns have dealt with the ways that digital media
are altering more traditional forms of communication, dealing with emerging concepts
of interactive television in "TV Tomorrow" or shifting conceptions of journalism in
"..." "Art Form for the Digital Age" uses Gilbert Seldes's concept of the "lively arts,"
developed in response to early 20th century media forms such as the comic strip, the
Hollywood film, and the Broadway musical, to propose ways of thinking about the
aesthetic status of computer games. Another column, "Culture Goes Global" uses the
production and circulation of global fusion music to make some predictions about new
kinds of culture which are likely to emerge as the net expands points of contact
between different national cultures.
"Nintendo and New World Narrative," which first appeared in Steve Jones'
Communications in Cyberspace, represents a dialogue with Renaissance scholar Mary
Fuller which compares new world travel writing and computer games as two different
forms of spatial stories. Here, we argue that spatial stories represent an understudied
aesthetic tradition that displaces issues of narrative causality and character
development in favor of spatial exploration.
COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO MEDIA AUDIENCES

A different strand of my research dealt with the intersection between media systems
from an audience studies perspective. My book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans
and Participatory Culture, dealt with the ways television fans utilized media content as
a resource for alternative forms of cultural production, including the writing of fan
fiction, the performance of filk or fan music, and the editing of fan videos.
I have subsequently traced the ways this same community makes use of digital media.
"Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?: alt.tv.twinpeaks, The Trickster
Author, and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery's Full of Secrets:
Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, explored the ways that fans of Twin Peaks
employed the internet to expand the resources available to them for deciphering the
mystery of Who Killed Laura Palmer.
I returned to this same issue of on-line communities and fan reception almost a decade
later with "Interactive Audiences?" Here, I draw on Pierre Levy's concept of collective
intelligence to examine the ways fans use computers in relation to other media to
expand opportunities for critical dialogue, audience activism, and cultural production
and distribution and in the process, redefine the relations between audience, producers,
and texts.
Another recent essay, "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? Parody and Appropriation in an
Age of Cultural Convergence", which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's

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d-Film anthology, deals with the ways that Star Wars fans have made use of the
emerging resources of digital cinema to talk back to the Hollywood blockbuster. Once
again, I am dealing with the flow of content -- stories, characters, ideas -- from one
media system to another.
MIGRATORY CHARACTERS AND NARRATIVE

"Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie," which
appeared in Marsha Kinder's Kids Media Culture, offers another approach to
comparative media studies -- tracing the migration of a popular fictional character
across books, television, and film and across different historical periods. I focus on
moments when the ownership of the remarkable collie shifts since these moments are
often occasions for articulating the value of dogs and the kinds of investments which
they owners make in them.
Similarly, "The All-American Handful: Dennis the Menace, Permissive Childrearing

and the Bad Boy Tradition," which first appeared in Lynn Spigel and Mike Curtin's
The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, traced the
evolution of a "bad boy" character as he migrates from the comics to television.
In "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek Through Digital Media," co-authored with
Janet Murray and first appearing in Greg Smith's On A Silver Platter: CD-Roms and
the Promises of a New Technology, I examine what gets embraced and what gets left
behind when television content is transformed into the basis for interactive
entertainment. Murray approaches this question from an aesthetic perspective,
expressing pleasure in the more immersive opportunities for play with Star Trek
introduced by games, where-as I tackle the question from the point of view of meaning
and interpretation, noting the ways that Star Trek games excludes aspects of the series
metatext which sustained the interests and participation of its female fans.
METHODOLOGY
In recent years, I have been called upon to develop overview essays that synthesize
significant new theoretical and methodological developments.
For example, the Hop on Pop project was intended to focus attention on new
methodological and conceptual models for studying the politics and pleasures of
popular culture. In a manifesto , "The Culture That Sticks to the Skin: Towards a New
Paradigm in Cultural Studies," co-authored with Jane Shattuc and Tara McPherson, we
make a case for the emergence of a new perspective, one born of a closer affective
relationship to popular culture, a greater emphasis on the particularity of specific case
studies which are nevertheless understood within a larger context, a commitment to
language which makes these ideas more accessible to a broader public, and an
awareness of the interplay between global and local factors. An earlier version of this

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manifesto, "Cultural Studies: The Next Generation," appeared as the forward to a

special issue of Continuum. In both Continuum and in Hop on Pop: The Politics and
Pleasures of Popular Culture, we brought together more than 40 essays by young and
established cultural scholars which demonstrate these new approaches at work.
In "The Work of Theory in the Age of Digital Transformation," published in Toby

Miller and Robert Stam's A Companion to Film Theory, I offer an overview and
critique of developments in digital theory suggesting the ways that it resembles or
differs from earlier forms of media theory. Specifically, I describe four important
dimensions of the emerging digital theory -- the shifting relationship between academic
and vernacular theories of digital change, the concept of critical utopianism as a way of
using future prediction to critique present conditions, and the use of digital media to
revitalize the study of previous media and to examine points of intersection between
media.
"Media in Transition: An Introduction," co-authored with David Thorburn for our

book, Media in Transition, attempts to demonstrate how a comparative and historically
informed approach might help us to better understand the process of media change.
The essay specifically addresses both political changes and aesthetic changes brought
about through the introduction of new communication and information technologies
into pre-existing social and cultural contexts.
"Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss,"
which appeared in Christine Gledhill and Linda William's Reinventing Film Theory, re-
visits core issues in theorizing the cinematic audience and ends with the suggestion that
such accounts are limited if they do not fully address a new media environment where
film may be consumed through many different communication channels and where
film content intersects with other media content in many different ways.

Henry Jenkins
MEDIA CONVERGENCE
We are living in an age when changes in communications, storytelling and
information technologies are reshaping almost every aspect of contemporary
life -- including how we create, consume, learn, and interact with each other. A
whole range of new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate,
appropriate, and recirculate media content and in the process, these technologies
have altered the ways that consumers interact with core institutions of
government, education, and commerce.
OVERVIEWS
I have increasingly come to prefer the term, media convergence, to describe the full
context of media change. In "Convergence? I Diverge," one of my Technology Review
columns, I offer a basic overview of different kinds of convergences -- technological,
economic, aesthetic, organic, and global -- which are redefining our media
environment. It is a good starting point for understanding much of my other recent
writing on this topic.
"The Work of Theory in the Age of Digital Transformation", published in Toby Miller
and Robert Stam's A Companion to Film Theory, makes the case for a new mode of
media theory which reflects the opportunities and challenges of the media age. Central
to this argument is a consideration of the ways that digital change is provoking
theorizing not only with the academy but across all of those sectors being reshaped by
the new media and an urge for academic theory to move beyond the classroom to
engage in a larger public conversation about those changes.
"From Home[r] to the Holodeck", presented at the Post-Innocence: Narrative Textures

and New Media Conference at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia in
1998, represented another attempt to define the place of the humanities as a means of
responding to the challenges of the changing media environment and includes some
ideas about theorizing the process of media change which are developed more fully in
"Media in Transition: An Introduction," co-authored with David Thorburn.
One important discourse on media change has come through science fiction, which
emerged in the 1920s as part of a larger effort to promote popular access to information
on scientific discovery and technological innovation. I developed a series of forums
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involving contemporary science fiction writers discussing the key themes of media
change underlying their work. Transcripts of these conversations with Gregory
Benford, Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, James Patrick Kelly, Ellen
Kushner, Frederick Pohl, Allen Steele and Sarah Zettel can be found on the Media in
Transition website. I provided an overview on the relationship of science fiction and
media change intended as an introduction to the various transcripts entitled "Media and
Imagination: A Short History of American Science Fiction."
With Christopher Weaver, I developed an MIT course on Popular Culture in the Age of
Media Convergence. The syllabus of that course is on-line and provides a good reading
list for anyone wanting to know more about this topic. An important aspect of this site
are the various student critiques of contemporary media product which display, with
varying degrees of competency or mastery, some of the core concepts to emerge from
the class.
I am currently developing a book proposal exploring more fully how these various
forms of media convergence are impacting contemporary popular culture. Watch this
space for more news as the book develops.
CULTURAL CONVERGENCE
If the phrase, media convergence, can be used to describe the kinds of technological
and economic changes which are fostered the flow of media content across multiple
delivery technologies, cultural convergence describes the new ways that media
audiences are engaging with and making sense of these new forms of media content. I
have argued that cultural convergence has preceded, in many ways, the full
technological realization of the idea of media convergence, helping to create a market
for these new cultural products. I first introduced the concept of "cultural convergence"
in "The Stormtroopers and The Poachers," a talk which I gave at the University of
Michigan which was transcribed for circulation of Philip Agre's Red Rock Eater News
mailing list. I later fleshed out that essay more fully for an anthology on cult audiences
which will be published in Paris next year.
"Interactive Audiences?", which will be published in xx, explores how Pierre Levy's
Collective Intelligence might shed light on the behavior of media audiences in this new
era. Specifically, I explore how the knowledge culture of fandom is transformed
through the use of networked communications and how the new media alter reader's
relations to texts, to media producers, and to each other. I trace various ways that the
media industries are responding to the challenges of a more participatory culture.
I wrote an introduction to Kurt Lancaster's Interacting with Babylon 5 that explains

how Babylon 5 might be read as symptomatic of this larger process of media and
cultural convergence.

Henry Jenkins
THE DIGITAL RENAISSANCE

Across a range of journalistic pieces, mostly published in Technology Review, I have
developed these concepts of media and cultural convergence to describe the present
moment as a kind of Renaissance culture, one being transformed -- for both better and
worse -- as the social, cultural, political, and legal institutions respond to the
destabilization created by media change. Among the topics I have addressed have been
digital media's impact on Journalism ("..."), the emergence of new forms of global
culture ("Culture Goes Global"), the potentials of interactive television ("TV
Tomorrow"), the production of knowledge in an information rich environment
("Information Cosmos"), the emergence of new youth cultures in cyberspace ("The
Kids are Alright Online"), and the impact of digital media on our understanding of
intellectual property ("Digital Land Grab.") Although not published in Technology
Review, "Contacting the Past," can be understood as part of this same strand in my
writing -- explaining how the early history of radio as a participatory medium might
shed light on our current period of media transition.
DIGITAL CINEMA
I have become increasingly interested in studying new aesthetic forms that have
emerged in response to the potentials of digital media. One such area of interest is
digital cinema. Digital cinema can refer to many different things, ranging from the use
of digital cameras in film production or digital projection in film exhibition to the use
of the web as a delivery system for films. Our Digital Cinema conference explored
many different aspects of this topic.
In "The Director Next Door," one of my Technology Review columns, I explore how
the development of the web as a distribution channel might empower amateur
filmmakers not only to make new kinds of films but also to reach new audiences. I
briefly discuss here the ways that commercial media is starting to recruit media makers
and content from the web.
I explore the intersection between commercial and amateur media making more fully
in "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Parody and Appropriation in an Age of Cultural
Convergence," which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's d. film
anthology. Here, I argue that Star Wars functioned as a "catalyst" encouraging fans to
embrace the potentials of digital production and distribution, resulting in an enormous
grassroots movement of Star Wars parodies. As a result of this essay, I was asked to
develop a festival of fan-made films to be shown at the Walker Art Institute and to
develop program notes explaining my choices.
COMPUTER GAMES
I became interested in computer and video games more than a decade ago when my

Henry Jenkins
son purchased his first Nintendo. A short time later, I wrote my first essay, "x Logic:
Placing Nintendo in Children's Lives," which sought to review an emerging body of
scholarly literature on games and to stress the importance of atmospheric design and
spatial narrative to this emerging medium. I built on that concept of spatial storytelling
through a dialogic essay, "Nintendo and New World Narrative," which I co-authored
with Mary Fuller and which appeared in Steve Jones's Communicating in Cyberspace.
I took a more social historical approach to game space in "Complete Freedom of
Movement: Video Games as Gendered Playspace" in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat:
Gender and Computer Games. Here, I argued that a comparison between traditional
gendered play spaces and computer games might shed light on the challenge of
developing games which might appeal equally to girls and to boys. I have recently
returned to reconsider the relationship between space and narrative in "...", which
thinks about game design as a form of informational architecture which provides the
preconditions for emergent and embedded forms of storytelling.
In "Art Form for the Digital Age," published in Technology Review, I make the case
that games are a new "lively art," along the lines outlined by Gilbert Seldes in the
1920s, and explore what we might learn about game aesthetics through analogies to the
silent cinema. These ideas are fleshed out more fully in "....", an essay which will
appear in ....and in "...", an essay developed in conjunction with "Game On," an
exhibition of games as art at London's Barbican Art Center.
Another important aspect of my interest in games centered around the challenges of

expanding the diversity of games content in order to attract more girls to gameplaying.
I hosted an MIT conference which brought women in the games industry to campus to
explore the then emerging "girls game" movement and to engage in dialogue with
academic feminists who had written on this topic. The book, From Barbie to Mortal
Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which I co-edited with Justine Cassell, grew
out of that conference. Our introductory essay, "Chess For Girls?" explores the
contradictions which surround the girls game movement, seeking to complicate easy
ideological judgements about the value of these new kinds of software for girls.
"Voices From the Combat Zone" brought together online writings by women
gameplayers, showing an alternative version of digital feminism which focused on
empowering women to do combat with men in digital playspaces rather than designing
more traditionally feminine kinds of games. "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek
Through Digital Media", coauthored with Janet Murray for Greg Smith's On A Silver
Platter, tackles the challenge of designing games for women from a different angle.
Using Star Trek as a case study, I argue that those aspects of the original television
series that attract female consumers have been systematically stripped away as the
franchise was translated into video and computer game formats. Here, the issue isn't
whether games should be redesigned to attract women but why decisions are being
made to cut back on aspects of existing material which has already proven successful

Henry Jenkins
in engaging female consumers.
I have increasingly sought to engage in a larger dialogue with people in the games
industry about the current state and future potential of games as a medium. In
collaboration with the Interactive Digital Software association, I helped to organize the
first national academic conference on video and computer games, bringing together
leading game designers and game critics (academic and journalistic) for a two day
conversation about the medium. More than 400 pages of transcripts of that event have
been posted on the web and constitute an important resource for anyone who wants to
understand the current state and future direction of the games industry.
Through the Comparative Media Studies program, I have organized a series of creative
leaders workshops with Electronic Arts, a leader in the games industry, to explore
issues of character, narrative, emotion, and community and to point towards some new
directions for game design. We have helped to organize a series of workshops and
presentations at such industry gatherings as the Games Developers Conference, E3
(The Electronic Entertainment Exposition), and Siggraph, which have helped to
enlarge the industry conversation about games.
We are currently working with Microsoft to explore the potential use of game for
learning. Our task is to make the case for games as a potential instructional and
simulation platform and to develop prototypes of how one might combine state of the
art game play with MIT quality science and engineering instruction.
As we have taken this conversation about games into the public sphere, my work has
gained a great deal of attention within the games press and general interest publications
alike. My favorite stories to date include a far reaching interview with Kurt Squire in
Joystick 101, a conversation on games and violence in Gamasutra, and ....

Henry Jenkins
MEDIA CONSUMPTION
All media theory makes assumptions about the nature of the media audience. In
some cases, those assumptions emerge through introspection or through reading
audiences as if they were products of formal and ideological structures of texts
or through borrowing models from psychology or... Audience research seeks to
directly engage with empirical audiences in order to better factor their
experiences and perspectives into its accounts. In my opinion, what is important
about audience research is not necessarily its ability to arrive at some truth,
since it still reads the audience through some theoretical framework which
makes some aspects visible but may blind us to others, but it opens up a
dialogue between researchers and audiences and, if done well, forces us to be
more accountable for the claims that we make about media consumption and
interpretation.
OVERVIEWS
I offered an overview of the methods and theoretical models surrounding audience
research, at least as they are applied to cinema, in "Reception Theory and Audience
Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss", which appeared in Christine Gledhill
and Linda Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Theory. Here, I use Thelma and Louise as
a case study for examining how audience researches have looked at aspects of the text,
contexts of reception, and interpretive communities to map the reception process, and
end with some ideas about how what we learn from fan communities might inform
academic criticism.
Anyone who wants to better understand my own approach to audience research might
start with two lengthy published conversations, one with Taylor Harrison, which first
appeared in Enterprise Zones, and the other with Matt Hills, which was published in
Intensities. Across these two conversations, I try to contextualize my fan studies
research and deal with the academic and personal stakes in researching the audience.
The Intensities dialogue represents an exchange between two generations of fan
researchers on such topics as the impact of media convergence on fan culture, the
relationship between fandom and academia, the problematic analogy between fandom
and religion, the value of psychoanalysis for discussing fan cultures, and the challenges
of writing about and documenting the affective dimensions of fandom.
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STUDYING FANDOM
I have been an active television and cult media fan for more than two decades, well
before I entered academic life. When I first began studying media in graduate school, I
was enormously frustrated with academic representations of media consumption,
because their vision of isolated, passive, and ideologically vulnerable consumers were
so at odds with my highly social, engaged, empowered, and creative experiences as a
fan. I often joke that I got tired of being told to get a life and decided to write a book
instead. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was that book --
an attempt to map fandom as an interpretive and creative community actively
appropriating the content of television for its own pleasures. My work drew heavily on
ideas from Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life and was informed by my
mentor, John Fiske, whose ideas about media audiences are best represented in his
book, Television Culture. Nothing prepared me for the response to Textual Poachers
either within the academy, where it is still widely taught more than a decade after its
original publication, within fandom itself, where passages of the book routinely surface
as signature lines on e-mail, or in journalism, where the book has helped to reshape the
ways reporters cover the fan community. I am now in negotiations with Routledge to
develop an expanded and updated new addition of the book to deal with the ways that
fandom has changed over the past decade as a result of networked computing and
media convergence.
"Interactive Audiences?, which will first appear in xx, maps some of those changes and
suggests some new directions in my own thinking about fandom. Here, I draw on
Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence to describe the links between affect, knowledge,
and community in a media environment that has facilitated new kinds of interactions
between fans, producers, and texts and where industry operates on an assumption of an
active and potentially collaborative consumer.
"The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Popular Culture in the Digital Age", which first
appeared on Red Rock Eater News and more recently has been expanded and translated
into French for publication in xx, offered another take on the changing status of fans,
exploring contradictory responses to fan culture from a media industry eager to absorb
aspects of fan aesthetics but uncomfortable with the image of a grassroots community
of cultural producers whose use of its intellectual property can not be adequately
policed. The issue of fandom and intellectual property law also surfaces in "Digital
Land Grab," which was published in Technology Review.
In my "Foreward" to Kurt Lancaster's Interacting With Babylon 5, I explore what

performance studies might contribute to our understanding of this new fan culture,
looking at the ways that media producers are creating new spaces for fans to interact
with and participate within the fictional worlds of their programs. "Fandom, the New
Identity Politics," which appeared in Harpers, explores the political dimensions of
contemporary fan culture, drawing parallels between fan politics and debates among

Henry Jenkins
queer activists, and urging us to think in new ways about what might be described as
categories of cultural preference. Both of these essays deal with the issue of people
dressing up and performing the parts of fictional characters, albeit from very different
theoretical perspectives.
Textual Poachers has often been read as a book about Star Trek fans. Perhaps this is
because my very first essay on fan fiction, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten",
which first appeared in Studies in Mass Communication, dealt with Star Trek as its
primary case study. In fact, Textual Poachers dealt with the female fanzine
community, which cuts across many different media products. It was not intended
either as a study of Star Trek fans per se nor a totalizing account of fandom, but a
specific case study of a fan community. To make this point, I followed up Textual
Poachers with a book that did deal with Star Trek fans, Science Fiction Audiences:
Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Their Followers, which I co-authored with John Tulloch.
In my sections of the book, I tried to demonstrate the ways three different fan
communities -- male MIT students, female fanzine writers, and the members of a queer
fan club -- interacted with Star Trek. Each group took something different from their
encounter with the series, depending on, among other things, their understandings of
science fiction as a genre, their existing interests and fantasies, and their forms of
social interaction and cultural production. Of the case studies in the book, "Out of the
Closet and Into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek" has been the most widely
reprinted and the most influential. It is an example of what John Hartley calls
"Intervention Analysis" in which the academic researcher joins forces with the media
audience for an activist purpose. In this case, I wanted to lend my support to a letter-
writing campaign which wanted to see a gay, lesbian, or bisexual character included on
the television program as a reflection of its historic commitment to the acceptance of
diversity.
INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES
Shaping Science Fiction Audiences was the idea that fandom constituted an interpretive
community or, more accurately, communities. Interpretive communities are social
groups which share similar intellectual resources and patterns of making meaning.
With interpretive communities, meanings are debated and over time, some loose
consensus emerges. There is, of course, never total agreement, but there appears to be
some agreement about what kinds of disagreements can be tolerated and which ones
throw you beyond the parameters of a particular group. Interpretive communities
become especially visible in net discourse when they collide with each other,
producing flame wars. Flame wars occur on fan lists, I argue, where the core
assumptions which are taken for granted by individual participants are too much at
odds with each other to be tolerated, forcing them to be dealt with in more explicit and
often more impassioned ways.

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Through the years, I have developed a number of case studies of specific fandoms that
might be read as interpretive communities, trying to offer detailed accounts of the
process of their interpretive activities and how their interpretations of specific
programs fit within the larger context of their lives. For example, in "It's Not a Fairy
Tale Any More!: Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast," which first appeared in the
Journal of the University Film and Video Association and later in Textual Poachers, I
examine a group of female fans of Beauty and the Beast, suggesting how they drew on
the program's balance of romance and action-adventure to work through contradictions
and uncertainties about the place of femininity in an era where women are assuming
more and more professional responsibility. I demonstrated the place of genre in
shaping both their evaluations of individual episodes and their expectations about
where the series was likely to take them and then discuss the fragmentation and
reinvention of their community when the producers "retooled" the series in an effort to
attract more male viewers.
By contrast, "Do You Enjoy Making The Rest of Us Feel Stupid?: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the
Trickster Author and Viewer Mastery," which appeared in David Lavery's Full of
Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, dealt with the predominantly male fans on
an early internet discussion list which was preoccupied with the challenge of
determining who killed Laura Palmer and had constructed a vivid image of David
Lynch as a "tricky" author to justify their own intensive reading of the series. Here,
again, notions of genre plays a significant role, since they tended to fold the soap opera
aspects of the series into their reading of it as a mystery, using the challenge of solving
the crime to justify their speculations about interpersonal relationships.
A third case study, "Going Bonkers!: Children, Play and Pee-Wee," first published in
Camera Obscura and later reprinted in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis's Male
Trouble, dealt with children as media consumers, suggesting that children do not so
much watch television as play with it. Here, I draw on children's play, stories, and
artwork to reveil their attempts to work through the ambiguities surrounding Pee-Wee
Herman's man-child persona, seeing this as part of a larger process of exploring what it
means to gain maturity at a time when they were making a transition from the home to
kindergarten.
FANS AS CULTURAL PRODUCERS

One of my more significant contributions to audience research has been to shift
attention from fans as meaning producers towards fans as cultural producers, who
transform the act of consumption into various forms of creative expression. Textual
Poachers describes the art world of fandom in some detail. Other essays, written at the
same time or subsequently, look more closely at specific forms of fan creation. "If I
Speak With Your Sound: Fan Music, Textual Proximity and Liminal Identification",
which appeared in Camera Obscura and "Strangers No More, We Sing: Filking and

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the Social Construction of the Science Fiction Fan Community," which appeared in
Lisa Lewis's The Adoring Audience, dealt with filk, a genre of fan-generated folk
music. In the first essay, I used filk as a means of complicating our understanding of
fan identification with series characters as well as exploring how fans used filk songs
to express their ambivalent feelings about their own experiences as media consumers.
In the second essay, I compared filk to traditional folk culture, stressing its community
building functions.
In "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Parody and Appropriation in an Age of Cultural

Convergence," which will appear in Bart Cheever and Nick Constant's d-film, I
examine fan contributions to the digital cinema movement. Here, I try to reconcile
claims made about media convergence within a political economy framework with
claims made about participatory culture within a cultural studies framework, seeing
Star Wars as both the defining example of the new transmedia corporate franchise and
as the catalyst for an enormous amount of grassroots cultural production. In one of my
Technology Review columns, "The Director Next Door," I offer some additional
thoughts about digital cinema as an alternative distribution venue for amateur and
independent filmmakers.
In "Before the Holodeck: Tracing Star Trek Through Digital Media," co-authored with
Janet Murray and published in Greg Smith's On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the
Promises of a New Technology, I use what we know about fandom as an interpretive
and creative community to assess the kinds of interactivity on offer in Star Trek
computer and video games. What we learned was that those aspects of the series which
had sustained the interests and participation of female consumers were systematically
stripped aside in order to develop games that more perfectly satisfied the interests of
the game industry's predominantly male demographic.
HISTORICAL AUDIENCES
Most of the work referenced here draws on various forms of ethnographic research to
map the activities of contemporary media consumers. The challenges of documenting
historical media audiences are somewhat more daunting. Two of my essays can be
thought to deal directly with historical media audiences and they adopt very different
techniques for reconstructing those viewers. In "Shall We Make It for New York or
For Distribution?: Eddie Cantor, Whoopee, and Regional Resistance to the Talkies," I
draw on trade press reports and industry surveys to reconstruct a history of hinterland
resistance to certain genres -- especially the musical -- which had emerged as
Hollywood made the transition to talking pictures. I argued that the early talkie period
exaggerated the importance of northeastern cities, which were among the first to have
theaters wired for sound, where-as the solidification of sound cinema restored the
power of hinterland markets and forced a rejection of strategies that had seemed
promising only a year earlier. I documented the repositioning of Jewish comedian

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Eddie Cantor in response to those shifting market pressures.
In "Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory,"
which I co-authored with Lynn Spigel for William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson's The
Many Lives of the Batman, we tried to construct the "popular memory" of the 1960s
cult television series through focal group interviews of people who recalled watching
the program as children. Here, we combined research into the contemporary reception
of the series with oral history techniques, reading recent responses as illustrating the
processes by which personal and collective experiences are transformed and
mythologized through memory.
VERNACULAR THEORY
My thinking about fandom has been tremendously influenced by Thomas
McLaughlin's Street Smarts and... McLaughlin challenges our conception of theory
production as an exclusively academic activity, forcing us to reflect on the place of
theory-making in a range of other sectors, including fandom. Everyday people develop
theories to explain their own relationships to media and these theories can be as
sophisticated on their own terms as those produced within the scholarly community.
He challenges us to engage more openly with theoretical dialogue with these
vernacular theorists. I have taken up his challenge in two different published works.
In "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back," with appeared in From
Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, co-edited with Justine
Cassell, I reprinted essays about gender and computer games which first appeared on a
range of fan websites. Here, the self-proclaimed "game grrls" offered a significant
critique of the ideological assumptions shaping the "girls game" movement,
challenging us to rethink academic assumptions about what women want from games.
In "The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from Terra Nostra
Underground and Strange Bedfellows," which was co-edited with Cynthia Jenkins and
Shoshanna Green and appeared in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander's Theorizing
Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, we introduced academic readers to various
attempts by slash fans to theorize slash writing. Here, the three editors were active
participants in an APA, an amateur publication, which regularly discussed slash and its
relationship to other forms of sexual representation and we reprinted our own fannish
contributions to the APA alongside other contributions.
MEDIA LITERACY
My interest in media audiences has led me in recent years to become more outspoken
in advocating the development of media literacy resources for our schools. To some
degree, this activism has been inspired by my disgust at the easy fit between media
effects research (which often ascribes little or no agency to consumers) and the kinds

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of moral panic generated by cultural warriors in Washington and elsewhere. My own

research has shown media audiences to be active, critical, constantly testing media
discourse against their own perceptions of the world, constantly reworking or
appropriating it for their own uses. I had stayed away from media literacy education
because most of it has been developed with the goal of shaping student's tastes and
operates on the assumption that media is doing bad things to us. I wanted to rethink
media literacy as a set of skills which includes both reading and writing, consuming
and producing media texts. It needs to start with a keen awareness of children's existing
uses of new media technologies and the place of popular culture in the formation of
their personal and subcultural identities. This research should then shape classroom
activities that help to encourage creative and ethically responsible uses of media
technologies. I am currently in the process of developing a research team, along with
Justine Cassell, Mitchell Resnick, and Sherry Turkle, which would research children as
media users and get that information out to concerned policy-makers, teachers, school
administrators, psychologists, and others.
The shifts in my thinking about media literacy education can be traced across several
of my essays. "Empowering Children in the Digital Age: Towards a Radical Media
Pedagogy", which was published in Radical Teachers, discusses my skepticism about
the myth of childhood innocence underlying much media literacy education and
proposes a more radical approach which empowers children to critique and rewrite
media texts.
The Columbine Massacre and the moral panic that followed forced me to pay greater
attention to this issue, as might be suggested by my testimony before the U.S. Senate
Commerce Committee and my essay, "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington" which
was written in response to that experience.
I wrote two essays, "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want to Hear
About Youth and Media", which appeared in Independent School, and "The Uses and
Abuses of Popular Culture: Raising Children in the Digital Age", which appeared in
The College Board Review. Both countered widespread claims that media violence had
inspired the recent wave of school shootings, drawing on insights from audience
research to offer a more complex account of the place of violent entertainment in the
lives of contemporary teens.
As part of a school outreach effort, we produced a study guide for teachers to use to
discuss contemporary media developments with their students. In addition, I engaged
in debates with moral reformer David Grossman and conversations with journalist Jon
Katz about Columbine and media violence.
In response to requests that I provide some model for how parents can develop better

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communication with their children about popular culture, I wrote "The Monsters Next
Door: A Father-Son Conversation about Buffy, Moral Panic and Generational
Differences" as a dialogic essay with my son about one of our favorite television
shows, using it as an entry point into thinking about the psychological and social roots
of moral panic and generational conflict.
I also developed a talk which sought to explain to journalists, parents groups,

librarians, and civil liberties organizations how teens were currently making use of web
technologies, "It's The Only Thing I Have Complete Control Over: Teen's Use of the
Web," which also inspired one of my Technology Review columns, "The Kids Are
Alright Online."
These activities suggest the potential value of audience research for framing policy
debates about media literacy education and youth access to digital technologies.

Henry Jenkins - Children's Culture
CHILDREN'S CULTURE
The popular culture produced for, by, and/or about children. Children's culture
is not "innocent" of adult political, economic, moral or sexual concerns. Rather,
the creation of children's culture represents the central arena through which we
construct our fantasies about the future and a battleground through which we
struggle to express competing ideological agendas.
CHILDREN AS MEDIA CONSUMERS

"Going Bonkers!': Children, Play, and Pee-Wee" represents my earliest writing on
children's culture, produced as part of an independent study under the direction of John
Fiske, when I was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The essay
used as its starting point a "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" party for my son and his
kindergarten age friends. The essay argues that children's characteristic engagement
with television content involves play (which is spontaneous, unstructured and
exploratory) rather than games (which are structured, goal-oriented, and rule-bound);
that the kindergarten age students used Pee-Wee's ambiguous age status to explore
their own mixed feelings about leaving home and going to school; and that the
program's "Ket"-like aesthetic enabled children to express a cultural identity distinct
from their parent's demands upon them. "Going Bonkers!" appeared initially in
Camera Obscura but was reprinted in the book, Male Trouble.
COMPUTER GAMES
Several of my projects have involved looking at computer games, which represent one
of the most important new forms of children's media in recent years.
"x Logic" was a review of Marsha Kinder's Playing With Power and Eugene
Provenzo's Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo but also includes some original
analysis of the spatial rather than narrative-focus of video games and the ways that
gameplaying fits within children's everyday lives.
Extending these arguments, "Nintendo and New World Travel Narratives"was a dialog
with Renaissance literature scholar Mary Fuller about the category of "spatial stories,"
a concept derived from the work of Michel de Certeau. We argue that certain kinds of
narratives lack the focus on characterization, causality, and linear plot development
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which defines classical storytelling and instead focus on movements through and the
occupation of narrative space. We argue for a fundamental congruence between
Nintendo games and earlier forms of travel narratives. This essay appeared in Steve
Jones' anthology, Cyber-Society.
The issue of gender and computer games forms the focus of my forthcoming book,
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which is co-edited
with Justine Cassell (from the MIT Media Lab). This book brings together essays by
scholars in a range of fields, including educational psychology, cultural studies, social
science research, and media design, and includes interviews with six key women in the
games industry and a selection of webzine writings by game grrlz. The book takes a
snapshot of the current "girls game" movement as a way of understanding the
intersection between academic and entrepreneural feminism in the late 1990s.
In our introductory essay, "Chess for Girls?: Feminism and Computer Games," we
trace through the range of political and corporate responses to the "gender gap" in the
computer game industry, outlining some of the contradictory assumptions about gender
shaping current decisions about game design, development, and distribution.
In "Complete Freedom of Movement': Computer Games as Gendered Playspaces," I

continue my exploration of video games as "spatial stories," suggesting the ways that
the genre conventions of the "boys game" responded to features in traditional backyard
"boy culture," moving them inside in response to children's diminishing access to
physical playspaces in their own neighborhoods. Then, I continue to examine the
history of gender distinctions in children's book publishing as a way of examining the
successes and failures of the "girl game" movement. Specifically, the essay includes a
close consideration of Purple Moon's Secret Paths Through the Forrest and Theresa
Duncan's Chop Suey and Zero Zero.
My arguments about the relationship between computer games and traditional

backyard "boy culture" formed the basis for an interview with Next Generation
magazine which centered around issues of video game violence. In February 2000, the
Comparative Media Studies Program hosted a conference, Video and Computer Games
Come of Age, which brought together leading figures from the games industry with
critics, academics, and the public for two days of intense conversation about the
current state and future directions of this emerging storytelling medium.
In an essay for Technology Review titled "An Art for the Digital Age," I made the
argument that video and computer games constitute a new "lively art." I borrow the
concept of "lively art" from Gilbert Seldes, who wrote in the 1920s to put forward the
argument that the most important American arts for the 20th century would be popular

arts, such as Hollywood movies, jazz, comic strips, and Broadway musicals.
PERMISSIVE CHILD-REARING AND POPULAR CULTURE

I am currently considering writing a book-length study of the impact of permissive
child-rearing doctrines on post-war popular culture aimed at children. This research
has resulted in a series of already published essays examining major landmarks of the
period in terms of their relationship to the changing conception of the child.
"The Sensuous Child: Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Sexual Revolution" offers a
provocative look at changing conception of children's sexuality as reflected in advice
to parents on such issues as masturbation, "playing doctor," and parental nudity. It
traces the shift from the anti-sensualism associated with the pre-war work of
behaviorist William Watson to the celebration of sensuality and exploration of the
body associated with the post-war work of Benjamin Spock and others. This essay
appears in my collection, The Children's Culture Reader.
"'The All American Handful': Dennis the Menace and the Bad Boy Tradition" fits
Hank Ketchum's popular comic strip and the television series adaptation within a
tradition of writings about bad boys which date back to the 19th century and which
provided the culture with a way of exploring its conflicting feelings about masculinity.
This essay appears in The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social
Change.
"'Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie" uses the
classic children's novel, Lassie Come Home, and its television manifestation to explore
the intersection between our sentimental valuation of the dog and of the child.
Specifically, I examine moments in the television narrative when Lassie changes
ownership as crisis points in the program ideology, exploring how the series negotiates
these transitions and how each shift reflects some changes in the core assumptions
behind the series. This essay appears in Kid's Media Culture edited by Marsha Kinder.
"'No Matter How Small': The Democratic Imagination of Doctor Seuss" examines the
ways that shifting post-war assumptions about childhood were linked to larger debates
about democracy and represented a domestic extension of the pre-war Popular Front
movement. I examine the links between Doctor Seuss's pre-war and wartime activities
as an editorial cartoonist for PM and as a propagandist working in the Capra Unit and
his post-war writings for children. This essay will appear in Hop on Pop: The Politics
and Pleasure of Popular Culture.
CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE
The Children's Culture Reader brings together a range of pre-published essays by

social historians, cultural scholars, literary critics, anthropologists, psychologists, and

others, mostly centered around the politics of childhood innocence, the construction of
children's sexual and gender identities, and the relationship between children's play and
children's consumption. The Workbook section reproduces a number of primary
documents drawn from child rearing guides from the 1910s-1960s.
"The Innocent Child and Other Myths" is the introduction to this collection. Using a
consideration of Susan Molinari's address to the 1996 Republican National Convention
and Hilary Clinton's speech to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, I
demonstrate the complex relationship between the image of the innocent child and
adult politics. Then, I offer an overview of the ways that our understanding of the child
has shifted across the last five hundred years and the ways that cultural scholars and
others have understood the issue of children's cultural and political agency.
The pedagogical implications of this work are examined in an essay published in

Radical Teacher titled "Empowering Children in the Digital Age: Towards a Radical
Media Pedagogy." Here, I argue for a mode of teaching which starts from the
assumption that popular culture is a meaningful part of children's lives and that
teachers should empower them to more actively manipulate and appropriate its
materials as a way of working through their implications for children's everyday lives.
Here, I bring together my work on children's culture with my work on cultural
appropriation and fandom.
The syllabus for my course, "Understanding Children's Fictions," suggests some ways
that classroom teachers might encourage students to reflect on the intersection between
adult politics and children's culture. [link syllabus here]
COLUMBINE AND BEYOND

In the wake of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, I was
called before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into "Marketing
Violence to Youth." My testimony sought to challenge the dominant media effects
paradigm and call for a more complex understanding of teen's relationships to popular
culture. Testifying before Congress was a harrowing experience, which I described in
my essay, "Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington," which was widely posted around
the web and eventually reprinted in Harpers. I was subsequently asked to write essays
for educators, including "Lessons From Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want To
Hear About Youth and Media." I participated in many different forums and discussions
about this issue, including this exchange with slashdot journalist Jon Katz, which was
held at MIT. I also visited high schools across the country to try to better understand
teen's relationship to media, distributing this resource guide for teachers. I devoted one
of my Technology Review columns to exploring how outcast youth benefit from their
time spent in the on-line world, "The Kids Are Alright On-line."


Henry Jenkins
GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Our sense of personal identity (gender) and our erotic relations (sexuality) are
partially shaped by social and cultural factors, including the representations of
gender and sexuality found in mass media and popular culture.
Almost from the day I arrived at MIT, I have been deeply involved in the Women's
Studies Program. I also served as the acting director of the MIT Gay and Lesbian
Studies program for three years. Issues of gender and sexuality have been central to my
work, including both my scholarship and my teaching. I have taught two courses
specifically in this area -- Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture and Myths of Gender
-- Masculinity.
MASCULINITY
Much of the scholarship in gender studies has emerged from feminist work and has
tended to focus on the social construction of femininity and on the limitations that
women experience in their professional and personal lives. A growing body of
literature, also inflected by feminist theory and politics, has begun to turn the lens in
the other direction -- to examine the social construction of masculinity. Many of my
essays adopt this approach. Collectively, these essays represent an attempt to map
some of the central genres of contemporary entertainment in terms of their often
complex and contradictory representations of male identity.
"Never Trust a Snake!: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama" uses genre theory
to examine the melodramatic dimensions of television wrestling and its "fit" with the
social and economic experience of working class American males. Specifically, I draw
on the work of Norbert Elias to examine the ways that sports function as an authorized
space of male emotional release and to consider the ways that the fictional structure of
wrestling makes it especially effective for provoking strong emotions. This essay first
appeared in Aaron Baker and Todd Boyd (ed.), Out of Bounds : Sports, Media, and the
Politics of Identity Because of this essay, I was interviewed for the Canadian
documentary, Wrestling With Shadows, which will appear on the Arts and
Entertainment Channel this fall.
"The Laughing Stock of the City: Male Dread, Performance Anxiety and Unfaithfully
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Yours" examines masculine responses to another genre -- film comedy. One of my few
ventures into psychoanalytic theory, I offer an account of the relationship between
male identity formation and a dread of women and suggests the ways that comedy may
serve useful psychic functions in helping to resolve male fears about their own
inadequacies in comparison to our larger-than-life ideals about heroic masculinity. This
approach helps me to examine the complexities of Preston Sturge's Unfaithfully Yours
and to explain why this film has been widely perceived as an artistic failure. This essay
originally appeared in Kristine Karnack and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) Classical Hollywood
Comedy.
"Dennis the Menace, 'The All-American Handful'" represents the intersection between
my work on children's culture and my work on masculinity, examining the narrative
tradition of "bad boy" comedy as embodying certain masculine fantasies about escape
from matriarchal control and then exploring how the 1950s comic strips and 1960s
television series based on Dennis the Menace expressed specific concerns of the post-
war generation about fatherhood and domesticity. This essay initially appeared in a
slightly edited form in Michael Curtin and Lynn Spigel (Eds.) The Revolution Wasn't
Televised:Sixties Television and Social Conflict.
"'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" examines

the ways that contemporary video games build upon traditions of gendered play which
emerged in the context of 19th century "Boy Culture." This essay draws on cultural
geography, social history, and research on children's literature, to map the spaces open
for boys and girls within contemporary video games. It appears in Justine Cassel and
Henry Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games.
For more on this project, see the Children's Culture section.
FEMALE COMIC PERFORMANCE

Another important strand in my work has dealt with the issue of female comic
performance. For a long time, most histories of film comedy made little or no reference
to female stars, even though female clowns have surfaced in almost every period of
film history. A growing body of feminist scholarship has sought to reclaim these stars
and understand how their films allowed an expression of the contradictory attitudes
towards femininity at play within the culture.
"'Don't Become Too Intimate With That Terrible Woman!': Wild Women, Disorderly
Conduct and Gendered Laughter in Early Sound Comedy" looks at the representations
of gender relations within the early 1930s films of three comic stars, W.C. Fields,
Winnie Lightner, and Charlotte Greenwood. Fields' comedies fit within a larger
tradition I call "Comedy of Marital Combat" which reflects male anxieties about the
growing authority women exercised in the domestic sphere; Winnie Lightner's films
use comic masquerade to express a female resistance to traditional conceptions of

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feminine beauty and compliance; Charlotte Greenwood's So Long Letty turns the
"Comedy of Marital Combat" on its head to express why women might not find
domestic life so rewarding. This essay first appeared in Camera Obscura and then
appeared in my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the
Vaudeville Aesthetic.
"'You Don't Say That in English!': The Scandal of Lupe Velez," written to appear in a
forthcoming collection of essays on female comic performance edited by Kristine
Karnack, represents a revision and reconsideration of my own earlier work.
Specifically, I look at the intersection of race and gender in the films of Lupe Velez, a
Mexican-American comic star who is remembered today more for her scandalous life
and death than for her screen appearances. I examine the ways that the figure of "the
unruly woman" or the "woman on top" helped to naturalize existing prejudices against
Mexican-American women, even as it allowed a limit space for women to question
socially-sanctioned gender roles.
FEMALE AUTHORSHIP
"'Compromised Cinema': Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman's Terminal
Island " examines the space open for female political and aesthetic exploration in the
exploitation films produced by Roger Corman in the 1960s and 1970s. Corman offered
new filmmakers, including women like Stephanie Rothman, the chance to make films
and to express their own perspectives on contemporary society provided they were
willing to fulfill the exploitation cinema's expectations of sex, nudity, and violence.
Using Terminal Island as a case study, I examine how Rothman was able to make
these very elements the central vehicles for expressing her distaste for contemporary
gender relations and for exploring utopian fantasies of female empowerment and social
transformation. This essay was written to appear in a book on Trash Cinema being
edited by Eric Schaeffer.
GENDER, SEXUALITY AND INTERPRETATION

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. This book offers an
ethnographic perspective on the mostly female fan communities surrounding such
popular television series as Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, The Professionals, and
Blake's Seven. Specific chapters consider the ways that fan critical practice relate to
work done by David Bleich and others on gender and reading; the struggle between
Beauty and the Beast fans and producers over the series' generic status as part romance
and part action-adventure series; the rewriting of television series through fan fiction
and the complex gender and sexual politics surrounding slash, a genre of homo-erotic
romance featuring television characters such as Kirk and Spock.
I am often asked by people reading or teaching this book where they can find slash.
More and more of it is becoming available on the web, though it is often of mixed

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quality. The best website to get started reading on-line slash is Satyricon Au Go-Go.
My contributions to Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek
continue this exploration of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and
interpretation, and include close considerations of the ways female fans rewrite the
relationship between Kirk and Nurse Chapel as a way of resolving the program's
contradictory attitudes towards the role of women in Star Fleet; the history of the
efforts by gay, lesbian, and bisexual fans to lobby for the inclusion of a queer-positive
character in Star Trek; and the status of Star Trek at MIT as a means of working
through complicated attitudes about the relationship between mind and emotion and for
exploring the students' own growing mastery over issues of science and technology.
"Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking" was an attempt to pull together excerpts
from slash fans theorizing about slash writing. So much academic writing has emerged
in recent years on the subject of slash, but little of it has been written by participants in
this subculture. I wanted to use my access to academic publishing to make the ideas of
slash fans more accessible to a broader community. This essay, which I co-edited with
Cynthia Jenkins and Shoshanna Green, will appear (someday) in Cheryl Harris and
Alison Alexander (Eds.) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity.
"Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss" offers
an overview of the ways that people have theorized audience response to the cinema.
At the core of this essay is the close consideration of one fan story which depicts
Thelma and Louise as lesbian vampires. I trace how this story might be understood in
relation to the original film, its critical reception, the subcultural practices of fandom,
and research on queer audiences. This essay was written to appear in a collection on
different approaches to film studies being edited by Linda Williams and Christine
Gledhill.

Henry Jenkins
TALES OF MANHATTAN:
MAPPING THE URBAN IMAGINATION THROUGH HOLLYWOOD FILM
By Henry Jenkins
False Starts
The first chords of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" are heard. The sun glistens over the
Manhattan skyscape. The black and white images possess the sheen of old Hollywood
glamour photographs. Woody Allen stammers the opening lines: "Chapter One. He
adored New York City. He idealized it all out of proportion." Then, he stops, corrects
himself, substitutes "romanticized" for "idealized," and continues, "To him no matter
what the season, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the
great tunes of George Gershwin."
"Ah, No, Let me start this all over."
In the opening montage of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), Allen's hesitations,

revisions, and contradictions reflect his ambivalence towards New York. Sometimes,
Allen emphasizes glamour and romance, sometimes aggravation and self doubt. In one
passage, he "thrives on the hustle and bustle of the crowds and the traffic." In another,
he is "desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage." Searching for a
consistent vantage point from which to capture the totality of Manhattan in a single
paragraph, he, of course, is doomed to fail.
Allen's ambivalence is reinforced by the images and music. The still photographs,
which borrow from classic representations of the city, are only loosely linked to the
narration. The Soulvka King and the Empire Diner are treated with the same reverence
as Times Square and the Guggenheim. A young couple kiss on a penthouse balcony;
two black teenagers shoot baskets in the projects. Allen's narration suggests that the
Gershwin soundtrack expresses the protagonist's romanticism, yet "Rhapsody in Blue"
also uses jarring bursts of percussion, unanticipated fanfares, and syncopation to
express the clashing and contradictory qualities of urban life. Allen makes no effort to
coordinate the images and cutting to its rhythms. Only in the final moments do sound
and image come together: fireworks burst over the Manhattan skyline and Gershwin's
music explodes into a crescendo of clashing cymbals and pounding drumbeats.
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/manhattan.html (1 of 21) [2007-06-28 02:18:49]

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Images of the Cinematic City

In his classic study, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch sought to bring to city design
an appreciation of the aesthetics of urban experience as a "temporal art," recognizing
that our perceptions of the city change and unfold over time. The book opens with an
acknowledgment of the complexity and multiplicity of urban life, suggesting that the
city can never be reduced to a single stable image but can only be understood in kinetic
and dynamic terms:
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear
can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is
experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the
sequence of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences...
Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and
his image is soaked in meanings and memories...Most often, our
perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary,
mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the
image is the composite of them all...Not only is the city an object which
is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely
diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who
are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own. While it
may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in
detail.
Lynch sought to bring greater clarity and sensuality to our "images" of our native cities
and to design urban spaces with more striking features that would enable a more
coherent "cognitive mapping" of their basic parameters. At the same time, Lynch
recognized that city-dwellers needed to be taught to perceive their cities in new ways.
Lynch saw urban studies as a way of building a more educated and appreciative
audience for urban design. Lynch recognized that our "images" of cities, then, are
partially shaped by formal properties of the cities themselves and partially by the
process of perception and interpretation through which we construct mental
representations of those properties. In The Image of the City, Lynch is interested
primarily in the experiential process by which city dwellers develop a sense of their
native turf. However, our mental maps of familiar cities incorporate not only memories
of direct encounters but also second-hand experiences gained through mediated
interactions with various representations of those cities -- paintings, photographs,
written descriptions, films, television programs, and the like.
In an oft-cited passage from America, Jean Baudrillard argues that visiting a European
city where the urban environment seems to be a "reflection of the paintings" one has
just scrutinized in the galleries, while Manhattan "seems to have stepped right out of

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the movies." This impression of Manhattan as a cinematic city is not surprising when
one considers that one recent filmography of feature-length movies set in New York
City listed more than 500 titles. In many cases, New York simply provides the setting
for these films, a convenient and familiar backdrop for the narrative action, but this
paper will be more centrally concerned with those cases where filmmakers sought to
make movies about Manhattan, trying to give aesthetic shape to their own particular
perceptions of America's most famous city. Such an essay can not, of course, exhaust
the full range of urban images to circulate in the American cinema, but my goal is to
focus attention on a set of aesthetic and ideological problems at the heart of
representing the "cinematic city."
For Lynch, the "legibility " of a city image was what enabled it to become such a
powerful basis for affective associations and metaphoric meanings: "The image of the
Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion,
greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and
reinforces the meaning." The image of a city, for Lynch, must remain "plastic to the
perceptions and purposes of its citizens." The "city image" in film, however, already
comes to us as interpreted through the powerful creative intelligence of an artist who
wants us to see that skyline in a certain way. When Lynch writes about the "image of
the city," then, he is primarily interested in formal features that make it harder or easier
for us to grasp the city's essential structures, but when we discuss the cinematic image
of the city, we are entering a space where formal and ideological issues merge.
Reading Lynch from the perspective of someone who studies cinema and not cities,
what I find most striking is that he discusses urban form in a vocabulary which closely
parallels the ideals of the classically constructed narrative. Lynch, for example, speaks
of a "melodic" structuring of landmarks and regions along a succession of paths, which
he suggested might follow a "classical introduction-development-climax-conclusion"
pattern. Yet, Lynch is acutely aware of the various factors that prevent the city from
achieving such a classical narrative form, that disrupt or break down its coherent
development or fragment our perceptions of it. An ill-considered development deal
may mar the urban landscape, blocking our ability to see important landmarks or to
move fluidly between nodes. In one sense, the cinema would seem to be the perfect
form to express the dynamic properties of the city, since like urban design itself,
cinema is a "temporal art form," but the cinema brings its own expectations about what
a classically constructed story looks like -- expectations which urban-based stories
often find themselves unable to satisfy. Classically constructed stories remain focused
on particular characters, their motives, their goals, their memories, and their
experiences. The challenge for the filmmaker is to create a story that situates the
individual in relation to the city in such a way that the film preserves what is
distinctive about the metropolis -- congestion, simultaneity, heterogeneity,
randomness, fragmentation, in short, incoherence.
SPATIAL STORIES

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Cultures, Michel De Certeau tells us, construct stories to explain and justify their
occupation of geographic spaces, to describe and record their collective journeys and
migrations, and to map the boundaries between known and unknown territories.
Telling a story is an act of clarification that bestows coherence on ambiguous or
ambivalent relationships between people and places. "Every story is a travel story," De
Certeau writes, and often, the stories themselves circulate beyond their original
cultures, justifying one community to another.
The cinema emerged in the midst of a period of dramatic transformation within

American culture. The urban population of the United States quadrupled in the forty
years between 1870 and 1910. The cinema helped the United States to negotiate the
tensions and uncertainties surrounding its transition from a predominantly pastoral
society to a predominantly urban and suburban one. From the start, the American
cinema was closely associated with the urban experience. The earliest films often
documented a moment in time at a specific location, facilitating a process of virtual
tourism. In Europe, such films typically linked colonial powers with the far-flung
reaches of their empires. In the United States, cinema brought images of the emerging
American metropolis to the hinterlands.
Exhibition was the central economic force behind the vertically-integrated studio
system which dominated American film production from the 1920s until the late
1940s. For the five major studios, their primary exhibition revenue came from the
urban hubs where they owned almost all of the theaters. Rural and hinterland audiences
were secondary markets. Urban markets determined what films would be made and
what aesthetic sensibilities would dominate the American film industry. Consequently,
the majority of Hollywood films of the studio era centered on urban experience, albeit
with a certain nostalgia for America's pastoral past. The Hollywood cinema explained
to city-dwellers the nature of their own experience and transmitted traces of that
experience to a broader population being gradually absorbed into urban areas. Such
films spoke to both immigrants from other countries who were hoping to better
understand their new life in America and migrants from rural areas who were hoping to
accommodate themselves to their new urban homes.
This is not to say that the American cinema offered a coherent or totally accurate
picture of urban life. Urbanization provoked highly charged and often deeply
ambivalent feelings even for -- or perhaps especially for -- those who lived in New
York or Los Angeles. Many were horrified by mass culture given the prevailing
ideology of rugged individualism. Often, they came to the city seeking a social
mobility and personal freedom they could not enjoy in the villages where their families
had lived for generations. However, they also feared the alienation and isolation of
inhabiting a world of strangers and they felt buffeted by the rapid pace and fragmented
nature of modernity. Hollywood's spatial stories gave expression to both these utopian
and dystopian impulses, seeking to reconcile them through a more totaling account of

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the city.
Though our contemporary relationships to the city are dramatically different from
those that shaped these earlier spatial stories, the genre conventions that emerged
during this important transitional period continue to exert a powerful influence over
subsequent representations. Contemporary artists give new form to their perceptions of
urban life, but often, they do so in dialogue with these earlier representations. They
quote them, as Allen does in Manhattan when he evokes a succession of classic
photographs representing the New York skyline, or they rewrite them, as we will see in
the example of Dark City, which merges the visual vocabulary of the film noir tradition
with more contemporary science fiction trappings. For those reasons, any attempt to
understand the contemporary cinematic city must always position those representations
in relation to earlier images.
PANORAMIC PERSPECTIVES
Early writers emphasized the fragmentation and constant sensory bombardment of city
life, traits that they felt resulted in perpetual disorientation and confusion. The cinema
was the ideal apparatus for recording the diversity of urban experience. Cinema was an
art form based on sequencing and juxtaposing image fragments to construct a more
meaningful whole. Cinema could give shape to collective experience, while retaining
the particularity of individual narratives.
Margaret Cohen has argued that the cinema's synthesizing function was prefigured by a
19th century French genre of popular writings, which she calls "Panoramic Literature."
Rather than telling a single story about fictional characters and their experiences, such
works sought to tell the collective story of the city. Panoramic works create a
composite account which combines written descriptions and narratives with various
graphic representations, including maps, charts, cartoons, etchings, and photographs.
Panoramic literature sought to record and classify all aspects of everyday experience.
Cohen notes, "Panoramic texts evince a characteristic narrational mode: They are
composed of micro-narratives with no direct continuity from plot to plot." Often,
panoramic works had multiple authors, each writing in different genres with different
styles and tones.
The cinema absorbed many of these panoramic impulses, constructing a moving record
of everyday life. Many early films were literally panoramas, offering views out the
windows of streetcars, views pointing into busy intersections, views looking off
rooftops. These films encourage a pleasure in scanning the image and observing
ordinary interactions. An evening's entertainment at the movies, which might be
composed of short comedies, dramas, documentaries, travel films, and the like, was
itself a composite picture of turn-of-the-century life, though gradually, the feature film
with its classically constructed narrative replaced "the cinema of attractions". Some
later American films still adopted this panoramic structure, bringing together stories by

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multiple authors through some unifying structure based on thematic associations or

movements through space. Tales of Manhattan (Julian Duvivier, 1942) uses the
improbable circulation of a dress coat to link a series of short stories by some of the
period's top screenwriters (including Ben Hect, Donald Ogden Stewart, Alan
Campbell, and Lamar Trotti). The coat takes us from the arts world (worn by Charles
Laughton as a struggling concert conductor or Charles Boyer as a successful Broadway
star) to the shanty town inhabited by a group of black sharecroppers. The stories range
from the broadly comic (W.C. Fields as a charlatan temperance lecturer) to the tragic
(Edgar G. Robinson as a down-and-out man who dresses up to attend his college
reunion).
From the 110th Floor: Of course, the use of the term, panoramic, is misleading.
These works were less panoramas than collages, composite pictures taken from
multiple perspectives in which each element maintains some degree of separation from
the others. Such works value diversity rather than coherence. A panorama, on the other
hand, creates a totalizing perspective that integrates a wide array of elements into a
single vista. What often gets lost in a panorama is the particularity of individual
experiences.
In his essay, "Walking in the City," Michel De Certeau describes the experience of
observing Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center. New York City unfolds
around him like a panorama. His vantage point flattens the city into geometric patterns
devoid of human activity:
Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the
middle of a sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at
Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over
Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem.
A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The
giant mass is immobilized before the eyes.
De Certeau is fascinated with the false sense of totality ("seeing the whole") created by
this panoramic perspective: "To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to
be lifted out of the city's grasp." We build our modern towers of Babel not to reach the
sun, he suggests, but rather to see and know the urban world below us. One of the ways
that this desire is fed is through the production and circulation of picture postcards
which reproduce this "celestial" view of the city and make it available to many who
have never visited the top of the World Trade Center.
Architectural critic Alvin Boyarsky has examined picture post cards as a conventional
system for representing urban life, suggesting that they adopt a pictorial vocabulary
that has remained relatively unchanged for more than sixty years and that varies only

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minimally from city to city. The postcard embraces an ideology of urban progress,
celebrating the man-built environment. Each postcard offers an emblematic image of
the city, encapsulating the visit and allowing its transmission to those back home. The
postcard, thus, depends on monumentalism, translating the cluttered urban
environment into "sights" that can be isolated and recorded, dropped in the mail or
plastered in scrapbooks. The most characteristic vantage points on New York City
include civic landmarks photographed from a low-angle position, the skyline itself
viewed from a boat in the harbor or across one of the bridges, or the aerial perspective
looking down on the city streets. The focus is mostly on architecture, not people
(except as parts of crowds).
The art of the cinema is not the art of the postcard. Cinema's focus is on movement,
juxtaposition, and narrative, not static, emblematic, or monumental images. The
cinema can not remain in the clouds, if it wants to tell the stories of those who walk
below. Yet, the opening montage in Manhattan draws liberally on the postcard's visual
repertoire. Allen situates his actors against the backdrops of familiar New York
landmarks -- Diane Keaton and Woody Allen watch the sunrise over the Brooklyn
Bridge; they have a spat amid the planetarium's alien moonscape.
A more complex play between "celestial" and more earthly perspectives can be found
in Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story (1961),one of the first
Hollywood musicals to make extensive use of location shooting. The film opens with a
sequence of spectacular helicopter views looking down on the island of Manhattan.
From such heights, we can see cars and buildings, but no people. However, we hear
faint echoes of whistling and snapping fingers. A series of shots brings the camera
closer to the ground to show us a group of teenagers loitering in a vacant lot. The scale
of the film has shifted. We are now on ground level, inhabiting turf contested by the
Jets and the Sharks. The camera toys with the spectator, making dramatic shifts in shot
scale, swish panning from location to location, often racking focus or zooming out mid-
shot to show unanticipated aspects of the image. The moment one side dominates a
shot, suddenly the other appears from off-camera, moving in from the left and the
right, or even from above and below the original framing and the power dynamic
shifts. In a few moments, the film maker moves us from the skies to the streets and it is
this shift that enables the story to begin. The shift also represents a move from a
"unified" conception of the city to one that sees the urban sidewalks as a space being
actively contested between recent immigrants and longer-term residents, one
segregated by race, class, gender and nationality as well as a set of borderlands where
different communities come together.
From the Sidewalk: West Side Story prefigures De Certeau's own shift in focus. If the
viewer standing atop the World Trade Center remains "alien" to the inhabited world
below, those who walk the streets become active participants. Though individually
"illegible," the aggregate of many such movements constitutes the story of urban life:

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The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold

story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of
trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it
remains daily and indefinitely other.
Such uncoordinated movements, De Certeau argues, can not be adequately expressed

through abstractions, whether those of the artist or the urban planner:
Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but
do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a
qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic
appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of
singularities.
De Certeau argues for a sociology that respects these "singularities" rather than
searching for a totaling account.
The opening of Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories (1989) explores these "qualitative"
differences in ways of moving through the city, representing Manhattan from a
pedestrian's perspective. An initial montage shows the morning migrations of urban
office workers, a mass of people pushing their way down the sidewalk, pouring out of
the subway or waving frantically for taxi cabs. Three men arrive at the same cab
seconds apart. They each grab at the door and try to push the others away. When one of
them gets into the back seat, the others seize him by his legs and yank him out again.
The rapid cutting between different images and the monumental music express the
stress and tension of rush hour traffic. Here, Lane self-consciously echoes a justly
famous montage sequence from Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), which
compared the crowds shoving onto the subway to a flock of sheep being herded into
the stockyards.
The rhythms of Lane's cutting and music shift as we pick up the trajectory of an aged
street person pushing a shopping cart full of belongings. The takes become longer,
preserving the slower pace of his footsteps. Deep-focus compositions position him
against other unfolding narratives, as he moves past bodies sleeping on the streets and
people rummaging through trash cans. Our eye strays to observe a series of street
performers, lingering long enough to appreciate their acts, before the tracking shot
takes us a little further through Washington Square. In each case, the music shifts tone
and genre to reflect the performers' individual sensibilities. Lane constructs a powerful
class-based contrast between the urban environment as experienced by those who
move with purpose and those who wander because they have no home and no job. As
De Certeau suggests, the pedestrian's movements are unpredictable and shadowy,

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following no fixed trajectory, indifferent to the intended flow of traffic or the desired
use of space. "To walk," De Certeau suggests, "is to lack a place." Lane builds his
contemporary silent comedy, in the tradition of Chaplin, around such local acts of
appropriation and disruption, seeing the homeless as the protagonists of their own
stories living in the "shadows" of the great public drama of work life.
From a Lower Balcony: Between the streets and the skies, there are many other
perspectives, which offer a middle ground between alien abstraction and intimate
involvement. The choice de Certeau poses for us, between "voyeurs and walkers" is, in
some sense, a false one, though as we will see, middle level generalizations are often
difficult to convert into spatial stories. In "Seen From the Window," Henri Lefebvre
describes what he observes from his lower balcony. Lefebvre's perch is much closer to
the street than De Certeau's, allowing him some distance from individual pedestrians
and yet enabling him to focus on the rhythms and patterns of collective movement. He
has not lost touch with human scale, experiencing the city not as a static spectacle but
as a series of intersecting narratives. From the opening paragraphs, LeFebvre is
interested in the process of perception and interpretation:
Noise. Noises. Rumors. When rhythms are lived and blend into another,
they are difficult to make out. Noise, when chaotic, has no rhythm. Yet,
the alert ear begins to separate, to identify sources, bringing them
together, perceiving interactions....Over there, the one walking in the
street is immersed into the multiplicity of noises, rumors, rhythms...But
from the window noises are distinguishable, fluxes separate themselves,
rhythms answer each other.
He wants to document different durations of time, ranging from the intervals between
green and red lights to the cyclical shifts from morning to night, as they influence the
activity in the streets. LeFebvre's essay ends with the suggestion that the rhythms of
the city are "much more varied than in music"; "no camera, no image or sequence of
images can show these rhythms. One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a
memory, a heart." LeFebvre sees perception and interpretation as active processes that
can not be readily separated from their contexts.
A similar fascination sparked a genre of documentary films known as "City

Symphonies." As that designation suggests, the central metaphors running through
Manhattan (Paul Strand, 1921), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttman,
1927), or Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) are musical; these films
orchestrate the rhythms of urban experience. Often, like LeFebvre, these film makers
were fascinated with the cyclical quality of a day in the life of a great city, starting at
dawn and ending after dark, showing patterns of collective movement often invisible to
individuals focused only on personal goals and activities. Empty streets come to life,
fill with people, and then empty again at the end of the day. Berlin and the other city

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symphonies represent collective patterns of work, eating, recreation, and rest, built up
from single images which themselves express individual or particularized experiences.
These images purposely cut across class distinctions, bring together many different
occupational groups, mix and match men and women.
Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) is a contemporary city symphony, set to Philip

Glass's minimalist music. Koyaanisqatsi contrasts the gradual rhythms of the natural
world with the frantic pace of modernity, seeing urban life as "crazy life...life in
turmoil...life out of balance... life disintegrating." Reggio uses stop-motion
photography to accelerate the action. A huge pile of newspapers evaporates in a matter
of seconds. Subways become hives of insects as mobs of people flit from place to
place. The flow of traffic becomes a throbbing pattern of light surging through urban
arteries. Strategic juxtapositions create a succession of analogies between the
population flow along crowded sidewalks and the flow of hot-dogs down a conveyer
belt. Its pixilated images involve a play with perception as we struggle to focus on
individuals, to sort out specific actions from the pulsating rhythms of the mass.
Periodically, Reggio slows down the motion to offer portraits of individuals, looking
like squirrels caught in headlights. In the film's final moments, the shot of a city taken
from outer space is compared with the microscopic surface of a computer circuit, each
indecipherable and yet clearly structured. The film wants us to perceive this
acceleration of modern perceptual experience as horrific. Yet, there is a haunting
beauty about Reggio's images, such as a giant moon flowing rapidly across the
nighttime sky or the glistening lights of cars whizzing along the freeway. We are
fascinated by the city's ordered but relentless rhythms.
From the Pages of a Guidebook: City symphonies existed on the fringes of the
narrative cinema. Their abstraction from individual human experience meant that they
did not fit comfortably within the character-centered storytelling associated with the
Classical Hollywood Cinema. How do we move from large scale structures focused on
collective activity to more personal stories that still express something of the
complexity and heterogeneity of urban life? One common structure for spatial stories
centers around the tour. Looking at the city through a visitor's eyes helps us to
recognize distinguishing characteristics that we ignore in our daily lives. We
underestimate the cities where we live, never able to see them with the wonderment
that bring tourists to see the sights. One function of spatial stories is to transform the
city from a mundane space into a fantastic one, but the tour structure carries its own
dangers. Tour guides lead us around by the nose and often do not leave us open to
spontaneous discoveries or personal experiences. They prescribe where we should look
and what we will see. They reduce the city to its landmarks.
"What can happen in one day," a construction worker asks the trio of sailor boys on
leave in On The Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949) and as if to answer that
question, the next number, "New York, New York," compresses an entire tour of the

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city into a three minute segment. Each shot shows a different location and a different
mode of transportation, as the boys race each other across the Brooklyn Bridge, ride
horse drawn carriages, take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, point at the sites through
the roof of taxi cabs, take the subway, gallop on horseback, whiz by on bikes.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Chip (Frank Sinatra), who has never been anywhere
but Peoria, has structured the whole day -- in fifteen minute increments - according to
his grandfather's 1905 guidebook. The guidebook represents one way of organizing the
eclectic experiences of the Metropolis, designating a series of sights worthy of
particular notice (because, as De Certeau suggests, they are "believable," "memorable,"
or "primitive") and structuring a route between them that lends coherence and purpose
to the day. The guidebook fails Chip in two important ways. First, it does not capture
the protean quality of the city. Many of the landmarks he hopes to see -- the
Hippodrome, the Floradora Girls -- have been displaced by more contemporary
attractions. As the female taxicab driver explains, "A big city changes all the time."
Instead, she offers him "the one thing that doesn't change" -- the experience of love and
romance. He wants to see the Flatiron Building and she wants to get him back to her
place. And this suggests the other way that the guidebook fails him -- displacing the
personal, particularized narratives of individuals with totalizing, abstracted
representations of the city. In disgust, she protests in a later scene, "whisper sweet
nothings in my ear like the population of the Bronx or how many hot-dogs were sold in
the last fiscal year at Yankee Stadium." Only when Chip tosses his dated guidebook off
the ledge of the Empire State Building does he enjoy Manhattan's real pleasures.
Long before Chip rejects his guidebook, On the Town abandons his itinerary for
another route through New York City -- one determined by Gabey (Gene Kelly) and
his search for the girl of his dreams. The musical maps the city's heterogeneity onto the
composite figure of "Miss Turnstiles," this month's poster girl for the subway system:
"She's a home loving girl but she loves high society's whirl. She loves the army but her
heart belongs to the navy. She's studying painting at the museum and dancing at
Symphonic Hall." And she has the one trait that allows her to perfectly personify
Manhattan -- she wasn't born there. In fact, she comes from Gabey's own hometown,
Meadowville. Despite his friends' constant claims that it is impossible to find one girl
among the multitudes, Gabey keeps running into and losing her again and his pursuit
takes him through the city's museums, concert halls, high rises, and nightclubs. Here,
the shared experience of the guidebook tour gives way to the particularized goal of the
search. Both offer the potential stories which center around movements through space
but one focuses on the individual experience while the other foregrounds the collective.
Both depend on the act of looking: one an act of looking at, the other an act of looking
for.
From the Countryside: Not surprisingly, a large percentage of Hollywood's spatial

stories center around visitors who come to the city from regional cities like Peoria,

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small towns like Meadowville (On the Town), Mapletown (The Clock) or Glenwood
Falls (The Out-of-Towners) or from the countryside. Often, such films build a thematic
opposition between town and city which is closely modeled on Ferdinand Tonnies's
classic distinction between Gemeinschaft (Community) and Gesellschaft (Society).
Phillip Kasinitz provides a useful summary of these concepts:
For Tonnes, Gemeinschaft is a type [of] social solidarity based on

intimate bonds of sentiment, a common sense of place (social as well as
physical), and a common sense of purpose. Gemeinschafts, he argues,
are characterized by a high degree of face-to-face interaction in a
common locality among people who have generally had common
experiences.... In a Gesellschaft, in contrast, relationships between
people tend to be impersonal, superficial and calculating, and self-
interest is the prevailing motive for human action. Social solidarity is
maintained by formal authority, contracts and laws.
These differences surface especially powerfully in the silent cinema, when the
American people were still adjusting to the new centrality of urban life to their national
culture. Such a distinction structures, for example, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). A
woman from the city comes to the country on vacation and destabilizes the relationship
between a farmer and his wife. The city woman is depicted as operating outside the
shared moral norms of the rural community. She has little respect for the institutions
that hold the community together. She is soon the subject of gossip, one of the
mechanisms which Tonnies argues help to enforce the stability of the Gemeinschaft by
creating sanctions against the violation of its norms. The seductive and socially
fragmenting force of the city is vividly represented in one of the film's key moments as
the city woman urges the farmer to murder his wife and run away with her. She writhes
in her slinky black dress as she describes to him the temptations and sensations of the
city and images of urban nightlife (city skylines, bright lights, jazz bands) appear
behind her almost as if they were projected onto a movie screen. Murnau uses camera
movements, superimposition, and layered images to convey something of the
heterogeneity, intensity, and fragmentation of the Gesellschaft. The farmer's wife, by
contrast, is a plain, simple woman who loves her husband and remains faithful to him,
despite his infidelities. When she visits the city, she is drawn towards simple pleasures,
such as watching the church wedding of a young couple or getting a photograph taken
with her spouse. She is suspicious of the easy, informal social relations of the city,
anxiously eyeing the manicurist who trims her husband's nails. The city is full of
threats and seductions that can destroy a marriage; they both are eager to return home
to the country.
The story is a familiar one -- the farm couple comes to the city, takes in its sights, and
then returns back home where they belong. In Neil Simon's The Out-of-Towners
(1970), George (Jack Lemmon), a small town businessman, comes to New York City

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with his wife, Glen (Sandy Dennis) for a job interview. George and Glen have big
plans for how they will enjoy their night on the town, but all of their plans go awry.
Before the night is over, George and Glen stand, shivering, starving, and desperate, in a
New York Police Station. "We were in a hold-up. We might have been killed," Glen
proclaims, but they have great difficulty holding the attention of the police officer on
duty. The sanitation strike which has left the city piled high with garbage has at last
been settled, they are told, but now the milkmen have gone out. A horde of people all
press towards the desk, each with their own stories of crime, woe, and distress, each
interrupting with their own demands for resolution and assistance. Gwen is herself
distracted, worrying about everyone's problems but her own: "I know what you're
going through," she explains, which is, of course, literally true. George and Gwen's
troubles stem from their assumption that their experiences matter when the city
operates on the basis of statistics, not individuals. One missed train, one lost piece of
luggage, one mislaid hotel reservation, one stolen wallet, one important business
transaction amount to little. There are too many people, too many problems, for city
services to respond to any of them. And, George can only react by trying to order the
events by preparing for a law suit, taking down names, making a list of grievances, as
if the whole experience were one great conspiracy against him. He screams to the
skies, "You're just a city. Well, I'm a person and a person is stronger than a city. You're
not getting away with anything. I have all your names and addresses." In the end, the
couple finds they have no place in the city and they go back home to the Midwest, a
region with a stronger sense of human proportion.
On a Street Corner: Gemeinschaft, as Tonnes describes it, has many of the familiar
features of a classically constructed narrative -- a unity of time and place, a consistency
of viewpoint, a shared goal, a relatively limited cast of characters. In fact, to illustrate
the social relations that arise in such a culture, Tonnes constantly evokes plots that
have long been building blocks of the western storytelling tradition -- stories of the
relationship between generations, between father and son, between siblings, between
husbands and wives, between neighbors. In such a world, relationships are defined
through their continuity and reciprocity, the intensity and permanence of the emotional
investments we make in other community members. Relationships within a
Gesellschaft culture, on the other hand, are "transitory and superficial"; people have
many more social encounters in such a world but they do not cohere into a consistent
narrative, because they do not demand the same emotional investments and thus do not
leave lasting imprints.
Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931), which is based on a stage play by Elmer Rice, was a
bold experiment in narrative form because it attempts to create a plot structure
appropriate for a Gesselschaft culture. Set on a tenement block, the film's opening
scenes have little or no consistent focus. Children play in the streets. Neighbors linger
on their stoops, shout from window to window, come and go along the sidewalks.
Their conversation shifts from topic to topic. They get into arguments that reflect their

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conflicting moral codes. Vidor captures the seeming randomness of Rice's plot with
fluid camera movements that sweep the space, following dialogue from window to
window, or tracking down the street with one character and then pivoting and tracking
back with another.[fig.10] Within these early scenes, there are many potential plots -- a
woman cheating on her husband, a young couple awaiting a birth, a family about to be
evicted because they can no longer pay their bills, a sister worried about her brother. In
one shot, the camera pans across adjacent windows that reveal residents shaving,
dressing, stretching and exercising, bouncing their babies, hanging the laundry,
applying make-up. Each neighbor seems totally unself-conscious about the close
proximity of the others.
Only late in the film does a single plotline dominate: a husband returns home
unexpectedly and catches his wife in the arms of her lover; he murders her and the
entire community is drawn into the investigation and its aftermath. Street Scene signals
its sudden shift in plot structure by altering its editing style -- from long-takes and
camera movements to close-ups and rapid editing. A succession of reaction shots show
the startled and alarmed people as they witness the acts of violence or run down the
street to see what has happened. Then, finally, the camera pulls back to show the entire
city block mobbed with people. The multiplicity of urban life coheres into a narrative
only when disaster occurs. Even then, coherence is provisional. Soon, attention will be
drawn elsewhere.
Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) could almost be understood as an attempt to
update Street Scene. Rice and Vidor documented the cultural conflicts that arose within
a multicultural neighborhood as waves of immigration were changing the character of
life on the Lower East Side. Street Scene's Jews, Italians, Irish, and Swedes watch each
other with suspicion, debate religious and social values, hurl ethnic slurs, but somehow
co-exist on the same block. They constitute a community, despite their differences. Do
the Right Thing is about the uneasy compromises that enable life to continue in a
multiracial Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Through a series of vividly drawn vignettes, Spike
Lee moves us beyond sociological generalizations to more directly experience the
emotional investments various characters make in having their own "place" in this
evolving community.
Who speaks for this community? The hot-tempered "Buggin' Out," the sputtering
Smiley with his photocopied images of great black leaders, the dignified but drunk
"mayor," the fast-talking disc-jockey Senior Love Daddy, the wise crone Mother
Sister, or the pragmatic and unreliable Mookie? Each has a chance to articulate Bed-
Stuy's values, but Spike Lee offers us little way of reconciling their contradictory
assumptions. The neighborhood seems constantly on the verge of racial conflict, as
Sal's son resents having to work on "the planet of the apes," Buggin' Out demands that
there should be pictures of "brothers" on the restaurant's wall of fame, the old black
men who sit on the street corner sputter with rage over Korean immigrants buying up

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business in their neighborhood, Radio Rasheim's rapping Boombox tries to drown out
his Hispanic neighbor's salsa, and the locals feud with a Celtics supporter who has
invested in an old "brownstone" on their block. At one dramatic moment, the story
stops altogether as Lee shows us one character after another hurling racial epithets
directly into the camera in a montage sequence that traces the cycle of hate and
bigotry. As individuals, these people can form friendships, make moral and personal
distinctions, find ways to relate to each other, even parent children together. But, as
representatives of their own racial communities, they can only fight for space and
seethe over historic injustices.
Lee's film, no less than Street Scene, depends upon a nostalgia for an organic
community whose ties extend across generations and beyond cultural boundaries. Sal
evokes such a vision of Bed-Stuy when he describes the experience of owning his own
restaurant there for decades: "I watch the little kids grow old and the old people grow
older...They grow up on my food." Lee calls attention to the affection that Sal has for
Mookie and his sister and the friendship between Mookie and Sal's younger son. He
depicts Sal as someone who has learned to compromise to avoid conflict and who
respects the hierarchy of the community. Yet, Lee has little faith that these kinds of
sentimental attachments can transcend society-wide racial conflicts, which are evoked
moments later by a shot of graffiti scrawled on the side of the wall, "Tawana told the
truth," or by the images of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that Smiley peddles in
the street. When violence erupts, the incidents are pulled into the history of police
brutality against black defendants. There is an eerie familiarity to the moment when the
firemen turn their hoses off the blaze and direct them against the community members
who have gathered to watch Sal's place burn to the ground.
No less than Rice and Vidor, Lee wants to use this street corner society as a microcosm
to speak about the larger history of urban America. Much as in Street Scene, the
opening moments of Do The Right Thing are episodic, with their focus shifting from
one vivid character to another, until we know our way around Lee's fully drawn and
richly populated milieu. And much like Street Scene, the film builds towards a moment
of violence when all of the various characters and their stories come together. The
violence in Street Scene was personal -- a jealous husband murders his wife -- though
in the tightly-woven communities of the Lower East Side, it is impossible to extract
oneself fully from your neighbor's business. The violence in Do the Right Thing is
collective and political. No one can remain neutral, as becomes clear as the spiritual
Mother Sister shouts for her neighbors to "burn it down" and then, moment later, cries
with horror at the destruction that has been unleashed. In the end, personal loyalties
matter little. Mookie, who Sal described as "a son," smashes a trash can through the
pizzeria window. But, racial loyalties are of vital importance; the Korean grocer shouts
over and over, "I no white. You, Me, the Same," trying to close ranks against the
Italians while preserving his own precarious status in the neighborhood. All social ties
are temporary, unstable. The story of the city is being re-negotiated along the

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borderlands where different racial groups come together or break apart.
At the Train Station: Train stations are narrative nexuses where paths cross and new
relationships are formed. What happens within such spaces depends heavily upon
chance, upon the random ebb and flow of urban traffic. People are brought together
and they are separated. Yet, in the hands of an artist, such flux can become meaningful.
The risk, of course, is that the characters will be swamped by the bustle surrounding
them.
A train pulls into Penn Station at the opening of Vincente Minelli's The Clock (1945)
and a mob of people disembark. Among them is Joe (Robert Walker), a serviceman on
leave. When he stops beside an escalator to read his newspaper, Alice (Judy Garland),
an attractive office worker, trips over him and breaks the heel of her shoe. They meet
and fall in love. Later, the couple gets separated at Grand Central Station. Pushing
through an indifferent mob, Alice gets on a subway train and Joe doesn't. They still
don't know each other's names and have no way of finding each other again. When
Alice seeks advice at the local USO club or when Joe asks a newspaper stand owner
whether he saw a girl get off a train, they are met with incredulousness: "I see a
thousand girls get off trains." All girls look alike to the man who sells the papers; but
only one girl will do for the soldier in love.
Yet, despite all the odds, they do find each again and the closing moments of the film
bring them back to Penn Station once more - now a young married couple separating
for the first time. The camera pans slowly past the people awaiting their trains. A father
clutches his newborn baby. Elderly mothers hold onto their servicemen sons. A
husband discusses last minute details of family business. An old officer bids farewell
to his wife, a young black man to his father, and young lovers kiss one last time. But,
in each cluster, there is at least one person who is serving his country and all of them
are saying goodbye.
What brings the young lovers together again is not so much chance as predestination.
From its beginnings, the classical Hollywood cinema was suspicious of the
arbitrariness of chance and coincidence. Ideally, its stories were structured around well-
motivated causal event-chains. Conventions mandated that each event should be
linked, logically and inextricably to all those that come before and all of those that
follow it. In romantic comedy, however, causality often gives way to predestination.
Some couples are made for each other and will be united, one way or another. The
more daunting the obstacles in True Love's path, the more inevitable the coupling
seems. Consequently, the city becomes the ideal setting for romantic comedy - one that
translates chance encounters into inevitable romances, provides appropriate backdrops
for courtship, and contrasts the intimacy between the lovers with the alienation of
urban culture. Though the enormity of Manhattan constantly threatens to engulf them,
their love story stands out against the hurried backdrop of New York's various

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terminals.
But this "city of strangers" can just as readily lend itself to erotic nightmares. In Martin
Scorsese's black comedy, After Hours (1985), a young adventurer encounters a
mysterious woman at an all-night Laundromat and gets pulled into her story, venturing
into Soho during the wee hours of the morning. However, nothing coheres or makes
much sense in this farce about contemporary urban alienation. As one character warns
him, "different rules apply when it gets this late." A series of random encounters with
eccentric women strips him step by step of all the trappings of his identity - his wallet,
his car keys, his clothing, even his hair (punk rockers threaten to give him a Mohawk).
An emblem of the role of happenstance in the film, the twenty dollar bill he is
clutching blows out the window of the fast-moving cab leaving him no way to pay his
tab and no way to get back home. Later in the film, the bill ends up plastered onto a
sculpture he encounters in his ramblings. Everything seems connected to everything
else, but not in predictable ways. Everything that happens is subject to multiple
interpretations and our protagonist usually misunderstands what is happening to him.
He spots a group of Hispanic men struggling with a television set, which he assumes
must be stolen. When he screams, they drop it and run away, which convinces him that
he has foiled a crime in progress. It turns out that both men are normally criminals but
they have actually bought this set: "See what happens when you pay for stuff." As the
night unfolds, he finds himself under suspicion for local break-ins, chased through the
streets by an angry mob. An artist's sketch of his face is plastered on every telephone
post. Robbed of his identity, he has no way to free himself from their unjust suspicions.
Lost in a strange neighborhood, he has no friends or families he can draw upon for
support or assistance.
Through the Rear-View Mirror: Hollywood's spatial stories repeatedly tell us that
we are a product of the spaces we inhabit. As we move through the city, we do not
remain separate from it; the city becomes a part of us, alters our behavior, redefines our
identities. In Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle's eyes pear intently into the rear view
mirror. Rain splatters on the windshield and the wipers swish it away. The street
outside is a neon blur. Red and blue flashing lights illuminate the human figures that
bob in slow motion along steamy streets. And the taxi cab scurries about the city,
picking up passengers and dropping them off. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver risks
incoherence in trying to tell the story of a man who sees everything and understands
little, who is constantly in movement and yet moves without purpose. "I go all over,"
he tells us, "It doesn't make any difference to me." The world as seen from the mirror
of Bickle's cab is a lonely place full of lonely people, and he holds it in horror and
contempt: "All of the animals come out at night..." He imagines the approaching
apocalypse: "Some day a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets."
Bickle becomes, in Scorsese's film, the personification of New York - sometimes

romantic, sometimes brutally violent. Bickle embodies the random events and unstable

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social relations of urban culture, constantly shifting his goals and tactics. The parts
only come together retrospectively, when his violent impulses are redirected from his
plans to assassinate a presidential candidate and towards the task of rescuing a young
prostitute. He shoots his way into the brothel, leaving a path of bloody bodies, sitting
in a dazed and confused state until the police arrive to take him away. None of this
makes any sense. For the newspapers, however, Bickle has become a hero. The eyes of
New York are upon him.
By the film's closing images, all of coherence has broken down into a fragmented,
almost cubist image, which recalls the stylized and subjective representations of New
York that Frank Stella created in the 1920s and 1930s. We see the world partly through
his front windshield, partially through his rearview mirror. The scene is almost
abstract, flashes of light and color that sometimes take shape into something we
recognize, but more often remain blurry and indistinct.
Anticlimax: Hollywood's spatial stories struggle to balance their utopian and

dystopian conceptions of the city, their belief in urban progress and their anxiety about
the collapse of old social institutions. The film artists try to reconcile their focus on the
totality of the urban environment and their fascination with the complex interplay
between multiple experiences. Such tensions run through our attempts to theorize the
city and to give it aesthetic form. The forces shaping urban experience are complex,
multidirectional, transient, and often totally invisible. Nevertheless, we imagine urban
life as controlled by secret societies, hidden forces, conspiracies, smoke-filled rooms.
The current popularity of conspiracy theories in popular culture suggests our
compelling need to personify the governing forces behind urban life and our fear that
they may not be directly observed or readily mapped.
Dark City (Alex Prokas, 1997) offers a noir-ish vision of the postmodern city,
depicting urban space as an incomprehensible maze. The city is mutating before our
eyes. Nothing remains the same; nothing matters. Yet, Prokas suggests, the city
follows a secret logic; its citizens are manipulated by hidden forces. The Dark City is
not New York, not any place in particular. It has been, we have been told, "fashioned
on stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one." Dark City
makes stunning use of morphing to literally restructure the city before our eyes. We
watch new buildings rise from the concrete. Old buildings grow window ledges,
expand into domes. While the city sleeps, dark hooded figures creep among us,
changing our clothes, imprinting new memories, moving us from place to place, so that
when we awake we are enmeshed in a different life, become part of an alternative
narrative. Our memories are distilled, "mixed like paints," and then re-injected into us,
offering no reliable way of understanding who we are and what is happening to us. As
one of the characters explains, "They steal people's memories and swap them between
us -- back and forth, back and forth -- until nobody knows who he is anymore." The
protagonist awakens, naked and without any memories, conscious while others sleep,

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observing but not fully comprehending other people's behavior as he pears through
their windows.
His search for an explanation is mirrored by the detectives and their serial murder
investigation (which may or may not lead back to him). In a classic noir, the detective
was a lone individual who understood better than anyone else the code of the city. His
search for truth promised to untangle the web of relationships that link the story's
various characters. In the neo-noir Dark City, the detectives do not have a clue; they
have no hope of finding answers. One detective has been driven mad by the complexity
of this city, scrawling endless spirals and scribbling cryptic words on his apartment
walls. "I've been spending time in the subway, riding in circles, thinking in circles.
There's no way out. I've been over every inch of the city." Though he never
understands what he has discovered, his circles do contain the pattern that holds all of
this together, linking an early shot of rats being run through a circular maze with the
great clock which controls the waking and sleeping of the citizens and with our final
image of the city -- a spiral of skyscrapers arranging on a flat surface floating in the
vast emptiness of space.
But there is a conspiratorial logic here. The city is controlled by the Strangers, who
personify de Certeau's "alien" or "celestial" perspective. They are hooded figures with
featureless faces and bald heads; they are interchangeable, sharing a collective
memory. They are the very embodiment of urban experience as a totality, of a
deterministic logic that allows little or no room for particular experience. Through a
process of experimentation, they hope to understand the individuality that makes us
human. They are the ones who move the hands of the clock, who set the rhythms of
urban experience. If there is, in the end, a story of the city, they are its authors and its
architects. They, alone, enjoy absolute mobility -- they dwell in secret places
underneath the city; they can walk among us without being seen; they can hover over
the city streets peering down at the pedestrians.
Dark City, thus, uses the struggle against the Strangers to personify the core conflicts
that have run through this essay -- the conflict between abstraction and particularity,
between the city understood as a totality or as heterogeneity, between the urban
environment experienced as ordered or as random and chaotic. What this paper has
described is the struggle to give shape and form to urban experience, to find its
rhythms, map its labyrinthian streets, record its protean activities, and give it an
cohesive identity. This project has inspired -- and arguably, defeated - the imagination
of America's greatest filmmakers. The story of the city can't be told - at least not as a
totality. There is no structure, no coherence, only simultaneous activities, people
walking down sidewalks, pushing their way onto subway trains, standing in their
windows, waiting impatiently at police stations, wandering aimlessly through
museums, pursuing their own particular paths without regard to each other. There is no
single vision which can express and contain our complex and contradictory feelings

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towards the American metropolis. There are only ways of seeing, only provisional
vantage points which offer a succession of near perfect images of urban life.
Kevin Lynch arrived at almost the same place. There is a curious passage near the end
of The Image of The City where Lynch tries to imagine an alternative form that might
preserve his own sense of the multiplicity of urban meanings and experiences while
achieving the legibility and clarity that was central to his aesthetic conception of the
city. For a few paragraphs, Lynch imagines the city as given ideal expression in a
multilinear and polysequential form. Though Lynch would not have had access to the
analogy in 1959, Lynch imagines something akin to hypertext:
Intuitively, one could imagine that there might be a way of creating a

whole pattern, a pattern that would only gradually be sensed and
developed by sequential experiences, reversed and interrupted as they
might be. Although felt as a whole, it would not need to be a highly
unified pattern with a single center or an isolating boundary. The
principal quality might be sequential continuity in which each part flows
from the next -- a sense of interconnectedness at any level or in any
direction. There would be particular zones that for any one individual
might be more intensely felt or organized, but the region would be
continuous, mentally traversible in any order. This possibility is a highly
speculative one: no satisfactory concrete examples come to mind.
Lynch seems to suggest that the city itself might be structured as a hypertext, but
suppose that the hypertext gave us a more perfect representation of the city precisely
because it was multilinear and interactive. Suppose a future artist were to construct
such a hypertext, one in which the four million stories that O. Henry imagined in New
York City were all recorded, and viewers could traverse each narrative and observe
their points of intersection and digression. Suppose we could represent at once the
abstract patterns of movement and the particular journeys, searches, and tours that
motivated individual experience. Suppose the structuring elements of this hypertext
were Lynch's various paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, the features around
which so many spatial stories arise and play themselves out. Suppose this artist were to
construct the perfect model of the urban experience, one that was truly totalizing in its
perspective. Could we as spectators comprehend such a story? Would we have time or
the interest to experience the complex interweavings of its various plot strands? Could
we feel its rhythms and witness the unfolding of random chance, romantic
predestination, and urban indifference? Could we stand over the sum total of human
experience as if it were a panorama or a picture postcard? This would be a truly
celestial --and inhuman -- perspective.

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The All American Handful
Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington

By Henry Jenkins
This is the story of how a mild mannered MIT Professor ended up being called before
Congress to testify about "selling violence to our children" and what it is like to testify.
Where to start? For the past several months, ever since my book, from Barbie to Mortal
Kombat: Gender and Computer Games appeared, I've been getting calls to talk about
video game violence. It isn't a central focus of the book, really. We were trying to start
a conversation about gender, about the opening up of the girls game market, about the
place of games in "boy culture," and so forth. But all the media wants to talk about is
video game violence. Here is one of the most economically significant sectors of the
entertainment industry and here is the real beach head in our efforts to build new forms
of interactive storytelling as part of popular, rather than avant-garde, culture, but the
media only wants to talk about violence. These stories always follow the same pattern.
I talk with an intelligent reporter who gives every sign of getting what the issues are all
about. Then, the story comes out and there's a long section discussing one or another of
a
seemingly endless string of anti-popular culture critics and then a few short comments
by me rebutting what they said. A few times, I got more attention but not most. But
these calls came at one or two a week all fall and most of spring term. Then, with the
Littleton shootings, they increased dramatically. Suddenly, we are finding ourselves in
a national witch hunt to determine which form of popular culture is to blame for the
mass murders and video games seemed like a better candidate than most. So, I am
getting calls back to back from the LA TIMES, The New York Times, The Christian
Science Monitor, The Village Voice, Time, etc., etc., etc. I am finding myself
denounced in The Wall Street Journal op-ed page for a fuzzy headed liberal who
blames the violence on "social problems" rather than media images. And, then, the call
came from the U.S. Senate to see if I would be willing to fly to Washington with just a
few days notice to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee hearings. I asked a
few basic questions, each of which feared me with greater dread. Turned out that the
people testifying were all anti-popular culture types, ranging from Joseph Lieberman to
William Bennett, or industry spokesmen. I would be the only media scholar who did
not come from the "media effects" tradition and the only one who was not representing
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popular culture as a "social problem." My first thought was that this was a total setup,
that I had no chance of being heard, that nobody would be sympathetic to what I had to
say, and gradually all of this came to my mind as reasons to do it and not reasons to
avoid speaking. It felt important to speak out on these issues.
A flashback: When I was in high school, I wore a trenchcoat (beige, not black), hell, in
elementary school I wore a black vampire cape and a medallion around my neck to
school. I was picked on mercilessly by the rednecks who went to my school and I spent
a lot of time nursing wounds, both emotional and some physical, from an essentially
homophonic environment. I was also a sucker for Frank Capra movies -- Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington most of all -- and films like 1776 which dealt with people who
took risks for what they believed. I had an amazing high school teacher, Betty Leslein,
who taught us about our government by bringing in government leaders for us to
question (among them Max Cleveland, who was then a state legislature and now a
member of the Commerce Committee) and sent us out to government meetings to
observe. I was the editor of the school paper and got into fights over press censorship.
And I promised myself that when I was an adult, I would do what I could to speak up
about the problems of free speech in our schools. Suddenly, this was a chance.
I also had been reading Jon Katz' amazing coverage on the web of the crackdown in
schools across America on free speech and expression in the wake of the shootings.
Goth kids harassed for wearing subcultural symbols and pushed into therapy. Kids
suspended for writing the wrong ideas in essays or raising them in class discussions.
Kids pushed off line by their parents. And I wanted to do something to help get the
word out that this was going on.
So, it didn't take me long to say yes.
I was running a major conference the next day and then I would have one day to pull
together my written testimony for the Senate. I didn't have much in my own writings I
could draw on. I pulled together what I had. I scanned the web. I sent out a call for
some goth friends to tell me what they felt I should say to Congress about their
community and a number of them stayed up late into the night sending me information.
And I pulled an all-nighter to write the damn thing that was really long because I didn't
have time to write short. And then, I worked with my colleague, Shari Goldin, to get it
proofed, edited, revised, and sent off to Congress. And to make arrangements for a last
minute trip.
When I got there, the situation was even worse than I had imagined. The Senate
chamber was decorated with massive posters of video game ads for some of the most
violent games on the market. Many of the ad slogans are hyperbolic -- and self-
parodying -- but that nuance was lost on the Senators who read them all dead seriously

and with absolute literalness. Most of the others testifying were professional witnesses
who had done this kind of thing many times before. They had their staff. They had
their props. They had professionally edited videos. They had each other for moral
support. I had my wife and son in the back of the room. They are passing out press
releases, setting up interviews, being tracked down by the major media and no one is
talking to me. I try to introduce myself to the other witnesses. Grossman, the military
psychologist who thinks video games are training our kids to be killers, won't shake
my hand when I wave it in front of him. I am trying to keep my distance from the
media industry types because I don't want to be perceived as an apologist for the
industry -- even though, given the way this was set up, they were my closest allies in
the room. This is set up so you can either be anti-popular culture or pro-industry and
the thought that as citizens we might have legitimate investments in the culture we
consume was beyond anyone's comprehension.
The hearings start and one by one the senators speak. There was almost no difference
between Republicans and Democrats on this one. They all feel they have to distance
themselves from popular culture. They all feel they have to make "reasonable"
proposals that edge up towards censorship but never quite cross the constitutional lines.
It is political suicide to come out against the dominant position in the room.
One by one, they speak. Hatch, Lieberman, Bennett, the Archbishop from Littleton....
Bennett starts to show video clips which removed from context seem especially
horrific. The fantasy sequence from The Basketball Diaries reduced to 20 seconds of
Leonardo DiCaprio blasting away kids. The opening sequence from Scream reduced to
its most visceral elements. Women in the audience are gasping in horror. The senators
cover their faces with mock dread. Bennett starts going on and on about "surely we can
agree upon some meaningful distinctions here, between Casino and Saving Private
Ryan, between The Basketball Diaries and Clear and Present Danger..." I am just
astonished by the sheer absurdity of this claim which breaks down to a pure ideological
distinction that has neither aesthetic credibility nor any relationship to the media
effects debate. Basketball Diaries is an important film; Clear and Present Danger is a
right wing potboiler! Scorsese is bad but Spielberg is good?
Meanwhile, the senators are making homophobic jokes about whether Marilyn Manson
is "a he or a she" that I thought went out in the 1960s. These strike me as precisely the
kind of intolerant and taunting comments that these kids must have gotten in school
because they dressed differently or acted oddly in comparison with their more
conformist classmates.
By this point, we reach the hour when the reporters have to call in their stories if they
are going to make the afternoon addition and so they are heading for the door. It's
down to the C-Span camerawoman and a few reporters from the game industry trade
press.

And then I am called to the witness stand. Now, the chair is something nobody talks
about. It is a really, really low chair and it is really puffy so you sit on it and your butt
just keeps sinking and suddenly the tabletop is up to your chest. It's like the chairs they
make parents sit in when they go to talk to elementary school teachers. The Senators
on the other hand sit on risers peering down at you from above. And the whole power
dynamics is terrifying.
Grossman starts to attack me personally, claiming that a "journalism" professor and a

"film critic" have no knowledge of social problems. It takes me a while for the attacks
to sink in because they are so far off the mark. I am not a journalism professor and I
am not a film critic. I am a media scholar who has spent more than 15 years studying
and writing about popular culture and I do think I have some expertise at this point on
how culture works, how media is consumed, how media panics are started, how
symbols relate to real world events, how violence operates in stories, etc., etc. And
that's what I was speaking about.
I am doing OK with all of this. I am surprisingly calm while the other people speak,
and then Senator Brownback calls my name, and utter terror rushes through my body. I
have never felt such fear. I try to speak and can hardly get the words out. My throat is
dry. I reach for a glass of water and my hands are trembling so hard that I spill water
all over the nice table. I am trying to read and the words are fuzzing out on the page.
Most of them are handwritten anyway by this point because I kept revising and editing
until the last minute. And I suddenly can't read my writing. Cold sweat is pouring over
me. I have visions of the cowardly lion running down the halls in OZ escaping the
great blazing head of the wizard. But there's no turning back and so I speak and
gradually my words gain force and I find my voice and I debating the congress about
what they are trying to do to our culture. I take on Bennett about his distorted use of
The Basketball Diaries clip; explaining that he didn't mention this was a film about a
poet, someone who struggles between dark urges and creativity, and that the scene was
a fantasy intended to express the rage felt by many students in our schools and not
something the character does, let alone something the film advocates. I talked about the
ways these hearings grew out of the fear adults have of their own children and
especially their fear of digital media and technological change. I talked about the fact
that youth culture was becoming more visible but its core themes and values had
remained pretty constant. I talked about how reductive the media effects paradigm is as
a way of understanding consumer's relations to popular culture. I attacked some of the
extreme rhetoric being leveled against the goths, especially a line in TIME from a GOP
hack that we needed "goth control" not "gun control." I talked about the stuff that Jon
Katz had been reporting about the crackdown on youth culture in schools across the
country and I ended with an ad-libbed line, "listen to your children, don't fear them."
Then, waited.

The Senator decided to take me on about the goths, having had some staff person find
him a surprisingly banal line from an ad for a goth nightclub which urged people to
"explore the dark side." And I explained what I knew about goths, their roots in
romanticism and in the aesthetic movement, their nonviolence, their commitment to
acceptance, their strong sense of community, their expression of alienation. I talked
about how symbols could be used to express many things and that we needed to
understand what these symbols meant to these kids. I spoke about Gilbert and
Sullivan's Patience as a work that spoke to the current debate, because it spoofed the
original goths, the Aesthetics, for their black garb, their mournful posturing, and said
that they were actually healthy and well adjusted folks underneath but they were
enjoying playing dark and soulful. The Senator tried repeating his question as if he
couldn't believe I wasn't shocked by the very concept of giving yourself over to the
"dark side." And then he gave up and shuffled me off the stand.
The press warmed around the anti-violence speakers but didn't seem to want to talk to
me. I just wanted to get out of there. I felt no one had heard what I had to say and that I
had been a poor messenger because I had stumbled over my words. But several people
stopped me in the hallway to thank me. And dozens more have sent me e-mail since
having seen it on C-Span or heard it on the radio or seen the transcript on the web or
heard about it from friends. And suddenly I feel better and better about what had
happened. I had spoken out about something that mattered to me in the halls of
national power and people out there had heard my message, not all of them certainly,
but enough.
I know the fight isn't over -- at least I hope it isn't. There will be more chances to
speak, but I felt like I had scored some victory just by being there and speaking.
Someone wrote me that it was all the more powerful to have one rational voice amid a
totally lopsided panel of extremists. People would see this was a witch hunt of sorts. I'd
like to believe that.
The key thing was that I got a statement into the record that was able to say more than I
could in five minutes and people can now read it on the web.
What follows is the text of my oral remarks that are rather different from the written
statement because I was still doing research and writing on the airplane.
I am Henry Jenkins, Director of The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. I have
published six books and more than fifty essays on various aspects of popular culture.
My most recent books, The Children's Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal
Kombat: Gender and Computer Games deal centrally with the questions before this
committee. I am also the father of a high school senior and the house master of a MIT
dormitory housing 150 students. I spent my life talking with kids about their culture

and I have come here today to share with you some of what I have learned.
The massacre at Littleton, Colorado has provoked national soul searching. We all want
answers. But we are only going to find valid answers if we ask the right questions. The
key issue isn't what the media are doing to our children but rather what our children are
doing with the media. The vocabulary of "media effects," which has long dominated
such hearings, has been challenged by numerous American and international scholars
as an inadequate and simplistic representation of media consumption and popular
culture. Media effects research most often empties media images of their meanings,
strips them of their contexts, and denies their consumers any agency over their use.
William Bennett just asked us if we can make meaningful distinctions between

different kinds of violent entertainment. Well, I think meaningful distinctions require
us to look at images in context, not looking at 20 second clips in isolation. From what
Bennett just showed you, you would have no idea that The Basketball Diaries was a
film about a poet, that it was an
autobiographical work about a man who had struggled between dark urges and creative
desires, that the book on which it was based was taught in high school literature
classes, and that the scene we saw was a fantasy which expressed his frustrations about
the school, not something he acts upon and not something the film endorses.
Far from being victims of video games, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had a complex
relationship to many forms of popular culture. They consumed music, films, comics,
videogames, television programs. All of us move nomadically across the media
landscape, cobbling together a personal mythology of symbols and stories taken from
many different places. We invest those appropriated materials with various personal
and subcultural meanings. Harris and Klebold were drawn toward dark and brutal
images that they invested with their personal demons, their antisocial impulses, their
maladjustment, their desires to hurt those who had hurt them.
Shortly after I learned about the shootings, I received e-mail for a 16 year old girl who
shared with me her web site. She had produced an enormous array of poems and short
stories drawing on characters from popular culture and had gotten many other kids
nationwide to contribute. Though they were written for no class, these stories would
have brightened the spirit of
writing teachers. She had reached into contemporary youth culture, including many of
the same media products that have been cited in the Littleton case, and found there
images that emphasized the power of friendship, the importance of community, the
wonder of first romance. The mass media didn't make Harris and Klebold violent and
destructive and it didn't make this girl creative and sociable but it provided them both
with the raw materials necessary to construct their fantasies.

Of course, we should be concerned about the content of our culture and we all learn
things from The mass media. But popular culture is only one influence on our
children's imaginations. Real life trumps media images every time. We can shut down
a video game if it is ugly, hurtful, or
displeasing. But many teens are required to return day after day to schools where they
are ridiculed and taunted and sometimes physically abused by their classmates. School
administrators are slow to respond to their distress and typically can offer few
strategies for making the abuse stop. As one Littleton teen explained, "Everytime
someone slammed them against a locker or threw a bottle at them, they would go back
to Eric and Dylan's house and plot a little more."
We need to engage in a rational conversation about the nature of the culture children
consume but not in the current climate of moral panic. I believe this moral panic is
pumped up by three factors.
1) Our fears of adolescents. Popular culture has become one of the central
battlegrounds through which teens stake out a claim on their own autonomy from their
parents. Adolescent symbols from zoot suits to goth amulets define the boundaries
between generations. The intentionally cryptic nature of these symbols often means
adults invest them with all of our worst fears, including our fear that our children are
breaking away from us. But that doesn't mean that these symbols carry all of these
same meanings for our children. However spooky looking they may seem to some
adults, goths aren't monsters. They are a peaceful subculture committed to tolerance of
diversity and providing a sheltering community for others who have been hurt. It is,
however, monstrously inappropriate when GOP strategist Mike Murphy advocates
"goth control" not "gun control."
2) Adult fears of new technologies. The Washington Post reported that 82 percent of
Americans cite the Internet as a potential cause for the shootings. The Internet is no
more to blame for the Columbine shootings than the telephone is to blame for the
Lindbergh kidnappings. Such statistics suggest adult anxiety about the current rate of
technological change. Many adults see computers as necessary tools for educational
and professional development. But many also perceive their children's on-line time as
socially isolating. However, for many "outcasts," the on-line world offers an alternative
support network, helping them find someone out there somewhere who doesn't think
they are a geek.
3) The increased visibility of youth culture. Children fourteen and under now constitute
roughly 30 percent of The American population, a demographic group larger than the
baby boom itself. Adults are feeling more and more estranged from the dominant
forms of popular culture, which now reflect their children's values rather than their
own. Despite our unfamiliarity with this new technology, the fantasies shaping
contemporary video games are not profoundly different from those that shaped

backyard play a generation ago. Boys have always enjoyed blood and thunder
entertainment, always enjoyed risk-taking and rough housing, but these activities often
took place in vacant lots or backyards, out of adult view. In a world where children
have diminished access to play space, American mothers are now confronting directly
the messy business of turning boys into men in our culture and they are alarmed at
what they are seeing. But the fact that they are seeing it at all means that we can talk
about it and shape it in a way that was impossible when it was hidden from view.
We are afraid of our children. We are afraid of their reactions to digital media. And we
suddenly can't avoid either. These factors may shape the policies that emerge from this
committee but if they do, they will lead us down the wrong path. Banning black
trenchcoats or abolishing violent video games doesn't get us anywhere. These are the
symbols of youth alienation and rage -- not the causes.
Journalist Jon Katz has described a backlash against popular culture in our high
schools. Schools are shutting down student net access. Parents are cutting their
children off from on-line friends. Students are being suspended for displaying cultural
symbols or expressing controversial views.
Katz chillingly documents the consequences of adult ignorance and fear of our
children's culture. Rather than teaching children to be more tolerant, high school
teachers and administrators are teaching students that difference is dangerous, that
individuality should be punished, and that self expression should be constrained. In this
polarized climate, it becomes IMPOSSIBLE for young people to explain to us what
their popular culture means to them. We're pushing this culture further and further
underground and thus further and further from our understanding.
I urge this committee to listen to youth voices about this controversy and have
submitted a selection of responses from young people as part of my extended
testimony.
Listen to our children. Don't fear them.

Contacting The Past
Contacting the Past:

Early Radio and the Digital Revolution
by Henry Jenkins
1,482 words
posted: december 3, 1997
The recent science fiction film, Contact, opens with a

dramatization of how sound waves travel through space. As the
camera pulls back through our solar system, the soundtrack
goes back into time, past landmark moments in the history of
broadcasting -- the release of the Iran Hostages, All in the
Family, The Beatles, Milton Berle, the end of World War II,
FDR's fireside chats -- and then, the silent void of space.
The sounds of silence, in this case, mask the erasure of history.

The casual viewer of the film might assume radio begin
sometime in the late 1920s and early 1930s, already operating
within a national system of commercial broadcasting. What we
didn't hear were thousands of overlapping voices as amateur
radio operators shouted their call letters and their messages
into home-made crystal sets. What we didn't hear were the dots
and dashes made by Marconi and countless other
experimenters, amateur and professional, who perfected the
technology. Contact, a corporate product, makes it impossible
to imagine radio outside corporate control.
Perhaps, the filmmakers concluded that such sounds would be

too arcane for a mass audience, confusing rather than
illuminating. Yet, this erasure of broadcast history is
perplexing when you consider how often Contact returns to the
image of ham radio, although its operators are more interested
in communicating with the dead or with space aliens than with
each other. In choosing not to reference the era of amateur
radio, Contact lost the chance to increase public awareness of
an age when participatory radio was the norm, rather than a
marginal recreation.
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Contacting The Past
Widespread ignorance of this history has tremendous

consequences at the present moment. Once again, we are
discussing the prospects of utopian or apocalyptic change
wrought by an emerging communications technology -- in this
case, digital media. Once again, we are seeing the potential for
a broad-based participatory medium, and once again, we run
the risk of losing it all to corporate interests.
The digital revolution, we are told, will enable us to participate

in virtual communities which overcome the alienation and
isolation of contemporary urban life. The digital revolution
will facilitate participatory democracy. The digital revolution
will sweep aside the gatekeepers, allowing free expression and
broad access to information. The digital revolution will free us
from national governments; we are now citizens of the "global
village" or free minds afloat in cyberspace. We live in an age
where our ideas are evaluated on their own merits, not on the
basis of visual markers like age, gender, race, or personal
appearance, a world where nobody knows you're a dog. We
can all find a home on the net, some place where everyone
knows your name. This is the world according to Wired and
Mondo 2000.
Or alternatively, the digital revolution will destroy the

American home, as our innocent children are exposed to video
game violence, pornography and cybersex. The digital
revolution will isolate us from real world communities and real
world politics; cyberspace is a nether world of illusionism,
fraud, and escapism. The digital revolution will destroy the
rational culture of the book and replace it with the chatter of
second-rate minds. This the world according to Time,
Newsweek and CNN.
Everywhere we turn, the digital revolution has been met with

sensationalism and overstatement; rarely has it been confronted
with much historical consciousness. If we are going to chart a
middle path between utopianism and media-bashing, if we are
going to make meaningful predictions about digital media's
actual impact, if we are going to make intelligent decisions
about its regulation and its financing, if we are going to take
full advantage of its potential for community-building, political
activism, knowledge transfer, and self expression, then we

Contacting The Past
need to study the past. We can't just talk about interactive

technologies; we need to know more about human interactions
with technologies.
Here, at MIT, we need to be engaged in a systematic dialogue

among historians, humanists, and social scientists
knowledgeable about media's past and those who are
imagining, designing, and building media's future. That means,
we need to find ways around the great divide between the "two
cultures," between science and engineering on one side and the
humanities, arts, and social sciences on the other. The two guys
on the MIT seal -- one holding the book, the other holding
tools --need to turn around and talk with each other! The
challenges confronting us are both technological and cultural,
matters of hardware and software and matters of community
and democracy, and we are not going to respond adequately to
those challenges unless we take both sides seriously.
If we look to the past, we will discover that the same social,

political, cultural and economic impulses that are fueling the
digital revolution sparked most previous communications
revolutions. As the North American continent was settled, we
required technologies that met the challenge of reaching out
and communicating with other Americans across massive
distances. Americans demanded participation in the political
and cultural debates shaping their democratic republic. And,
they wanted contact with the mother countries they left behind.
Radio was one of many communication technologies promoted

as bringing the world into our parlor. From the start, radio was
sold as a participatory medium; many assumed there would be
as many transmitters as receivers. Radio would enable
everyday citizens to communicate their ideas, feelings, and
experiences; it would would give rise to a new and more
democratic culture. Early advocates like Hugo Gernsback spun
elaborate fantasies about a world radically transformed through
better communications and transportation. Many built their
own crystal sets and joined an expanding amateur radio
culture. Much as we now talk of "surfing the web," they spoke
of "fishing the ether," bringing in remote signals, listening to
faraway conversations, and participating in geographically-
dispersed communities. From 1906 to 1912, amateur use

Contacting The Past
dominated the technology, with the airwaves literally clogged

with signals. Problems arose, with pranksters tapping into
government or military communications channels, transmitting
false information, or assuming fake identities, and there was
growing concern about radio's moral content. The more one
reads about the amateur radio culture of the early 1900s, the
more strongly one sees parallels with the cyberculture of the
late 20th century.
Learning more about this history can help us to identify the

forces which caused a dramatic shift in radio's use from a
grassroots medium to a more centralized system of commercial
broadcasting. By the early 1920s, radio was dominated by two
national networks -- NBC and CBS -- which still rule
television today. Many factors contributed to this change,
including increased government regulation of the airwaves
intended to secure governmental and military communications
during World War I and, then, to protect the growing interests
of the broadcast companies. The attractiveness of radio as a
means of spreading advertising messages also played a central
role in displacing its grassroots use. Most consumers found it
easier to buy sparkling clean radio receivers, made to look like
nice furniture, rather than to build their own transmitters, and
they were content to listen to entertainment and news, rather
than engage in conversation. Our contemporary talk radio may
be the last vestige of this earlier participatory ideal.
There are early warning signs that something similar might

happen to digital culture -- the overloading of AOL, the
Communication's Decency Act, increased government interest
in regulating cyberspace, the growth of push-advertising, and
the development of low cost technologies which enable us to
point-and-click but not to type (great for home shopping, poor
for cyber democracy). While we've been busy celebrating the
net's participatory dimensions, corporate mergers concentrated
most of our national media resources -- newspapers, radio
stations, television networks, cable outlets, film production
companies, etc. -- in the hands of four or five major
multinational conglomerates such as Viacom and Warners
Communications Inc. This media concentration expands the
rule of cultural gatekeepers over what messages get into broad
circulation, even if we can now speak back in cyberspace.

Contacting The Past
I don't mean to sound like a prophet of doom. Many factors

indicate that the digital revolution will have a more enduring
social, cultural, and political impact than the amateur radio
movement did. Yet, ignorance, apathy, and self-confidence
blind us to real threats to maintaining a broad-based
participatory media. MIT needs to take the lead in educating
not only our own community but the broader public about the
emerging digital culture and its historical context.
Students who would like to know more about these issues are
encouraged to enroll in a new HASS-D subject, 21L:015
Introduction to Media Studies, which examines the social,
cultural, and political impact of communications technologies
from Homer to cyberspace.
All members of the MIT community are encouraged to learn

more about media studies through a year-long series of events,
including speakers, conferences, film screenings, and readings
by noted science fiction writers, sponsored by the Media in
Transition Project and funded by the Markle Foundation.
Rev 1.0
WebPosted: wayne johnnie
´ Back to Articles Page

Untitled Document
Saturday,
February 3
8:30 - 9 am Registration in Ting Foyer, Bldg. 51
Bldg. 51
9 -10:15 am EMERGING MODELS OF LEARNING
Wong Aud.
Keynote: Chris Dede, Harvard GSE, Next Generation
"Virtual Environment" Technologies for Enhanced
Learning
10:15 -10:45 am Conference divides into discussion sessions led by:

(Rooms to be
assigned) ● Jo-Ann Castano, Castano Design Associates,
Encouraging Women in Technology
● Mary Hopper, CMS visiting scholar, and Ralph
Summer, Saluda Elementary, S.C., Where's the
Media? Models for Creating and Distributing
Teacher- and Student-Made Digital Media
● Mark Kelsey and Kris Kay,
Cambridge Community TV (CCTV)
● Howard Lurie, Facing History and Ourselves,
Facing History on the Web
10:45 - 10:55 am Break
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Untitled Document
10:55 -11:25 am Rotate discussion sessions
11:25 - 11:35 am Break
11:35 am - 12:30 pm General discussion

Wong Aud.
12:30 -1:30 pm Bag lunch
Ting Foyer
1:30 - 2:45 pm MEDIA LITERACY
Wong Aud.
Keynote: Bonnie Bracey, George Lucas Foundation
2:45 - 3:15 pm Conference divides into discussion sessions led by:

(Rooms to be
assigned) ● Jerry Crystal, Carmen Arace Middle School,
Bloomfield, CT, The Three Ts of Cyberethics in
Schools
● Mark Destler, Media and Technology Charter
High School (MATCH)
● Mary Leyden, Bernardston Elementary, MA,
Candid Candidates
● Vera L. Walker, Xavier University, LA, What a
Tangled Web We Weave: Media Literacy,
Symbol Systems and Learning
3:15 - 3:25 Break
3:25 - 3:55 pm Rotate discussion sessions
3:55 - 4:05 pm Break
4:05 - 5 pm General discussion

Wong Aud.
5 - 5:15 pm Break

Untitled Document
5:15 - 6:30 pm Screening of student-produced films

Wong Aud.

Henry Jenkins
"THE INNOCENT CHILD AND OTHER MODERN MYTHS"

by Henry Jenkins
INTRODUCTION
In the Summer of 1996, the Democratic Party held its presidential nominating
convention in Chicago and the Republican Party held its convention in San Diego.
Both gatherings focused as much on childhood and the family as on tax cuts or other
traditional issues. The Republicans wanted to overcome the gender gap, while the
Democrats wanted to show they still felt our pain after Clinton's support for
devastating welfare cutbacks. Neither could resist the attractions of the innocent child.
Both conventions offered classic stagings of parental concern.
Susan Molinari, Congresswoman from Queens, presented the Republican keynote

address, speaking as a misty-eyed and perky young "mom" about how her daughter's
recent birth had refocused her political priorities. Network camera crews dutifully
provided close-ups of her husband and her father hugging the newborn. After the
speech, they brought the baby, Susan Ruby, to the podium for her mother to hold
before the cheering crowds.
The cameras were equally obliging when the first lady, Hillary Clinton, addressed the
Democratic convention several weeks later. Hillary and her handlers hoped to shift
public attention from her controversial role in shaping health care policy onto her more
traditional concern for America's children. When she spoke about the nation as a
"family," the camera consistently showed the first daughter, Chelsea as visible proof of
Hillary and Bill's success as parents.
These close-ups of Susan Ruby and Chelsea rendered explicit the implicit politics of
these occasions, giving us concrete images to anchor more abstract claims about
childhood and the family. Both Susan and Hillary gained authority from their status as
"moms" and both supported their agendas by referencing their children. While their
political visions were dramatically different, the images of children they evoked, and
the rhetorical purposes they served, were remarkably similar. Both Molinari and
Clinton tapped into an established mythology of childhood innocence in the late 20th
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Henry Jenkins
century.
The myth of childhood innocence, as James Kincaid notes, "empties" the child of its
own political agency, so that it may more perfectly fulfill the symbolic demands we
make upon it. The innocent child wants nothing, desires nothing, and demands nothing
-- except, perhaps, its own innocence. Kincaid critiques the idea that childhood
innocence is something pre-existing - an "eternal" condition -- which must be
"protected." Rather, childhood innocence is a cultural myth that must be "inculcated
and enforced" upon children.
This dominant conception of childhood innocence presumes that children exist in a

space beyond, above, outside of the political; we imagine them to be noncombatants
who we protect from the harsh realities of the adult world, including the mud-
splattering of partisan politics. Yet, in reality, almost every major political battle of the
20th century has been fought on the backs of our children, from the economic reforms
of the Progressive Era (which sought to protect immigrant children from the sweat-
shop owners) and the social readjustments of the Civil Rights Era (which often
circulated around the images of black and white children playing together) to
contemporary anxieties about the digital revolution (which often depicts the wide-eyed
child as subject to the corruptions of cybersex and porn websites). The innocent child
carries the rhetorical force of such arguments; we are constantly urged to take action to
protect our children. Children also have suffered the material consequences of our
decisions; children are the ones on the front lines of school integration, the ones who
pay the price of welfare reform. We opportunistically evoke the figure of the innocent
child as a "human shield" against criticism.
Until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics of the child. Like
everyone else, we have a lot invested in seeing childhood as banal and transparent, as
without any concealed meanings of the sort that ideological critics might excavate, as
without any political agency of the kinds that ethnographers of subcultures document,
as without any sexuality that queer and feminist critics might investigate. Carey
Bazalgette and David Buckingham identify a "division of labor" within academic
research, which subjects youth culture to intense sociological scrutiny while seeing
childhood as a fit subject only for developmental psychology. Children are understood
as "asocial or perhaps, pre-social," resulting in an emphasis on their "inadequacies,"
"immaturity" and "irrationality," on their need for protection and nurturing. Because
developmental psychology focuses on defining and encouraging "normative"
development, it does not provide us tools for critiquing the cultural power invested in
childhood innocence. Sociological critics focus on the "deviance" and
"destructiveness" of youth cultures, their "irresponsibility" or the "rituals" of their
subcultural "resistance." While we often celebrate the "resistant" behaviors of youth
cultures as subversive, the "misbehavior" of children is almost never understood in
similar terms. This historic split has started to break down over the past five or six

Henry Jenkins
years, as more and more cultural scholars examine childhood.
This marginalization effects not only how we understand the child, its social agency,
its cultural contexts, and its relations to powerful institutions but also how we
understand adult politics, adult culture, and adult society, which often circles around
the specter of the innocent child. The Children's Culture Reader is intended to both
explore what the figure of the child means to adults and offer a more complex account
of children's own cultural lives.
Given the wealth of material about childhood which has emerged in sociology,
anthropology, pedagogical theory, social and cultural history, women's studies, literary
criticism, and media studies in recent years, it seems important to identify what this
collection won't do. It will not be a collection of essays centered primarily around
issues of motherhood, fatherhood, adult identities, pedagogy, schooling, advertising,
media reform, mass marketing, computers, public policy and the like, though all of
these topics will be explored in so far as they impact contemporary and historical
understandings of childhood. A surprising number of the essays written about
children's media, children's literature, or education manage not to talk about children or
childhood at all. The essays in The Children's Culture Reader, on the other hand, will
be centrally about childhood, about how our culture defines what it means to be a
child, how adult institutions impact on children's lives, and how children construct
their cultural and social identities.
This book is not intended as a guidebook for media and social reformers, not a series of
attacks on the corrupting force of mass culture on children's lives. Rather, it will
challenge some key assumptions behind those reform movements, rejecting the myth
of childhood innocence in order to better map the power relations between children and
adults. This book avoids texts that see children primarily as victims in favor of works
that recognize and respect their social and political agency.
Some may question the "political stakes" in studying the child, especially in moving
beyond powerful old binarisms about adult corruption and victimized children. Such
myths have survived because they are useful, useful for the left as well as for
conservative and patriarchal agendas. At a time when Republican crime bills would try
children as adults and toss them into federal prisons or when we want to motivate state
action against child abuse, images of innocent and victimized children are our most
powerful weapon. Yet, the right increasingly draws on a vocabulary of child protection
as the bulwark of their campaign against multiculturalism, feminism, Internet
expression and queer politics. Any meaningful political response to this conservative
agenda must reassess childhood innocence.
In this introductory essay, I outline work on children's culture across a range of

Henry Jenkins
disciplines and suggest some of this research's implications for thinking about
contemporary cultural politics. In doing so, I will identify what I see as three major
strands in recent writings about childhood: (1)the examination of the meanings which
children carry for adults; (2)historical research into our shifting understanding of the
relations between children and adults; and (3)studies of children as cultural and social
agents. Each of the next three sections of this introduction takes one of those strands as
its central focus. In the closing section, I return to the question of the politics of
childhood and outline some of the implications of this research.
Too often, our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares
and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the
primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination,
beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be
corrupted or protected by adults. Such a conception of the child dips freely in the
politics of nostalgia. As Susan Stewart suggests, nostalgia is the desire to recreate
something that has never existed before, to return to some place we've never been, and
to reclaim a lost object we never possessed. In short, nostalgia takes us to never-never-
land.
This book assumes that childhood is not timeless, but rather subject to the same
historical shifts and institutional factors that shape all human experience. Children's
culture is not the result of purely top-down forces of ideological and institutional
control, nor is it a free space of individual expression. Children's culture is a site of
conflicting values, goals, and expectations. As Henry Giroux has argued:
"Children's culture is a sphere where entertainment, advocacy and

pleasure meet to construct conceptions of what it means to be a child
occupying a combination of gender, racial and class positions in society."
Children, no less than adults, are active participants in that process of defining their
identities, though they join those interactions from positions of unequal power. When
children struggle to reclaim dignity in the face of a schoolyard taunt or confront
inequalities in their parents' incomes, they are engaged with politics just as surely as
adults are when they fight back against homophobia or join a labor union. Our
grownup fantasies of childhood as a simple space crumbles when we recognize the
complexity of the forces shaping our children's lives and defining who they will be,
how they will behave, and how they will understand their place in the world.
PART ONE
THE "FORT" AND THE "VILLAGE": THE POLITICS OF FAMILY VALUES
"The child was there waiting...defenseless and alluring, with no

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substance, no threatening history, no independent insistences. As a

category created but not occupied, the child could be a repository of
cultural needs or fears not adequately disposed of elsewhere.... The child
carries for us things we somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes
anxieties we want to be divorced from and sometimes pleasures so great
we would not, without the child, know how to contain them."
-- James Kincaid.
In this section, I will examine the convention speeches of Molinari and Clinton as
embodying different ideological strategies for mobilizing the figure of the innocent
child. For Hillary Clinton, the child represents our "bridge to the 21st century," the
catalyst transforming uncontrollable change into meaningful progress, while for Susan
Molinari, the child represents our link to the past, carrying forth family tradition and
"the American Dream" in a troubled world. For Clinton, the child is a figure of the
utopian imagination, enabling her to conceive of a better world -- a new "village" --
that must be built in the present. For Molinari, the child is a figure of nostalgic
remorse, whose violated innocence demands that parents "hold down the fort" against
contemporary culture. But, both women, in Kincaid's sense, use their children to "carry
things." As Kincaid acknowledges, the very impermanence of childhood, its status as a
transitional (and fragile) moment in our life cycle, enables many different symbolic
uses: "Any meaning would stick but no meaning would stick for long." Often, in our
rhetoric, the child embodies change, its threat and its potential. The child, both literally
and metaphorically, is always in the process of becoming something else. As Kincaid
writes:
"If the child had a wicked heart from birth, that heart could be ripped out
and a new one planted there in no time. If the child was ignorant, that
wouldn't last long; if disobedient, there was always the whipping cure; if
angelic, death would take him or, more likely, her; if loved or loving,
that too would pass."
Childhood -- a temporary state -- becomes an emblem for our anxieties about the
passing of time, the destruction of historical formations, or conversely, a vehicle for
our hopes for the future. The innocent child is caught somewhere over the rainbow --
between nostalgia and utopian optimism, between the past and the future.
The American (Heterosexual) Dream

Within the Republican ideology of family values, the innocent child is most often
figured in relation to the past, threatened by the prospect of unregulated change,
endangered by modernity, and denied things previous generations took for granted.
Molinari told how her grandfather had "bundled up a young son and left Italy in search
of a dream," an "American dream," which "passed down" from generation to
generation, until "a seat in a Queen's barbershop led to a seat in the U.S. Congress."

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Her "American dream" was, at core, the story of heterosexual courtship and
reproduction: "find a job, marry your sweetheart, have children, buy a home and
maybe start a business and in the process, always build a better life for your children."
This "American" dream has become harder to achieve in the face of crippling taxes and
other assaults upon the family. Far from an incidental detail, the child surfaces here
both as a reward for living the right life and as a responsibility heterosexuals bear.
Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men offers a somewhat more critical account of
this 1950s era version of the "American dream." Psychological discourse of the period
made the reproductive imperative not only a social obligation but a test of maturation
and sexual normality. Getting married and having children became one of those things
"mature," "normal" adult men were expected to do, while the failure to father was seen
as evidence of maladjustment, immaturity, and often, homosexuality. Ehrenreich notes,
"fear of homosexuality kept heterosexual men in line as husbands and breadwinners;
and, at the same time, the association with failure and immaturity made it almost
impossible for homosexual men to assert a positive image of themselves." If having
children became proof of mature heterosexuality, then, it is hardly surprising that the
reverse -- the prospect of homosexuals having access to children - was regarded as a
horrifying contamination.
While Ehrenreich's book recounts the breakdown of this formulation over the past
three decades of male-female relations, its persistence in Molinari's speech, and in
Republican rhetoric more generally, suggests it is still a powerful tool for enforcing
normative assumptions about gender roles and sexual identities. This common-sensical
connection between heterosexuality and childhood innocence undergirds the exercise
of homophobia in the late 20th century. The idea that only heterosexuals can bear -- or
should raise -- children shapes custody decisions which deny lesbian mothers access to
their offspring. The shock that occurs when queerness and children's culture come
together shaped the Southern Baptist Convention's choice of Disney as the target of its
campaign against corporations that provide health insurance for domestic partners. The
image of the crazed pedophile threatens the employment rights of gay teachers and led
to a campaign to get Bert and Ernie banned from Sesame Street because of their
"unnatural" relations. Molinari's version of the "American Dream" represents a more
benign version of these arguments, one that erases -- rather than denounces --
homosexuality as an aspect of American family life.
The Politics of Motherhood

For a moment, Molinari can't resist the tug of the myth of the innocent child as an
agent of progress. The birth of her daughter, Molinari argues, makes her "think a little
less about how the world is and a little more about the world you'll leave behind for
your children." However, the conservative logic of her argument pulls her back
towards the present as a decline from a past golden age, towards the "real pressures"
which prevent modern moms and dads from achieving their parent's dreams. The

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modern world, she suggests, is a world which places our innocent children at risk:
"Every morning they [parents] hesitate, at the kindergarten door, even if only for a
moment, afraid to let go of that small hand clinging so tightly onto theirs." For a
moment, Molinari hesitates, gesturing towards feminist protests against the
unreasonable expectations placed on contemporary women, only to retreat back
towards a more traditional solution:
"I don't know a mom today who isn't stretched to her limits trying to
hold down a job and trying to hold down the fort too. How many times
have we said to ourselves that there just aren't enough hours in a day....
Well, the Republicans can't promise you any more hours in your day but
we can help you spend more hours at home with your children."
The threat is transformed: it is no longer unequal gender relations, poverty or unfair

conditions of employment, but the idea of working outside the home, which renders
working "moms" miserable. Her speech sees returning to the home as the natural desire
of all women and depicts women's professional lives as an unwanted obligation that
better tax policies would render unnecessary.
The figure of the defenseless child has been consistently mobilized in both support of
and in opposition to American feminism. Since women have carried special
responsibilities for bearing and caring for children, their attempts to enter political and
economic life have often been framed in terms of possible impacts on children and the
family. Fatherhood is one role among many for most men; historically, for many
women, motherhood was the role that defined their social, economic, and political
identity. Early suffrage leaders represented their campaign for the vote in the late 19th
and early 20th century as a logical extension of their responsibilities as mothers to
shield the home from the corruptions of the outside world. This maternal politics, or
"domestic feminism," focused its attention on issues of alcoholism and prostitution and
on the social conditions faced by the children of the urban poor. As one early suffrage
leader explained, "The Age of Feminism is also the age of the child." Yet, this maternal
politics also restricted women's political voice to a narrow range of issues associated
with children, home and family.
Speaking as mothers gave the early feminists, who came mostly from the upper and
middle classes, a vocabulary for linking their experiences, across class and racial
divides, with those of other women. The revitalization of American feminism in the
1960s and 1970s often focused around issues of abortion, daycare, child custody, and
other family issues; middle class women's entry into identity politics emerged from
consciousness raising strategies and the recognition that the "personal is the political."
Women could gain economic autonomy only by shifting child-rearing burdens within
the family and only by gaining greater control over the reproductive process. Decades
later, Hillary Clinton evoked this rhetorical tradition of sisterly solidarity through

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motherhood when she told her convention audience, "I wish we could be sitting around
a kitchen table, just us, talking about our hopes and fears for our children's futures."
This tradition of maternal feminism has given urgency to female politicians when they
speak on behalf of children. Heather Hendershot has shown, for example, that Action
for Children's Television gained attention from the press and from the Federal
Communications Commission in the 1970s because it could speak as a group of
"mothers from Newton;" ACT expressed impatience with the demands for traditional
media effects research and spoke with "common sense" about the impact of media on
their own children's lives.
Yet, the heightened public discourse about maternalism has also provided a weapon for
criticizing female politicians as "bad mothers" when they place too much attention on
issues not directly linked to childhood or the family. Hillary Clinton was sharply
criticized for the public roles she played in her husband's administration and for her
flip remarks about not wanting to be reduced to "baking cookies." In her convention
speech, she made fun of the need to reposition herself as a mother, joking that she
might appear at the Democratic convention arm in arm with "Benti the child-saving
gorilla from the Brookfield Zoo." Dan Quayle's 1992 attacks on Murphy Brown's status
as an unwed mother became a major campaign issue.
The figure of the absent mother, the neglectful mother, the mother who abandons her
children for political and economic ambition, always shadows the use of the maternal
voice in American politics. Two of Clinton's choices to become the first female
Attorney General of the United States were ultimately withdrawn because of public
controversy surrounding their child-rearing arrangements, questions rarely if ever
raised in considering the confirmation of male cabinet appointments. So, it is perhaps
not surprising that when Molinari claimed common cause with other working mothers,
it was in part to urge their return to the kitchen table. Less than a year after she
delivered the keynote address at the Republican national convention, Molinari herself
resigned from the U.S. Congress to accept a job as a network anchorwoman, justifying
her choice on the grounds that it would allow her to spend more time with her
daughter.
The Suffering Father and the Unhappy Child

Republican formulations of the innocent child depict the home as "a fort" where
mothers and fathers must protect their children from the chaos of modern life.
Adopting characteristically military metaphors, the former general, Colin Powell,
spoke to the Republican convention about the need for families to remain strong in
order to:
"withstand the assaults of contemporary life...resist the images of

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violence and vulgarity which flood into our lives every day... [and]
defeat the scourge of drugs and crime and incivility that threaten us."
This formulation of family values uses the figure of the innocent child to police
boundaries between the family and the outside world. It often masks class and racial
divisiveness, despite the presence of the African-American Colin Powell as a living
symbol of Republican efforts towards becoming a "party of inclusion." This
formulation, as Eric Freedman notes, also presupposes that the primary threat to our
children comes from outside, while most cases of violence against children and most
cases of "missing children" can be traced back to family members. The Republican
version of "family values," which sharpens our fears and anxieties about outside forces,
lets the family itself off the hook.
One of the most memorable moments of the Republican convention involved the
speech of a wheelchair bound former policeman, crippled in the line of duty and now
an advocate of tougher sentencing laws. He was attended by his young son, who stood
behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder throughout the speech. With a slow and
pained voice, he explained:
"My son, Conner McDonald, is nine years old and he has never seen his
father move his arms or legs but when he puts his soft hands to his
father's face I feel the promise of America and when he looks into my
eyes I know that he can see the pride of America."
Few images more perfectly capture the melodramatic qualities of this "family values"
politics! One of the moment's most striking aspects was its embodiment of male
vulnerability and suffering. If conservative ideology has tended to hold women
responsible for nurturing and raising the child, it sees the father as a breadwinner and
as a bulwark protecting the family against the outside world. As Robert L. Griswold
notes:
"Men's virtual monopoly of bread winning has been part and parcel of
male dominance. The seventeenth century patriarch has long since
disappeared, but twentieth-century men have profited from their status as
fathers. The linkage between fatherhood and bread winning, for
example, has helped legitimate men's monopoly of the most desirable
jobs....So, too, insurance policies, pension plans, retirement programs,
tax codes, mortgage and credit policies, educational opportunities and
many more practices have bolstered men's roles as providers."
If women have found a politics based on motherhood a double-edged sword, justifying

both their ability to speak in the public sphere and their continued restriction to the

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domestic sphere, men have found fatherhood a win-win situation, justifying their
continued presence in public life, which, in turn, explains their negligible role in child-
rearing. While the charge of being a negligent mother can be directed against any
woman entering into politics, the "dead-beat dad," only now emerging as a political
category, is treated as an aberration - a breakdown of the family wage system. There is
something unnatural, then, about this spectacle of a father, who desperately wants to
care for his son but is unable to do so.
The wounded father, who can not wrap strong arms around his needful son, and the
wide-eyed son, who struggles to still believe in the "pride" of his nation, intensify our
horror over the breakdown of law and order. As Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger notes,
the discourse of childhood innocence has historically provided powerful tools for
criticizing the "vicious, materialistic, and immoral qualities of American society." The
horrors of modernity are magnified through children's innocent eyes. Children serve as
"soft and smiling foils to a more grim and grownup reality." Young Conner, his blond
hair slicked down, his blue eyes shifting nervously, personifies suffering innocence and
its rebuke against the adult order. At the same time, as Heininger notes, the figure of
the "pristine" child has been an "indispensable element of American optimism": "It is
precisely because the young are untainted that the nation can willingly vest in them its
best hopes." The father feels "the promise of America" in his son's touch. The speech
precariously balances the image of Conner as already damaged by a harsh world
against the image of Conner (and his unblemished innocence) as potentially healing
that world. As Heininger explains, "because simplicity and innocence were considered
to be children's most distinguishing characteristics, it followed that happiness should
be their natural state."
This ideologically powerful assumption allows us to direct anger against any social
force that makes our children unhappy. As Kincaid argues, "an unhappy child was and
is unnatural, an indictment of somebody: parent, institution, nation." The figure of the
endangered child surfaced powerfully in campaigns for the Communications Decency
Act, appearing as a hypnotized young face awash in the eerie glow of the computer
terminal on the cover of Time, rendering arguments about the First Amendment beside
the point. As one letter to Time explained, "If we lose our kids to cyberporn, free
speech won't matter." The innocent child was to be protected at "all costs."
Throughout the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole consistently characterized liberal politics
and counter-cultural "social experiments" in terms of the threats they posed to our
children: "crime, drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty and the
abandonment of children." Higher taxes, Dole argued, meant a grandmother might be
unable to call her grandchild or a parent might be unable to buy her child a book.
Evoking the title of Hillary Clinton's best-selling book, Dole proclaimed:
"After the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon

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which this country was founded, we are told it takes the village -- that is,
the collective and thus the state -- to raise a child... I am here to tell you.
It doesn't take a village to raise a child - it takes a family."
Dole's slippage between the village, the collective, and the state is characteristic of a
Republican rhetoric which reduces the problems of children to those confronted and
solved by volunteerism and by individual families; Dole frames government action as
the threat that makes children's lives miserable. Of course, many Republican solutions,
such as the Communications Decency Act, depend upon the policing power of the
village!
Democratic Family Values

Reworking conservative "family values" rhetoric -- and thus "taking the issue off the
table" -- has been central to the "New Democrat" strategy of the Clinton
Administration. The 1992 Democratic Party convention was framed around rethinking
the concept of the family to reflect the diverse ways Americans live in the 1990s.
Clinton and the other "New Democrats" embraced a broader range of social units,
including, at least briefly, the idea that gay and lesbian couples might constitute viable
families. Clinton and Gore retooled ancient conceptions of the leader as a law-giving
patriarch, adopting a post-feminist construction of the nurturing father watching over
his children's bedside; images of Clinton marveling over Chelsea's birth or Gore
attending his son, after a near-fatal accident, surfaced throughout speeches and
campaign biographies. This kinder, gentler conception of the patriarch emerges from
what Robert L. Griswold calls the discourse of "New Fatherhood" in post-war
America. While historically, fathers could gain power and authority from their public
roles as breadwinners, they could now also get credit for their more private roles as
educators and nurturers. While Griswold sees this shift as a response to the expanded
economic role of women in the workplace and to feminist critiques of the family, he
acknowledges that this new style of fatherhood often does not mean reciprocity of
responsibilities. "Sensitive" male politicians can freely embrace the domestic sphere
without becoming trapped there, while Hillary Clinton's shifts between domestic and
public sphere politics provoke controversy.
Hillary's law review essays defending the concept of "children's rights" and her
participation in Marian Edelman's Children Defense Fund were ruthlessly attacked at
the 1992 Republican convention by Marilyn Quayle and Barbara Bush as too
"extremist" for a proper first lady. While she acknowledged in her writing that "the
phrase 'children's rights' is a slogan in search of definition," Hillary Rodham presented
a powerful case for reconsidering how the courts and other legal institutions dealt with
children's issues. Sounding like many cultural critics of childhood innocence, Rodham
wrote:
"No other group is so totally dependent for its well-being on choices

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made by others. Obviously this dependency can be explained to a

significant degree by the physical, intellectual, and psychological
incapacities of (some) children which render them weaker than (some)
older persons. But the phenomenon must also be seen as part of the
organization and ideology of the political system itself. Lacking even the
basic power to vote, children are not able to exercise normal
constituency powers, articulating self-interests to politicians and
working towards specific goals."
She stressed the need of children to have a more powerful voice in custody disputes,
insisted on an expanded conception of their rights to free expression, and argued for
greater procedural protections for juveniles charged with criminal violations.
Republican critics felt that her arguments depended on state authorities to protect
children's interests even in the face of parental opposition and thus undermined the
sovereignty of the family. Her book, It Takes a Village, reworked some of these earlier
arguments, shifting from a discourse of children's rights to a language of parental
responsibility. Her new approach to "family values" was consistent with the Clinton
administration's endorsement of school uniforms, curfews, and the V Chip. Republican
critics still found within the book's more banal prose signs of the state power central to
her earlier formulations.
Forming the New Village

Lauren Berlant has argued that the Republican "family values" agenda involves a
"downsizing" of the public sphere, a reduction of the role of politics in public life in
favor of an exclusive focus on individual experience -- on a politics of personal
responsibilities and self-interest rather than one of the collective good. The Clinton
version of "family values" relocates the family within a revitalized public sphere.
When Hillary speaks of the "village" and its responsibility for children, she evokes a
middle ground between "the state" and the private, one consistent with her husband's
unstable compromise between Republican pressures towards de-federalization and
traditional liberal conceptions of government activism. Hillary's village metaphor
emerges from a politics of communitarianism, in which the community maintains a
social contract to insure the well-being of its members, a contract sometimes met by
volunteerism and sometimes by government policy: "Home can -- and should - be a
bedrock for any child. Communities can -- and should -- provide the eyes and
enforcement to watch over them, formally and informally. And our government can --
and should -- create and uphold the laws that set standards of safety for us all." Her
book acknowledges the breakdown of traditional communities and the potential for
new kinds of communities emerging in responses to changing technological and
economic conditions. Rather than calling upon the community to preserve its
traditional roles in protecting children, she calls a new community into being, one
constituted through its mutual concern for children as much-needed agents of future
progress. The village metaphor, with its evocation of the organic communities of small

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town American life, depends upon the historic linkage of childhood innocence to
pastoralism (an image that can be traced back to Rousseau and the Romantics.)
If the Republican formulation of family values pits the "collective" against the family,
the Democratic version sees the individual and the community as vitally and positively
linked. In her speech to the convention, Hillary Clinton evoked an image of a national
community where:
"Right now in our biggest cities and our smallest towns there are boys
and girls being tucked gently into their beds and there are boys and girls
who have no one to call Mom and Dad and no place to call home."
What unites the haves and the have-nots, according to this account, is that all of us care
about our children. Therefore, the needs of children must somehow be removed from
the realm of the political and into a space of shared understanding and communal
action, as we work together to create a "nation that does not just talk about family
values but acts in ways that values family."
Her vision of a world where "we are all part of one family" depends on state actions
(such as "dedicated teachers preparing their lessons for the new school year...or police
officers working to help kids stay out of trouble") but also on individual action
("volunteers tutoring and coaching children...and of course, parents, first and
foremost.") These community members work together against various threats: "gang
leaders and drug pushers on the corners of their neighborhoods...a popular culture that
glamorizes sex and violence, smoking and drinking." Their united efforts on behalf of
childhood innocence become the basis for a utopian revitalization of the nation. This
image of transformation is explicit in the final paragraph of her book:
"Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of

children. For children are at our core -- not only as vulnerable beings in
need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity
and contentiousness of modern life. Just as it takes a village to raise a
child, it takes children to raise up a village to become all it should be.
The village we build with them in mind will be a better place for us all."
For Clinton, it is not simply that children need the village, but the future of the village
depends upon its shared commitments to children.
Race, Imperialism and the Child

At a time when the Democratic Party was actively courting African- and Asian-
Americans for their votes and their campaign contributions, her choice of an African
proverb, one widely used in Afrocentric pedagogy, as the book's title could not have

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been an accident. Hillary cites Marian Wright Edelman, the African-American woman
who is the founder and head of the Children's Defense Fund as a mentor and friend. At
the same time, she retreats from the explicit links Edelman draws between children's
plight and racial politics. Edelman connects present day struggles on behalf of children
with the legacy of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement:
"We must put social and economic underpinnings beneath the millions
of African-American, Asian American, Latino, White and Native
American children left behind when the promise of the civil rights laws
and the significant progress of the 1960s and 70s in alleviating poverty
were eclipsed by the Vietnam War, economic recession, and changing
national leadership priorities."
Edelman had been sharply critical of Clinton's capitulation to the Republicans on

welfare reform, a decision which she estimated would place 5 million more children
into poverty.
Edelman recognizes that suffering occurs most often to particular children, marked by
racial and class differences, while Hillary engages in what Jacqueline Rose describes
as the "impossible fiction" of the universalized child. In our culture, the most persistent
image of the innocent child is that of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, boy, someone
like Conner, while the markers of middle classness, whiteness, and masculinity are
read as standing for all children. It Takes A Village adopts a multicultural variant of
this universalized child, depicting Hillary on the back cover surrounded by children of
all different racial and ethnic background, all well-dressed, all squeaky clean, all
smiling. The implications of this "Family of Man"-style image are complex: the
photograph envisions a utopian community united despite racial differences, while at
the same time, bleaching away Edelman's racial and class specificity.
For several generations, progressive civil rights policies, especially those surrounding
school desegregation, have rested on the hope that children, born without prejudice,
might escape racial boundaries. As Shari Goldin notes, school desegregation advocates
promote the image of black and white children interacting freely together on the
playgrounds and in the schoolrooms as the advanced guard for tomorrow's "color
blind" society. Hillary Clinton depicts childhood as an escape from racial antagonism
when she recalls the old hymn, "Jesus Loves Me," which finds "all the children of the
world, red, yellow, black, and white ... precious in His sight." She wonders how
"anyone who ever sang" this song "could dislike someone solely on for the color of
their skin." Her cover photo mimics classic pictures of Jesus "suffering the children."
At the same time, segregationists -- from rural Alabama to South Boston -- often posed
school busing as a violation of childhood innocence, as a cynical bureaucratic

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"experiment" which turned children into "guinea pigs," "scapegoats" and "hostages" of
a "liberal agenda." Racism, no less than the Civil Rights movement, has mobilized our
hopes and fears for our children. Moreover, as Ashis Nandy has suggested, dominant
ideologies of racism and colonialism have often mapped onto racial and cultural others
the image of the child as:
"an inferior version of the adult -- as a lovable, spontaneous, delicate

being who is also simultaneously dependent, unreliable and willful and
thus, as a being who needs to be guided, protected and educated as a
ward."
Such paternalism framed the official politics of colonial domination and the unofficial
politics of racial bigotry; white domination was presented as a rational (and benign)
response to the "immaturity" of nonwhite peoples. Asian and African adults were often
ascribed with the childlikeness of good "obedient" children or the childishness of bad
"rebellious" children.
Common Ground
Both the Republican and Democratic formulations of "family values" cast popular
culture as a social problem, roughly on the same level as crime and drugs. The same
week that Congress passed welfare reform, President Clinton met with television
executives to set up a ratings system and Bob Dole went to Hollywood to attack movie
violence. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, who backed the welfare reform
effort, has focused congressional attention on the problem of video game violence,
which he calls the "nightmare before Christmas." In each case, the attacks on popular
culture shift attention away from material problems effecting children and onto the
symbolic terrain.
Throughout the twentieth century, the myth of childhood innocence has helped to erect
or preserve cultural hierarchies, dismissing popular culture in favor of middle-brow or
high cultural works viewed more appropriate for children. As Lynn Spigel and Henry
Jenkins write, "By evoking the 'threat to children,' social reformers typically justified
their own position as cultural custodians, linking (either implicitly or explicitly)
anxieties about violence, sexuality and morality to mandates of good taste and artistic
merit." Within this protectionist rhetoric, taste distinctions get transformed into moral
issues, with the desire to shelter children's "purity" providing a rationale for censorship
and regulation. Once the innocent child has been evoked, it becomes difficult to pull
back and examine these cultural issues from other perspectives, thus accounting for the
bipartisan attacks against Hollywood.
Both the Republican and Democratic versions of family values presuppose the
innocent child as requiring adult protection; they both speak for the child who is

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assumed to be incapable of speaking for herself. Young Conner remains mute as his
father speaks of his own sufferings and those of his son. Three-month old Susan Ruby
was too young to talk, while the Clintons turned down Chelsea's request to speak at the
convention, "protecting" her from the glare of the public spotlight.
Both the Republican and Democratic visions presume a clear separation between
childhood and adulthood, with different rights and responsibilities ascribed to each
phase of human development. The myth of childhood innocence depends upon our
ability to locate such a break, as well as upon our sense of nostalgic loss when we cross
irreversibly into adulthood. As the next section will suggest, this particular conception
of childhood innocence is of fairly recent historical origins. In this next section, I will
move beyond contemporary debates between Republicans and Democrats to frame the
concept of childhood innocence in a larger historiographic context.
PART TWO
THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD
"Members of any society carry within themselves a working definition

of childhood, its nature, limitations and duration. They may not
explicitly discuss this definition, write about it, or even consciously
conceive of it as an issue, but they act upon their assumptions in all of
their dealings with, fears for, and expectations of their children."
-- Karin Calvert
Our modern conception of the innocent child presumes its universality across historical
periods and across widely divergent cultures. The pre-socialized child exists in a state
of nature. When we want to prove that something is so basic to human nature that it
can not be changed (the differences between the genders, for example), we point to its
presence in our children. This universalized conception of the innocent child effaces
gender, class and racial differences, even if it holds those differences in place. This
essentialized conception of the innocent child frees it of the taint of adult sexuality,
even as we use it to police adult sexuality, and even as we use the threat of adult
sexuality to regulate children's bodies. This decontextualized conception of the
innocent child exists outside of culture, precisely so that we can use it to regulate
cultural hierarchies, to separate the impure influence of popular culture from the
sanctifying touch of high culture. This historical conception of the innocent child is
eternal, even as our political rhetoric poses childhood as constantly under threat and
always on the verge of "disappearing" altogether. In short, the innocent child is a myth,
in Roland Barthes' sense of the word, a figure that transforms culture into nature.
Like all myths, the innocent child has a history. In fact, one reason it can carry so many
contradictory meanings is that our modern sense of the child is a palimpsest of ideas

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from different historical contexts -- one part Romantic, one part Victorian, one part
medieval and one part modern. We do not so much discard old conceptions of the
child, as accrue additional meanings around what remains one of our most culturally
potent signifiers. In this section, I will not trace a single lineage of the myth of the
child, a task well beyond the scope of this essay. Rather, I will outline how various
historians have approached this question and will examine the most prevalent
meanings that have stuck to the semiotically-adhesive child.
The Origins of Childhood

Philippe Aries begins his book, Centuries of Childhood, with the startling statement
that childhood -- at least as we currently understand it -- did not exist prior to the
Middle Ages. Childhood was not a cultural preoccupation, simply a brief phase of
dependency passed over quickly and bearing little special importance. The category of
the infant existed, since few passed beyond this stage in an era of extraordinary
mortality, but the category of child did not, since those who could fend for themselves
were treated as small adults. Children participated fully in all of the activities of the
adult world, yet there seemed little need to separate them out as a social category.
As the conception of a child as separate from an adult took shape, however, it still did
not bear connotations of innocence. As Aries notes, sexual contact between children
and adults, touching and stroking of the genitals, dirty jokes, sharing rooms and beds,
and casual nudity, was taken for granted well into the ancient regime. Children were
assumed to be closer to the body, less inhibited, and thus, unlikely to be corrupted by
adult knowledge.
The idea of the child as innocent first took shape, Aries argues, within pedagogical
literature, helping to justifying a specialized body of knowledge centered around the
education and inculcation of the young; this ideal rationalized the learned class's
expanded social role and efforts to police their culture. Other historians suggest
alternative or supplementary explanations for this modern conception of the child. One
key factor was the emergence of commercial capitalism and the rise of the middle
classes; the child became central to the discussion of transfer of property and the rights
of inheritance. The emerging bourgeois classes placed particular importance on the
education and rearing of their sons as preparation for participation in the market
economy. Out of the future-orientation of capitalism came a new focus on child rearing
and pedagogy. Some subsequent historians, notably Lawrence Stone and Lloyd de
Mause, have pushed beyond Aries' account to suggest that pre-modern parents had
little attachment to their children, treating them with neglect and abuse. These claims
have been sharply criticized by other historians as going well beyond available
evidence.
The importance of Aries' research may not depend on whether he is correct on every
particular: his book opened a space for examining the social construction of childhood

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as an ongoing historical process and for questioning dominant constructions of

childhood innocence. As Aries notes:
"The idea of childish innocence resulted in two kinds of attitude and

behavior towards childhood: firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by
life and particularly by the sexuality tolerated if not approved of among
adults; and secondly, strengthening it by developing character and
reason. We may see a contradiction here, for on the one hand childhood
is preserved and on the other hand it is made older than its years."
This contradiction runs through our modern conception of childhood innocence -- we

desire it and we want to help children to move beyond it. Or, to use Aries's terms, we
want to "coddle" the child and we want to "discipline" the child.
This emerging distinction between child and adult also played a central role in shaping
and regulating adult behavior. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias describes the
gradual "refinement" of manners and etiquette as the upper classes adopted modes of
behavior which separated them from the lower classes; the cultural transmission and
imitation of those norms responded to the emerging middle class's desire for social
betterment and political access. In his account, rules of etiquette must first be explicitly
expressed and consciously imitated, but subsequently, are internalized, becoming part
of what defines us as human. However, since these norms must be acquired, they must
be transmitted to children, who are initially perceived as operating outside the civilized
order. The child behaved in ways that adults would not, while the adults were obligated
to shape the child into conformity with social norms. According to Elias, the child
comes of age in a context of fear and shame; shame is the process through which social
norms are internalized. Elias sees our history since the middle ages in terms of
increased restraint of the body and tighter regulations of emotions, necessary to
facilitate participation in ever-more complex spheres of social relations. However,
more recent historians, such as John Kasson , have pointed to historical fluctuations
during which society loosened or tightened its control over body and affect. These
fluctuations determine whether parents "discipline" or "coddle" children, whether they
react to violations of adult norms with horror or amusement.
Drawing her evidence both from analysis of material culture and from popular
discourse about childhood, Karin Calvert locates three distinct shifts in the cultural
understanding and adult regulation of American childhood between 1600-1900. In the
first phase, children led precarious lives confronting the harsh conditions of frontier
settlement, subject to high infant mortality rates, "childhood illnesses, accidents, and a
lack of sufficient nourishment." In such a culture, Calvert argues, childhood was
experienced as "essentially a state of illness" or physical vulnerability: "Growing up
meant growing strong and gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take care of
oneself." Such a culture had little nostalgia for childhood, stressing the early

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acceptance of adult responsibilities. Child rearing practices sought to "hasten" self-

sufficiency.
Around the turn of the 18th century, attitudes shifted dramatically, with a "growing
confidence in the rationality of nature." If before, parents saw themselves as protecting
their children from natural threats, this new paradigm viewed excessive parental
intervention as producing invalid children. Childhood was now perceived as a period
of "robust health" during which "natural forces" took their course, allowing the young
to grow into vital adulthood. Childhood was seen as a period of "freedom" before the
anticipated constraints of adult civilization and so parents valued the "childishness" of
their children, their nonconformity to adult expectations.
In the third phase, from 1830-1900, adults did not simply take pleasure in childhood;
they sought to prolong and shelter it as a special period of innocence from the adult
world. As Calvert notes:
"Childhood was imbued with an almost sacred character. Children were

pure and innocent beings, descended from heaven and unsullied by
worldly corruption. The loss of this childish innocence was akin to the
loss of virginity, and the inevitable loss of childhood itself was a kind of
expulsion from the Garden of Eden."
This new myth of childhood innocence served, in part, as the basis for criticism of
modernity and the breakdown of traditional forms of family and community life.
Two Traditions: The "Free" Child and the "Disciplined" Child

As Calvert's account suggests, our recognition of a fundamental difference between
children and adults did not predetermine what significance got attached to that
difference. One strong tradition, as Jackson Lears has noted, envied children's close
relations to nature and their freedom from adult constraints. Romantic thinkers, such as
William Blake or Jean- Jacques Rousseau, engaged in a "primitivist " celebration of
children's "spontaneous feeling and intense experience." The child was emblematic of
"freedom from social convention and utilitarian calculation." Adulthood was
understood as corruption and formal education as an instrument that deforms the
child's development. As Rousseau argues:
"Nature intends that children shall be children before they are men. If we
insist on reversing this order we shall have fruit early indeed, but unripe
and tasteless and liable to early decay....Childhood has its own methods
of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Nothing shows less sense than to try to
substitute our own methods for these."

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Rousseau's Emile outlined an approach to education that linked learning to natural

sensation and material consequences rather than adult instruction and regulation.
Rousseau wanted to preserve children's pristine moral impulses, and especially to
protect children's minds from the influence of books:
"The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed....
Therefore education of the earliest years should be merely negative. It
consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from
vice and from the spirit of error....Exercise his body, his limbs, his
senses, his strength but keep his mind idle as long as you can....Leave
childhood to ripen in your children."
The Romantics valued the child's easy access to the world of the imagination and
sought to free themselves to engage with the world in a more child-like fashion.
Another tradition, grounded in puritan assumptions, focused on adult responsibility to

constrain and "manage" the child, shaping their development in accordance with
community standards. According to Kincaid, the prevailing metaphors of Victorian
child-rearing discourse emphasize the malleability of children's minds, their
willingness and eagerness to submit to adults. Here children are not inherently evil --
simply empty-headed -- and thus appropriately disciplined and instructed by their
elders:
"Children's minds are like wax, readily receiving all impressions." (1880)
"Like clay in the hands of the potter, they are waiting only to be
molded." (1882)
"There is a pliability in the young mind, as in the young twig; which

renders it apt to take any shape into which circumstances may press
it." (1818)
These wax, clay, and botanical metaphors rationalize increased adult control over
children's minds and bodies, often resulting in harsh punishment.
The persistence of these two contradictory strands -- one celebrating childhood

freedom from adult control, the other insisting on the necessity of adult restraint --
helps to explain the ebb and flow between authoritarian, discipline-centered and
permissive, child-centered approaches. Yet, these contradictions can surface within the
same thinker. Progressive era child-rearing experts, such as William Buron Forbush or
G. Stanley Hall, simultaneously celebrated childhood freedom and advocated increased
adult intervention into children's play. Forbush might state, "the infant is like the wild

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creature of the wood, and it is as cruel to confine the physical activities of young
children as those of squirrels and swallows." Hall might state, "Childhood is the
paradise of the race from which adult life is a fall." Yet, both promoted organized and
supervised play activities, such as the Boy Scouts or the YMCA, and urged the
development of classroom rituals intended to foster patriotism and religion. Drawing
on social Darwinism, the young child was, in the words of one progressive reformer,
"essentially a savage, with the interests of a savage, the body of a savage, and to no
small extent, the soul of one." Hall and his associates were remarkably literal minded
in insisting that the child be pushed through the various stages of civilization -- "from
Rome to Reason" -- in order to gain adulthood.
The "Value" of Childhood

Hall's "Child Study Movement" responded to what economist Viviana A. Zelizer
describes as a serious revaluation of the child within American culture. In the agrarian
cultures of the 19th century, children were expected to contribute labor to the family
farm as soon as they were physically able. More children meant more income. Even in
the immigrant families of turn-of-the-century New York, children contributed to the
household economy. However, the rising middle classes directed increased public
pressure against child labor, placing new emphasis upon the child's sentimental value
and pitting the ideal of the untarnished "child of God" (and of nature) against the
horrors of working children. The sentimental conception of the child, Zelizer argues,
compensated for the lost economic worth of child labor and quickly spread. Children
were to be shielded from participation in the economy, either in terms of productive
labor or in terms of relations of consumption. Public attitudes towards adoption shifted,
for example, from a culture which encouraged the "boarding out" of children as cheap
labor to one that emphasized sentimental bonds between adoptive parent and child; the
result was a decreased demand for older boy children (deemed economically
productive) and an increased demand for babies and young girls (viewed as cute and
cuddly.) The death of children, no longer taken-for-granted, became a scandal that
could be mobilized in reform campaigns.
With improvements in children's physical well-being , the primary focus of child

rearing shifted towards concerns with psychological development, with cultural
materials scrutinized for their potentially damaging effects upon children's mental
health. Attacks on popular culture, for example, reflected this new psychological and
sociological conception of the child. Media reform campaigns started in the late 19th
and early 20th century with criticisms of series books, joke magazines, and the comics,
but soon spread to all commercial culture targeted at the young. Jokes magazines and
comic strips, for example, were accused of destroying "all respect for law and
authority," teaching "lawlessness," "cultivating a lack of reverence" and thereby
"destroy[ing ] the American homes of the future."
Such attacks also reflected children's increasingly central role as consumers.

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Advertising aimed at children violated the "social contract" forged during this period of
sacredization. Madison Avenue, the critics charge, no longer viewed children as
outside the sphere of economic life. However, as Stephen Kline suggests, the ideology
of the "sacred" child also contained the roots of a consumerist ideology. The marketing
of consumer goods was coupled with parents' concerns for their children's well-being,
ideals of sanitation or education, and improvements in domestic life. The child became
a central salesman for mass-marketed goods, with marketing researchers exploiting
each new breakthrough in child psychology to more effectively reach this lucrative
market.
The Permissive Paradigm

Writing in the 1950s, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a culture of production
(with its demands for discipline and regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with
its expectations of a "fun morality") as a major force shaping child-rearing practices in
the 20th century. The emergence of permissiveness in the post-war era, she argues, was
partially a response to the expansion of the consumer marketplace and the prospect of
suburban affluence. Permissive conceptions of the child embraced pleasure (especially
erotic pleasure) as a positive motivation for exploration and learning. Bodily urges,
seen as dangerous and threatening in early 20th century formulations, were now
regarded as benign forces which could be "redirected" into more appropriate channels.
Permissiveness represented an Americanization of Freudian psychoanalysis and its
"discovery" of childhood sexuality. The association with childhood rendered these new
(and foreign) ideas "innocent," allowing adults to rethink their own sexuality as well.
At the same time, permissiveness represented an ideological response to the Second

World War and public distaste for anything smacking of authoritarianism. The
mobilization of children as "citizen soldiers" during the war had led parents to rethink
the distribution of power within the family in political terms. In the post-war era, child
rearing experts promoted permissive approaches as more "democratic," as helping to
prepare children for participation in the post-war era. Within this discourse, children's
relations to their parents paralleled citizens' relations to the state; many child rearing
guides centered around discussions of domestic jurisprudence. The core ideology
behind permissiveness can be traced back to progressive currents in American thought.
Benjamin Spock, the most popular child-rearing expert of the immediate post-war
period, drew insight from his political involvement in the Popular Front Movement,
from anthropological discoveries of Margaret Mead who stressed the more "liberated"
approaches to children's sexuality found in various "primitive" cultures and from
emerging ideas about "social engineering" within American sociology and psychology.
Permissiveness's popularity in post-war America seems all the more ironic when read
in relation to the militarization of American science and education, the cold-war, and
McCarthyism. For some, the need to protect innocent children fostered public concern
about the arm's race and thus increased support for anti-communism at home and
abroad. For others, the romantic conception of the free child as a utopian escape from

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adult regulation offered a way of coping with grown-up repression and conformity.
Post-War America was ripe for a new conception of parent-child relations; American
women were having children at younger and younger ages; their dislocation from
urban centers towards outlying suburbs separated them from their mothers and other
traditional sources of child-rearing advice. Spock's book guided their day-to-day
practices; its mixture of "commonsense" and expert advice offered a security blanket
for young and inexperienced parents. This new approach to child rearing also helped to
transform gender relations within the family, leading, as Robert Griswold notes,
towards a reconceptualization of the father as playmate rather than patriarch, and
preparing for the revival of feminist politics in the 1960s.
At the same time, precisely because this shift in the power relations in the home meant
a break with the way mothers and fathers had themselves been raised, young parents
demanded more and more information and thus, permissiveness proved a highly
productive cultural discourse. In the child-centered culture of post-war America,
permissive themes and images surface everywhere, from advice manuals to magazine
and television advertisements, from children's programming to adult novels. Not
surprisingly, the child became a potent political metaphor with liberal critics
characterizing Joseph McCarthy as "Dennis the Menace" and Spiro Agnew suggesting
that anti-war protesters should have been "spanked" more often when they were
children. Similarly, political metaphors surface consistently in child-rearing guides,
with a guilty conscience compared to the Gestapo or parental control to "brain-
washing."
The mobilization of the image of the innocent child at the 1996 conventions reflected
the continued break-down of the permissive era paradigm, which has been caught
within conservative backlash against the 1960s "counterculture." Republican ideology
has tended to embrace a more discipline-centered approach, while Democratic
ideology tends towards "authoritative parenting" as a middle position between
permissive and authoritarian approaches.
Implications and Contradictions

This history of the innocent child presupposes some relationship between large-scale
ideological shifts and localized practices. Our beliefs about childhood have some
impact on our treatment of children, just as shifts in material practices, such as the
responses to industrialization Zelizer documents, impact on our conceptual
frameworks. However, historical traces of individual child-rearing practices are
difficult to locate prior to the 20th century. Historians of childhood depend upon adult
records, most often upon records and advice from the learned classes and thus they
may accurately reflect only the experience of the middle class. Children left few direct
traces of how they responded to adult expectations. Only in more recent eras does the
historical record support a more dynamic account -- one that sees competing interests

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between parents and children.
The actual business of living and parenting during these historical periods was no
doubt much messier than our intellectual and social histories might suggest. In our own
times, parents often find themselves muttering "my parents would never have let me
get away with that," reflecting an internal conflict between their own experience of
childhood and their idealized conceptions of how children should be raised. Many
contemporary parents hold themselves accountable to the ideals of the permissive
family culture of the 1950s and 1960. These ideals can not be met within a changed
economy that demands that both parents work outside the home or a changed social
structure where more than half of American children have divorced parents. Faced with
these uncertainties, parents, not surprisingly, are unable to maintain consistent ideology
or a coherent style of parenting; instead, they respond to local conditions in confused
and contradictory ways.
Recent scholarship also suggests that contemporary America may be a far less "child-
centered" nation than it imagines. Joe Kincheloe locates a core "ambivalence" in
American attitudes towards childhood, while Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard F.
Stein describe a "pathological" culture where "bad" children become scapegoats for
our frustrations and guilt. Often, Scheper-Hughes and Stein suggests, we focus on the
individual child-abuser as an aberration rather than acknowledge what our society
exacts from its children. Their descriptions of abusive families, latchkey kids, and
neglected children could not be further from the squeaky clean and loving ideals of
permissive child rearing -- a nightmare culture which manifests itself most fully in
black humor and horror movies.
A history of the ideology of childhood, then, is most convincing when it acknowledges

the continued circulation of old conceptions and the emotional tug of previous
practices, when it sees change in gradual rather than revolutionary terms, when it can
account for the complex negotiations that occur during moments of cultural transition,
and when it can acknowledge the gap between our best intentions and our worst
impulses. Children's culture is shaped at the global level through powerful institutions
and at the local level through individual families. Through these everyday practices,
the myth of the innocent child gives way to the reality of children's experience.
PART THREE
CHILDREN'S CULTURE
"Parents and children negotiate all kinds of deals over television and
toys....The battle lines between public versus commercial television,
educational videos and literary adaptations versus toy-based animated
series, this video over that one, or one more hour of viewing versus one

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less are redrawn continually in parents' and children's daily lives."

-- Ellen Seiter
Many important contributions to the new scholarship about childhood have made the
child disappear; cultural critics and historians have pulled the rug out from under our
prevailing cultural myths to show us that the innocent child is often a figment of adult
imaginations. Philippe Aries taught us not only that childhood has a history but that
there may have been a period before childhood existed. James Kincaid tells us that
"what the child is matters less than what we think it is." Jacqueline Rose suggests that
behind the category of children's fiction, there exists only a fictional child -- a
projection of adult desire. Children's fictions, after all, are written by adults, illustrated
by adults, edited by adults, marketed by adults, purchased by adults, and often read by
adults, for children. As Rose's analysis suggests, children's writers have a wide array of
motives, some illicit, some benign, for their desire to "get close" to the child and to
shape her thoughts and fantasies. The examination of children's fiction, then, starts by
stripping away the fantasy child reader, or even the fantasy of "children of all ages," in
order to locate and interpret the adult goals and desires which shape cultural
production.
This displacement of the child from the center of our analysis was a necessary first step
for critiquing the mythology of childhood innocence. Yet, such work often leaves
children permanently out of equation, offering no way to examine the social experience
of actual children or to talk about the real-world consequences of these ideologies.
Increasingly, the child emerges purely as a figment of pedophilic desire. Rose suggests
that our desire to erase children's sexuality has less to do with adult needs to suppress
or regulate children's bodies than with the desire to "hold off" our "panic" at the
prospect of sexualities radically different from our own. At the same time, she sees the
process of storytelling as one of "seduction;" adults tell tales to justify their prolonged
closeness to the objects of their desire. Photography critic Carol Mavor has traced the
complex desires which link Lewis Carroll's photographs of naked girls with his
children's books; both reflect his urge to arrest young girls' development at the moment
when they first "bud" while forestalling the inevitable approach of adult sexuality and
death.
Far from a perversion of the Victorian era, this fascination with the erotic child, James
Kincaid argues, is utterly pervasive in our contemporary culture, surfacing in scandal
sheet headlines about molestation and murder, in Coppertone and Calvin Klein ads,
and in popular films such as Pretty Baby. Such images, he suggests, allow us to have
our cake and eat it too -- to be titillated by erotically charged images of children, while
clinging to their innocence of adult sexual knowledge. These interpretations reveal
some of the fundamental hypocrisy surrounding childhood innocence in Victorian and
contemporary culture. For writers like Kincaid and Mavor, pedophilia becomes a
scandalous category, shocking us out of complacency and forcing us to examine the

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power dynamic between children and adults.
In evoking the shock of pedophilia, they are playing a dangerous game. Contemporary
media scares about child molestation at day care centers are the latest in a long series
of attempts to use the ideology of the innocent child to force working women back in
the home, especially when coupled with equally sensationalistic accounts of latch key
children and the horrors of video game/television violence. No one is denying that
child seduction and molestation can be real problems, but the over-reporting of the
most sensationalistic cases denies us any meaningful perspective for examining the
actual incidence of such problems. These media campaigns leave working mothers
feeling that there is no safe way to raise their children, short of providing them with the
constant supervision demanded by child-rearing experts.
In such a culture, almost all representations that acknowledge children's sexuality are
subject to legal sanctions. Courts and media reformers are taking legal actions against
award-winning art films like The Tin Drum, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,
Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, the class projects of a Harvard undergraduate, and
hardcore pornography. Even Kincaid has been attacked in the British press for
allegedly advocating pedophilia. Elementary schools in Wisconsin organized "secrets
clubs" where children were encouraged to tell social workers about their parent's
sexual and drug use habits. There is no question that our culture proliferates eroticized
images of children, yet there is also no question that our culture engages in a constant
and indiscriminate witch-hunt against anyone who shows too much interest in such
images. Such hysteria makes it difficult for artists to question more traditional modes
of depicting children, for social critics to ask hard questions about sexuality, or for
mothers and fathers to be certain which family photographs might become weapons in
child custody battles. I am not denying the validity of cultural analysis that recognizes
pedophilic impulses, yet there are serious dangers in reducing the question of adult
power over children to erotic desire.
Strip away pedophilia and we are still left with questions about how contemporary
scholarship might represent the power relations between children and adults. Many
accounts of children's culture focus almost exclusively on the exercise of adult
authority over children, leaving little space for thinking about children's own desires,
fantasies, and agendas. For example, Stephen Kline denies children any role in the
production of their own culture:
"What might be taken as children's culture has always been primarily a

matter of culture produced for and urged upon children...Childhood is a
condition defined by powerlessness and dependence upon the adult
community's directives and guidance. Culture is, after all, as the
repository of social learning and socialization, the means by which
societies preserve and strengthen their positions in the world."

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Children's culture is, within this formulation, something that happens to children.
Children are not participants or contributors to that culture. However powerful it may
seem as a criticism of the regulatory power of adult institutions, Kline's formulation
rests on the familiar myth of the innocent and victimized child whom we must protect
-- the mute one whose voice we must assume.
Childhood Identities
Writing about our fascination with eroticized images of young girls, Valerie
Walkerdine suggests that popular culture is often experienced as "the intrusion of adult
sexuality into the sanitized space of childhood." This model is too simple, she argues,
since it denies children's own role in shaping and deploying these fantasies. As
Walkerdine notes, such an account does not acknowledge, for example, the ways that
working class girls actively embrace elements from adult erotic representations as
offering a fantasy of escape from limited social opportunities or restrictive adult
authority. Walkerdine would find equally simplistic any account which celebrated the
working class girl's performance of erotic identities as "resistance to the position
accorded her at school and in high culture," since this reading ascribes too much social
autonomy to children. She describes popular culture as the site of contested and
contradictory attempts to define the child. Children's culture is shaped both by adult
desires and childhood fantasies, with material conditions determining whether or not
we -- as adults or as children -- are able to enact our fantasies.
Walkerdine represents a larger scholarly tradition that examines the complex processes
by which children acquire identities or internalize cultural norms. Annette Kuhn's
Family Secrets, for example, uses close readings of family photographs to explore her
own struggle with her mother to define personal memory. Her autobiographical
discussion becomes all the more poignant because, as a feminist, Kuhn recognizes the
desperation behind her mother's attempt to project her own meanings onto her daughter:
"If a daughter figures for her mother as the abandoned, unloved, child
that she, the mother, once was, and in some ways remains, how can
mother and daughter disengage themselves from these identifications
without harm, without forfeiture of love?"
In adopting the voice of the daughter, while acknowledging her mother's fears and
fantasies, Kuhn reintroduces children's experiences into the discussion of "family
values." Carolyn Steedman's The Tidy House explores how creative writing by young
working class girls reveals a pained recognition of their parents' ambivalence towards
child rearing. Steedman explains:
"They knew that their parents' situation was one of poverty, and that the

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presence of children only increased that poverty....They knew that

children were longed for, materially desired, but that their presence was
irritation, regret and resentment. They knew that, in some clear and
uncomplicated way, it would have been better had they never been born."
Steedman reads the stories as the girls' "urgent" attempts to "understand what set of
social beliefs had brought them into being."
This tradition of feminist analysis slides back and forth between psychological and
sociological investigation, exploring the charged and unstable relations between
mothers and daughters in order to rethink the social and psychic dynamics of the
patriarchal family. Such analysis casts the child -- whether understood through
autobiographical introspection (Family Secrets) or textual analysis and ethnographic
description (The Tidy House) -- as an active participant in these family dramas;
children's desires, hopes, fears, and fantasies are central to the process of constructing
personal identities.
One limitation of our current research is that almost all such work has focused around
issues of motherhood and femininity. This is not surprising given women's primary
responsibility for child-raising. However, we lack solid critical analysis of the relations
between fathers and sons within these same critical terms; we need more work on the
construction of masculinity through the rituals of boyhood. Feminism probably offers
the best tools for initiating such a project, yet few male scholars have adopted its
modes of analysis to confront their own formative experiences.
Children's Culture and Adult Institutions

These recent studies of childhood have generated a more complex picture of the power
relations between children and adults. Parents, schoolteachers, church leaders, social
reformers, the adult world in general, are powerfully invested in "fixing" children's
identities. Eve Sedgwick has explored how parental anxieties that their sons and
daughters might grow up to be queer motivate the imposition of gender-specific
behaviors on "tom boys" and "sissies." Sedgwick reviews psychological literature and
clinical practices that confuse gender identification and sexual preference, seeing
inappropriate dress, play, and mannerism as early warning signs that a child has
homosexual tendencies. Sedgwick challenges efforts by the mental health profession to
"maximize the possibility of a heterosexual outcome," wondering who speaks for the
rights of queer children.
Children are subject to powerful institutions that ascribe meanings onto their minds
and bodies in order to maintain social control. Barrie Thorne suggests, for example,
that teachers' needs to routinize their procedures and to break their classes into
manageably scaled groups results in a constant reinforcement of the basic binaries

Henry Jenkins
between "boys and girls." Children are more likely to play together across gender
differences in their own neighborhoods, outside of adult supervision, than within
school cafeterias and playgrounds.
Children's culture is shaped by adult agendas and expectations, at least on the site of
production and often at the moment of reception, and these materials leave lasting
imprints on children's social and cultural development. Elizabeth Segel has examined
how publishers, librarians, and educators shape children's access to different genres,
resulting in gender divides in reading interests that carry into adult life. The separation
of domestic based stories for girls and adventure stories for boys re-affirm the
gendering of the public and private spheres. Boy's books were often "chronicles of
growth to manhood," while girl's books often "depicted a curbing of autonomy in
adolescence." The two forms of literature prepare girls and boys for their expected
roles in adult society. However, these gender designations are not totally rigid in
practice. Young girls often read boys books for pleasure and boys books are more
consistently taught in the classroom. On the other hand, boys typically have been
reluctant to engage with books with female protagonists or feminine subject matter.
Such an imbalance, Segel argues, extracts "a heavy cost in feminine self-esteem" and
may be even "more restrictive of boys'... freedom to read." Ellen Seiter has extended
Segel's analysis to the gendering of children's television. Feminists, she argues, may be
well-meaning when they attack hyper-feminine programs like My Little Pony and
Strawberry Shortcake, but their continued disparagement of the things girls like may
contribute to -- rather than help to rectify -- girls' declining self esteem.
The Resistant Rituals of Childhood

Without denying the tremendous cultural power behind these adult efforts to control
children's identity formation, scholarship on children's culture also acknowledges the
ways children resist, transform, or redefine adult prerogatives, making their own uses
of cultural materials, and enacting their own fantasies through play. Miriam Formanek-
Brunnel has researched the gender politics of doll play in the 19th century, indicating
both ways that dolls were valued by adults as a means of inculcating domestic skills in
young girls and the ways that doll play might "subvert convention, mock maternalism,
and undermine restrictions." On the one hand, the gift of a doll was intended to
encourage girls to sew and to rehearse other "domestic arts" expected of them as future
wives and mothers; the fragility of china dolls required delicate movements and
nurturing gestures. On the other, young girls often used the dolls to rehearse funerals
and mourning rituals, expressing a core ambivalence about their future maternal roles,
or played with them aggressively, chopping off their hair or driving nails through their
bodies. Formanek-Brunnel suggests:
"Girls in the process of constructing their own notion of girlhood

engaged their parents in a pre-conscious political struggle to define,
decide, and determine the meaning of dolls in their own lives and as

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representations of their own culture."
Erica Rand's Barbie's Queer Accessories suggests such localized resistance continues
in contemporary doll play. Rand solicited and interpreted adult's memories of Barbie
play, finding that these recollections often circle around unsanctioned and often
erotically charged play. Many lesbians remembered transforming the fashion model
into a "gender outlaw," drawing on their memories of childhood doll play to frame
"dyke destiny" stories. Just as the myth of childhood innocence naturalizes
heterosexual assumptions about appropriate gender roles, "dyke destiny" stories
suggest the inevitability of queer sexual orientation by tracing its roots back to early
childhood. Rand encourages skepticism about such stories, examining the way that
memory retrospectively rewrites the past to conform to our present-day identities.
Rand sees a constant struggle within children's culture (and within adult memories of
childhood) between moments of hegemonic incorporation and moments of resistance.
The same girl or boy may sometimes conform and sometimes disobey.
Adult institutions and practices make "bids" on how children will understand
themselves and the world around them, yet they can never be certain how children will
take up and respond to those "bids." A growing literature depicts children as active
creators, who use the resources provided them by the adult world as raw materials for
their play activities, their jokes, their drawings, and their own stories. Shelby Ann Wolf
and Shirley Brice Heath's The Braid of Literature offers a detailed description of
Heath's own young daughters as readers, documenting the many ways they integrated
favorite books their lives. Children's books became reference points for explaining
their own experiences. The girls often spoofed their language, characters, and
situations. The young girls felt compelled not only to re-read favorite stories but to
enact them with their bodies. Such play represents a testing of alternative identities.
Maintaining a fluid relationship to adult roles, children try things out through their
play, seeing if they fit or make sense, and discarding them when they tire of them.
The Ket Aesthetic

Adult control over the cultural materials which enter children's lives certainly
constrains the array of ideas and identities they can use in their play; adult restrictions
on play activities limit this process of ideological exploration; yet, nothing can fully
block oppositional meanings from entering children's lives. Alison James has explored
how children's relations to cheap candies (which are called "kets" in British slang)
suggest an oppositional aesthetic, one that challenges or reverses adult categories and
carves out a kids-only culture. Children embrace candies which provoke strange
sensations (bubbling or crackling on their tongues), which incorporate unfamiliar taste
combinations, which mimic things (rats, worms, etc.) adults refuse to eat, which
embrace lurid or jarring colors, or which encourage playful and messy modes of
consumption.

Henry Jenkins
James describes "children's culture" as children's space for cultural expression using
materials bought cheaply from the parent culture but viewed with adult disapproval.
Her account could not differ more from Kline's conception of a children's culture
produced and controlled by adults. The cheaper they are in price, the more cultural
goods are likely to reflect children's own aesthetic and cultural sensibilities. Materials
children can purchase with their allowances (such as candy, bubblegum cards, or
comic books) are less likely to bear the heavy imprint of adult gatekeepers than high
cost items (books and videos) parents purchase as gifts.
This "ket" aesthetic can also be recognized within children's television programs, such
as the "scream-real-loud" realm of Pee-Wee's Playhouse or the slop-and-slime world of
Nickelodeon's game shows, or in video games, which have often faced reformist
pressures because of their use of scatological or gory imagery. As Marsha Kinder has
suggested, Nickelodeon's self-promotion has often encouraged an ethos of
"generational conflict," stressing that parents "just don't get" its appeal to children:
"adults are untrustworthy; they wear deodorant and ties; they shave under their arms,
they watch the news and do other disgusting things." Nickelodeon's self-presentation
walks a thin line, using children's oppositional aesthetic to package shows (such as
Lassie) which contain little parents would find offensive and creating programs (such
as Kids Court or Linda Ellerbee's news specials) which almost -- but usually not quite
-- embrace a politics of kid-empowerment. Some of Nick's shows encourage children
to cast a critical eye towards adult institutions, teach them to be skeptical readers of
media images, encourage them to take more active roles in their communities
(including leading fights for free expression within their schools) and take seriously
their own goals for the nation's future (as in their Kids Pick the President campaign
coverage). Nickelodeon's claims to be "the kids only network" erects a sharp line
between the realms of children and adults.
This approach contrasts sharply with the children's programs of the 1950s (such as
Howdy Doody and Winky Dink and You) which Lynn Spigel has characterized as
inviting a "dissolution of age categories." Such programs, she argues, were "filled with
liminal characters, characters that existed somewhere in between child and adult" and
which encouraged a playful transgression of age-appropriate expectations. Spigel
points to their covert appeal to adult fantasies of escaping into the realm of childhood
free play from the conformity and productivity expected of grownups in Eisenhower's
America. The Nickelodeon programs such as Double Dare or What Would You Do, on
the other hand, stage contests between children and adults, invite children to judge
their parents or to smack them with cream pies and douse them with green slime. They
support children's recognition of a core antagonism with grownups, while positioning
the network, its programs, and its spin-off products on the kid side of that divide.
This desire to create an autonomous cultural space for children's play is not new, nor
does such freedom from adult control necessarily retard the child's inculcation into

Henry Jenkins
anticipated social roles. Children must break with their parents before they can enter
into adult roles and responsibilities. Children's play has often been a space where they
experimented with autonomy and self-mastery. E. Anthony Rotundo's analysis of "Boy
Culture" in 19th century America suggests its complex relationship to the adult world.
As industrialization led to a greater division of labor, forcing men to leave the home to
work in the factories and leaving women in the domestic sphere to raise the young, the
formation of masculine identities entered a new phase. Young boys sought an escape
from maternal restraint, fleeing into a sphere of male action and adventure. Their play
with other boys was clearly framed as oppositional to adults, taking the form of daring
raids on privileged adult spaces, comic assaults on parental authority, or simply a
rejection of maternal rules and restrictions. Through this play, boys acquired the
aggression, competitiveness, daring, self-discipline, and physical mastery expected of
those who would inhabit a culture of rugged individualism. The more rambunctious
and irresponsible aspects of this culture would need to be tempered as the young males
entered adult jobs and family relations, yet this rough-and-tumble "boy culture"
prepared them more fully for their future roles than the maternal sanctioned activities
of the domestic sphere.
Embracing a politics of appropriation and resistance runs the risk of romanticizing

child's play as the seeds of cultural revolution. I use the word, romanticizing, with
precision here. In many ways, the celebration of children as "gender outlaws" or
cultural rebels can be traced back to Rousseau's celebration of the "natural" and
"spontaneous" child as embodying a freedom not yet subordinated to the demands of
the civilized world. While this myth of the child certainly has advantages over the
more repressive image of the child as a blank slate or the multivalent image of the
innocent child at risk, it is nevertheless a myth. Perhaps, there is no way for adults to
speak of children without putting words in their mouths and turning them into symbols
for our own use. However, Rotundo's analysis suggests one escape from this impasse,
looking at the ways children's play represents a temporary space of freedom, while
contributing actively to socialization and indoctrination into cultural values. Rotundo
preserves the idea of children's social and cultural agency without assuming that they
are outside the cultural formations or material conditions that shape all human
interactions.
CONCLUSION
THE POLITICAL STAKES OF CHILDREN'S CULTURE
"Children are at the epicenter of the information revolution, ground zero

of the digital world.....After centuries of regulation, sometimes benign,
sometimes not, kids are moving out from under our pious control,
finding one another via the great hive that is the net....Children can for
the first time reach past the suffocating boundaries of social convention,
past their elders' rigid notions of what is good for them."

Henry Jenkins
-- Jon Katz
The Children's Culture Reader seeks modes of cultural analysis that do not simply
celebrate children's resistance to adult authority but provide children with the tools to
realize their own political agendas or to participate in the production of their own
culture. The challenge is to find models that account for the complexity of the
interactions between children and adults, the mutuality and the opposition between
their cultural agendas. Feminist analysis has taught us that politics works as much
through the micro-practices of everyday life as through large-scale institutions and that
our struggle to define our identities in relations to other members of our families often
determines how we understand our place in the world.
As I have been editing this collection, I have been continually asked to explain and
justify the "political stakes" in re-examining children's culture. As this discussion has
already suggested, I consider such questions misguided, both because they accept at
face value the premise that childhood is a space largely "innocent" of adult political
struggles and because they fail to recognize how foundational the figure of the
innocent child is to almost all contemporary forms of politics. Issues involving children
are often viewed as "soft" compared to "hardcore" issues like tax cuts, crime bills, and
defense expenditures, a language that suggests historic divisions between a feminine
domestic sphere and a masculine public sphere. Feminists have long campaigned for a
reassessment of those priorities and a recognition of the political stakes in domestic
life. Yet, the politics of the public sphere, no less than the politics of the domestic
sphere, rests on the figure of the child, as we saw in the various evocations of
childhood at the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Often, the figure of
the brutalized and victimized child gets mobilized in campaigns to build support for
war; the figure of the dead child is the most powerful trope in the campaign for tougher
sentencing of criminals. For example, the recent "Megan's Law," which requires public
notification of the movement of convicted child molesters and other offenders into the
community, will be forever associated with the memory of a specific child victim.
Moreover, without a politics of the family, without a progressive conception of

children's culture, the left lacks the ability to literally and figuratively reproduce itself.
We need to be engaged in the process not only of critiquing traditional conceptions of
the family, but of imagining alternative ways that families might perform their
responsibilities for the care and raising of the young. We need to think about our roles
as parents, teachers, and citizens in ways that help us to prepare children to participate
in the process of social change and political transformation. We need to embrace
approaches to teaching and social policy which acknowledge children's cultural
productivity and which provide them with the materials and skills they need to
critically evaluate their place in the world. The
Birmingham tradition of cultural studies helped us to question the labeling of youth
cultures as "deviant" by adult standards, seeing in their "hooliganism" the signs of a

Henry Jenkins
subversive or resistant subculture. We still lack a similarly political vocabulary for

examining moments when children buck adult demands. Instead, we frame such
localized moments of resistance in moralistic categories of "naughtiness" or in
developmental psychological terms as "testing limits." The need is to recognize that
children's disobedience of teachers, for example, might originate in a context of
economic or racial inequalities, might express something of the frustrations of coping
with a world which devalues your interests and seeks to impose adult values onto your
activities. If politics is ultimately about the distribution of power, then the power
imbalance between children and adults remains, at heart, a profoundly political matter.
Herb Kohl confronts these questions when he debates whether we should "burn
Babar." He invites us to question whether our recognition of noxious ideologies in
traditional children's literature (such as Babar's pro-colonialism agenda) compels us to
banish them or whether we should encourage children to become critical readers
locating and questioning the implicit assumptions they find in the culture around them.
As Kohl writes:
"The challenge parents face is how to integrate encounters with

stereotypes into their children's sensibility and help their children
become critical of aspects of the culture that denigrate or humiliate them
or anyone else....Instead of prohibiting things that tempt children, this
means allowing them the freedom to explore things while trusting them
to make sensible and humane judgments."
Jon Katz confronts these challenges when he shifts the focus of debates about
cyberspace away from the question of how we might protect our children from
corrupting influences (whether through legal sanctions or filtering technology) and
towards how we might empower children to actively contribute to the political culture
of the net. Katz argues that children, no less than adults, have "certain inalienable
rights not conferred at the caprice of arbitrary authority," rights that include access to
the materials of their culture and the technologies which enable more widespread
communication as well as "the right to refuse to be force-fed other generation's
values." Katz's polemical and suggestive essay points towards a reassessment of the
role of education, away from a focus on the transmission of established cultural norms
and towards the development of skills which enable children to question the society
around them and to communicate their ideas, via new technologies, with others of their
generations. He writes:
"Children need help in becoming civic-minded citizens of the digital age,

figuring out how to use the machinery in the service of some broader
social purposes....But more than anything else, children need to have
their culture affirmed. They need their parents, teachers, guardians and
leaders to accept that there is a new political reality for children, and the

Henry Jenkins
constructs that governed their own lives and culture are no longer the
only relevant or useful ones."
Sally Mann confronts these challenges when she creates photographs of children,
which emphasize their fears, anxieties, and uncertainties, their everyday scrapes and
bruises, and sexuality rather than representing childhood as a wholesome utopia. At
their best, Mann's photographs strip away the myth of childhood innocence to show the
struggles of children to define themselves.
Linda Ellerbee confronts these challenges when she creates television programs that
encourage children's awareness of real-world problems, such as the LA Riots, and
enable to find their own critical voice to speak back against the adult world. She trusts
children to confront realities from which other adults might shield them, offering them
the facts needed to form their own opinions and the air time to discuss issues.
These critics, educators, and artists offer us models of a children's culture which is
progressive in both its form and its content. They move beyond mythic innocence and
toward a recognition and advocacy of children's cultural, social, and political agency.
Such works do not ignore the fact that children suffer real material problems, including
neglect, abuse, and poverty, and that there are times and places where adults must
protect them from themselves and from the world. There are also times and places
where we need to listen to our children and factor their needs, desires, and agendas into
our own sense of the world and into the decisions that effects our children's lives.
Children need adults to create the conditions through which they develop a political
consciousness, to defend their access to the information they need to frame their own
judgments, and to build the technologies which enable them to exchange their ideas
with others of their generation. They need us to be more than guardians of the fort or
protectors of the village, and we will not rise to those challenges as long as our actions
are governed by familiar myths of the innocent child. The goal is not to erase the line
between children and adult, which we must observe if we are both to protect and
empower the young. The goal is to offer a fuller, more complex picture of children's
culture that can enable more meaningful, realistic, and effective political change.

Henry Jenkins - "COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT": VIDEO GAMES AS GENDERED PLAY SPACES
"COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT": VIDEO GAMES AS GENDERED PLAY

SPACES
by Henry Jenkins
[Download PostScript version for printing]
A Tale of Two Childhoods

Sometimes, I feel nostalgic for the spaces of my boyhood, growing up in suburban
Atlanta in the 1960s. My big grassy front yard sloped sharply downward into a ditch
where we could float boats on a rainy day. Beyond, there was a pine forest where my
brother and I could toss pine cones like grenades or snap sticks together like swords. In
the backyard, there was a patch of grass where we could wrestle or play kickball and a
treehouse, which sometimes bore a pirate flag and at other times, the Stars and Bars of
the Confederacy. Out beyond our own yard, there was a bamboo forest where we could
play Tarzan, and vacant lots, construction sites, sloping streets, and a neighboring farm
(the last vestige of a rural area turned suburban).
Between my house and the school, there was another forest, which, for the full length
of my youth, remained undeveloped. A friend and I would survey this land, claiming it
for our imaginary kingdoms of Jungleloca and Freedonia. We felt a proprietorship over
that space, even though others used it for schoolyard fisticuffs, smoking cigarettes or
playing kissing games. When we were there, we rarely encountered adults, though
when we did, it usually spelt trouble. We would come home from these secret places,
covered with Georgia red mud.
Of course, we spent many afternoons at home, watching old horror movies or action-
adventure series reruns, and our mothers would fuss at us to go outside. Often,
something we had seen in television would inspire our play, stalking through the
woods like Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman or “socking” and powing” each other under the
influence of Batman. Today, each time I visit my parents, I am shocked to see that
most of those “sacred” places are now occupied by concrete, bricks, or asphalt. They
managed to get a whole subdivision out of Jungleloca and Freedonia!
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/pub/complete.html (1 of 27) [2007-06-28 02:32:40]

My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard. He has grown up in various
apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass
buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on
the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of
anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause
damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some
blocks away which we could go on outings a few times a week and where we could
watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn
room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by
my son’s constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he
should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask “Where?”
But, he did have video games which took him across lakes of fire, through cities in the
clouds, along dark and gloomy back streets, and into dazzling neon-lit Asian
marketplaces. Video games constitute virtual playing spaces which allow home-bound
children like my son to extend their reach, to explore, manipulate, and interact with a
more diverse range of imaginary places than constitute the often drab, predictable, and
overly-familiar spaces of their everyday lives. Keith Feinstein (1997), President of the
Video Game Conservatory, argues that video games preserve many aspects of
traditional play spaces and culture, maintaining aspects that motivates children to:
learn about the environment that they find themselves living in. Video
games present the opportunity to explore and discover, as well as to
combat others of comparable skill (whether they be human or electronic)
and to struggle with them in a form that is similar to children wrestling,
or scrambling for the same ball - they are nearly matched, they aren't
going to really do much damage, yet it feels like an all-important fight
for that child at that given moment. Space Invaders gives us visceral
thrill and poses mental/physical challenges similar to a schoolyard game
of dodge-ball (or any of the hundred of related kids games). Video
games play with us, a never tiring playmate.
Feinstein’s comment embraces some classical conceptions of play (such as spacial

exploration and identity formation), suggesting that video game play isn’t
fundamentally different from backyard play. To facilitate such immersive play, to
achieve an appropriate level of “holding power” that enables children to transcend their
immediate environments, video game spaces require concreteness and vividness. The
push in the video game industry for more than a decade has been towards the
development of more graphically complex, more visually engaging, more three-
dimensionally rendered spaces, and towards quicker, more sophisticated, more flexible
interactions with those spaces. Video games tempt the player to play longer, putting
more and more quarters into the arcade machine (or providing “play value” for those
who’ve bought the game) by unveiling ever more spectacular “microworlds,” the

revelation of a new level the reward for having survived and mastered the previous
environment. (Fuller and Jenkins, 1995)
Video games advertise themselves as taking us places very different from where we
live:
Say hello to life in the fast lane. Sonic R for Sega Saturn is a full-on,
pedal-to-the-metal hi-speed dash through five 3D courses, each rendered
in full 360 degree panoramas....You’ll be flossing bug guts out of your
teeth for weeks. (Sonic R, 1998)
Take a dip in these sub-infested waters for a spot of nuclear fishin’....

Don’t worry. You’ll know you’re in too deep when the water pressure
caves your head in. (Critical Depth, 1998)
Hack your way through a savage world or head straight for the arena....
Complete freedom of movement. (Die By the Sword, 1998)
Strap in and throttle up as you whip through the most realistic and
immersive powerboat racing game ever made. Jump over roadways, and
through passing convoys, or speed between oil tankers, before they close
off the track and turn your boat to splinters. Find a shortcut and take the
lead, or better yet, secure your victory and force your opponent into a
river barge at 200 miles per hour. (VR Sports, 1998)
Who wouldn’t want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion
promised by today’s video games? Watch children playing these games, their bodies
bobbing and swaying to the on-screen action, and it’s clear they are there — in the
fantasy world, battling it out with the orcs and goblins, pushing their airplanes past the
sound barrier, or splashing their way through the waves in their speed boats. Perhaps,
my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my
bike whizzing down the hills of the suburban back streets, or settled into my treehouse
during a thunder storm with a good adventure novel — intensity of experience, escape
from adult regulation; in short, “complete freedom of movement.”
This essay will offer a cultural geography of video game spaces, one which uses
traditional children’s play and children’s literature as points of comparison to the
digital worlds contemporary children inhabit. Specifically, I examine the “fit” between
video games and traditional boy culture and review several different models for
creating virtual play spaces for girls. So much of the existing research on gender and
games takes boy’s fascination with these games as a given. As we attempt to offer
video games for girls, we need to better understand what draws boys to video games

and whether our daughters should feel that same attraction.
Video games are often blamed for the listlessness or hyperactivity of our children, yet
sociologists find these same behavioral problems occurring among all children raised
in highly restrictive and confined physical environments. (Booth and Johnson, 1975;
van Staden, 1984). Social reformers sometimes speak of children choosing to play
video games rather than playing outside, when, in many cases, no such choice is
available. More and more Americans live in urban or semi-urban neighborhoods.
Fewer of us own our homes and more of us live in apartment complexes. Fewer adults
have chosen have children and our society has become increasingly hostile to the
presence of children. In many places, “no children” policies severely restrict where
parents can live. Parents, for a variety of reasons, are frightened to have their children
on the streets, and place them under “protective custody.” “Latch key” children return
from school and lock themselves in their apartments (Kincheloe, 1997).
In the 19th century, children living along the frontier or on America’s farms enjoyed
free range over a space which was ten square miles or more. Elliot West (1992)
describes boys of 9 or 10 going camping alone for days on end, returning when they
were needed to do chores around the house. The early 20th century saw the
development of urban playgrounds in the midst of city streets, responding to a growing
sense of children’s diminishing access to space and an increased awareness of issues of
child welfare (Cavallo, 1991), but autobiographies of the period stress the availability
of vacant lots and back allies which children could claim as their own play
environments. Sociologists writing about the suburban America of my boyhood found
that children enjoyed a play terrain of one to five blocks of spacious backyards and
relatively safe subdivision streets (Hart, 1979). Today, at the end of the 20th century,
many of our children have access to the one to five rooms inside their apartments.
Video game technologies expand the space of their imagination.
Let me be clear — I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the
physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son could come
home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns. However, we
sometimes blame video games for problems which they do not cause — perhaps
because of our own discomfort with these technologies which were not part of our
childhood. When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Ct.) target video game
violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions which give rise
to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies which make it harder for most
of us to own our homes, and the development practices which pave over the old
grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear;
rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement.
Moving Beyond “Home Base”: Why Physical Spaces Matter

The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the

impact of “sunshine and good exercise” upon our physical well-being. Roger Hart’s
Children’s Experience of Place (1979), for example, stresses the importance of
children’s manipulations and explorations of their physical environment to their
development of self-confidence and autonomy. Our physical surroundings are
“relatively simple and relatively stable” compared to the “overwhelmingly complex
and ever shifting” relations between people, and thus, they form core resources for
identity formation. The unstructured spaces, the playforts and treehouses, children
create for themselves in the cracks, gullies, back allies, and vacant lots of the adult
world constitute what Robin C. Moore (1986) calls “childhood’s domain” or William
Van Vliet (1983) has labeled as a “fourth environment” outside the adult-structured
spaces of home, school, and playground. These informal, often temporary play spaces
are where free and unstructured play occurs. Such spaces surface most often on the
lists children make of “special” or “important” places in their lives. M. H. Matthews
(1992) stresses the “topophilia,” the heightened sense of belonging and ownership,
children develop as they map their fantasies of empowerment and escape onto their
neighborhoods. Frederick Donaldson (1970) proposed two different classifications of
these spaces — home base, the world which is secure and familiar, and home region,
an area undergoing active exploration, a space under the process of being colonized by
the child. Moore (1986) writes:
One of the clearest expressions of the benefits of continuity in the urban

landscape was the way in which children used it as an outdoor
gymnasium. As I walked along a Mill Hill street with Paul, he
continually went darting ahead, leapfrogging over concrete bollards,
hopping between paving slabs, balancing along the curbside. In each
study area, certain kids seemed to dance through their surroundings on
the look out for microfeatures with which to test their bodies....Not only
did he [David, another boy in the study], like Paul, jump over gaps
between things, go ‘tightrope walking’ along the tops of walls,
leapfrogging objects on sight, but at one point he went ‘mountain
climbing’ up a roughly built, nine-foot wall that had many
serendipitously placed toe and handholds. (p.72)
These discoveries arise from active exploration and spontaneous engagement with their
physical surroundings. Children in the same neighborhoods may have fundamentally
different relations to the spaces they share, cutting their own paths, giving their own
names to features of their environment. The “wild spaces” are far more important,
many researchers conclude, than playgrounds, which can only be used in sanctioned
ways, since they allow many more opportunities for children to modify their physical
environment.
Children’s access to spaces are structured around gender differences. Observing the
use of space within 1970s suburban America, Hart (1979) found that boys enjoyed far

greater mobility and range than girls of the same age and class background. In the
course of an afternoon’s play, a typical 10-12 year old boy might travel a distance of
2452 yards, while the average 10-12 year old girl might only travel 959 yards. For the
most part, girls expanded their geographic range only to take on responsibilities and
perform chores for the family, while parents often turned a blind eye to a boy’s
movements into prohibited spaces. The boys Hart (1979) observed were more likely to
move beyond their homes in search of “rivers, forts and treehouses, woods, ballfields,
hills, lawns, sliding places, and climbing trees” while girls were more like to seek
commercially developed spaces, such as stores or shopping malls. Girls were less
likely than boys to physically alter their play environment, to dam creeks or build forts.
Such gender differences in mobility, access and control over physical space increased
as children grew older. As C. Ward (1977) notes:
Whenever we discuss the part the environment plays in the lives of

children, we are really talking about boys. As a stereotype, the child in
the city is a boy. Girls are far less visible...The reader can verify this by
standing in a city street at any time of day and counting the children
seen. The majority will be boys. (p.152)
One study found that parents were more likely to describe boys as being “outdoors”
children and girls as “indoor” children (Newson and Newson, 1976). Another 1975
study (Rheingold and Cook), which inventoried the contents of children’s bedrooms,
found boys more likely to possess a range of vehicles and sports equipment designed to
encourage outside play, while the girls rooms were stocked with dolls, doll clothes, and
other domestic objects. Parents of girls were more likely to express worries about the
dangers their children face on the streets and to structure girls’ time for productive
household activities or educational play (Matthews, 1992).
Historically, girl culture formed under closer maternal supervision and girls toys were
designed to foster female-specific skills and competencies and prepare girls for their
future domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers. The doll’s central place in
girlhood reflected maternal desires to encourage daughters to sew; the doll’s china
heads and hands fostered delicate gestures and movements (Formanek-Brunnel, 1998).
However, these skills were not acquired without some resistance. Nineteenth century
girls were apparently as willing as today’s girls to mistreat their dolls, cutting their
hair, driving nails into their bodies.
If cultural geographers are right when they argue that children’s ability to explore and
modify their environments plays a large role in their growing sense of mastery,
freedom and self confidence, then the restrictions placed on girls’ play have a crippling
effect. Conversely, this research would suggest that children’s declining access to play
space would have a more dramatic impact on the culture of young boys, since girls
already faced domestic confinement.

Putting Boy Culture Back in the Home

Clods were handy and the air was full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid
like a hail storm; and before Aunt Polly could collect her surprised faculties and sally
to the rescue, six or seven clods had taken personal effect, and Tom was over the fence
and gone....He presently got safely beyond the reach of capture and punishment, and
hasted toward the public square of the village, where two ‘military’ companies of boys
had met for conflict, according to previous appointment. Tom was the general of one
of these armies, Joe Harper (a bosom friend) general of the other....Tom’s army won a
great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted,
prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for
the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away,
and Tom turned homeward alone. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1961),
pp.19-20.
What E. Anthony Rotundo (1994) calls “boy culture” emerged in the context of the
growing separation of the male public sphere and the female private sphere in the wake
of the industrial revolution. Boys were cut off from the work life of their fathers and
left under the care of their mothers. According to Rotundo, boys escaped from the
home into the outdoors play space, freeing them to participate in a semi-autonomous
“boy culture” which cast itself in opposition to maternal culture:
Where women’s sphere offered kindness, morality, nurture and a gentle

spirit, the boys’ world countered with energy, self-assertion, noise, and a
frequent resort to violence. The physical explosiveness and the
willingness to inflect pain contrasted so sharply with the values of the
home that they suggest a dialogue in actions between the values of the
two spheres — as if a boy’s aggressive impulses, so relentlessly opposed
at home, sought extreme forms of release outside it; then, with stricken
consciences, the boys came home for further lessons in self-restraint.
(p.37)
The boys took transgressing maternal prohibitions as proof they weren’t “mama’s
boys.” Rotundo argues that this break with the mother was a necessary step towards
autonomous manhood. One of the many tragedies of our gendered-division of labor
may be the ways that it links misogyny — an aggressive fighting back against the
mother — with the process of developing self-reliance. Contrary to the Freudian
concept of the oedipal complex (which focuses on boy’s struggles with their all-
powerful fathers as the site of identity formation), becoming an adult male often means
struggling with (and in many cases, actively repudiating) maternal culture. Fathers, on
the other hand, offered little guidance to their sons, who, Rotundo argues, acquired
masculine skills and values from other boys. By contrast, girls play culture was often
“interdependent” with the realm of their mother’s domestic activities, insuring a

smoother transition into anticipated adult roles, but allowing less autonomy.
What happens when the physical spaces of 19th century boy culture are displaced by
the virtual spaces of contemporary video games? Cultural geographers have long
argued that television is a poor substitute for backyard play, despite its potential to
present children with a greater diversity of spaces than can be found in their immediate
surroundings, precisely because it is a spectatorial rather than a participatory medium.
Moore (1986), however, leaves open the prospect that a more interactive digital
medium might serve some of the same developmental functions as backyard play. A
child playing a video game, searching for the path around obstacles, or looking for an
advantage over imaginary opponents, engages in many of the same “mapping”
activities as children searching for affordances in their real-world environments.
Rotundo’s core claims about 19th century boy culture hold true for the “video game
culture” of contemporary boyhood. This congruence may help us to account for the
enormous popularity of these games with young boys. This “fit” should not be
surprising when we consider that the current game genres reflect intuitive choices by
men who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when suburban boy culture still reigned.
(1) Nineteenth century “boy culture” was charactered by its independence from the
realm of both mothers and fathers. It was a space where boys could develop autonomy
and self confidence. Twentieth century video game culture also carves out a cultural
realm for modern day children separate from the space of their parents. They often play
the games in their rooms and guard their space against parental intrusion. Parents often
express a distaste for the games’ pulpy plots and lurid images. As writers like Jon Katz
(1997) and Don Tapscott (1997) note, children’s relative comfort with digital media is
itself a generational marker, with adults often unable to comprehend the movement and
colored shapes of the video screen. Here, however, the loss of spacial mobility is
acutely felt — the “bookworm,” the boy who spent all of his time in his room reading,
had a “mama’s boy” reputation in the old “boy culture.” Modern day boys have had to
accommodate their domestic confinement with their definitions of masculinity, perhaps
accounting, in part, for the hypermasculine and hyperviolent content of the games
themselves. The game player has a fundamentally different image than the “book
worm.”
(2) In 19th century “boy culture,” youngsters gained recognition from their peers for
their daring, often proven through stunts (such as swinging on vines, climbing trees, or
leaping from rocks as they cross streams) or through pranks (such as stealing apples or
doing mischief on adults.)
In 20th century video game culture, children gain recognition for their daring as
demonstrated in the virtual worlds of the game, overcoming obstacles, beating bosses,
and mastering levels. Nineteenth century boys’s trespasses on neighbor’s property or

confrontations with hostile shopkeepers are mirrored by the visual vocabulary of the
video games which often pit smaller protagonists against the might and menace of
much larger rivals. Much as cultural geographers describe the boys’ physical
movements beyond their home bases into developing home territories, the video games
allow boys to gradually develop their mastery over the entire digital terrain, securing
their future access to spaces by passing goal posts or finding warp zones.
(3)The central virtues of the 19th century “boy culture” were mastery and self-control.
The boys set tasks and goals for themselves which required discipline in order to
complete. Through this process of setting and meeting challenges, they acquired the
virtues of manhood.
The central virtues of video game culture are mastery (over the technical skills required
by the games) and self-control (manual dexterity). Putting in the long hours of
repetition and failure necessary to master a game also requires discipline and the ability
to meet and surpass self-imposed goals. Most contemporary video games are ruthlessly
goal-driven. Boys will often play the games, struggling to master a challenging level,
well past the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. Children are not so much
“addicted” to video games as they are unwilling to quit before they have met their
goals, and the games seem to always set new goalposts, inviting us to best “just one
more level.” One of the limitations of the contemporary video game is that it provides
only pre-structured forms of interactivity, and in that sense, video games are more like
playgrounds and city parks rather than wild-spaces. For the most part, video game
players can only exploit built-in affordances and pre-programed pathways. “Secret
codes,” “Easter Eggs,” and “Warp zones” function in digital space like secret paths do
in physical space and are eagerly sought by gamers who want to go places and see
things others can’t find.
(4) The 19th century “boy culture” was hierarchical with a member’s status dependent
upon competitive activity, direct confrontation and physical challenges. The boy
fought for a place in the gang’s inner circle, hoping to win admiration and respect.
Twentieth century video game culture can also be hierarchical with a member gaining
status by being able to complete a game or log a big score. Video game masters move
from house to house to demonstrate their technical competency and to teach others
have to “beat” particularly challenging levels. The video arcade becomes a proving
ground for contemporary masculinity, while many games are designed for the arcade,
demanding a constant turn-over of coins for play and intensifying the action into
roughly two minute increments. Often, single-player games generate digital rivals who
may challenge us to beat their speeds or battle them for dominance.
(5) Nineteenth century “boy culture” was sometimes brutally violent and physically

aggressive; children hurt each other or got hurt trying to prove their mastery and
daring. Twentieth century video game culture displaces this physical violence into a
symbolic realm. Rather than beating each other up behind the school, boys combat
imaginary characters, finding a potentially safer outlet for their aggressive feelings. We
forget how violent previous boy culture was. Rotundo (1994)writes:
The prevailing ethos of the boys’ world not only supported the
expression of impulses such as dominance and aggression (which had
evident social uses), but also allowed the release of hostile, violent
feelings (whose social uses were less evident). By allowing free passage
to so many angry or destructive emotions, boy culture sanctioned a good
deal of intentional cruelty, like the physical torture of animals and the
emotional violence of bullying....If a times boys acted like a hostile pack
of wolves that preyed on its own kind as well as on other species, they
behaved at other times like a litter of playful pups who enjoy romping,
wrestling and testing new skills. (45)
Even feelings of fondness and friendship were expressed through physical means,
including greeting each other with showers of brickbats and offal. Such a culture is as
violent as the world depicted in contemporary video games, which have the virtue of
allowing growing boys to express their aggression and rambunctiousness through
indirect, rather than direct, means.
(6) Nineteenth century “boy culture” expressed itself through scatological humor. Such
bodily images (of sweat, spit, snot, shit, and blood) reflected the boy’s growing
awareness of their bodies and signified their rejection of maternal constraints.
Twentieth century video game culture has often been criticized for its dependence
upon similar kinds of scatological images, with the blood and gore of games like
Mortal Kombat (with its “end moves” of dismemberment and decapitation), providing
some of the most oft-cited evidence in campaigns to reform video game content
(Kinder, 1996). Arguably, these images serve the same functions for modern boys as
for their 19th century counterparts — allowing an exploration of what it’s like to live
in our bodies and an expression of distance from maternal regulations. Like the earlier
‘boy culture,’ this scatological imagery sometimes assumes overtly misogynistic form,
directed against women as a civilizing or controlling force, staged towards women’s
bodies as a site of physical difference and as the objects of desire/distaste. Some early
games, such as Super Metroid, rewarded player competence by forcing female
characters to strip down to their underwear if the boys beat a certain score.
(7) Nineteenth century “boy culture” depended on various forms of role-playing, often
imitating the activities of adult males. Rotundo (1994) notes the popularity of games of

settlers and Indians during an age when the frontier had only recently been closed,
casting boys sometimes as their settler ancestors and other times as “savages.” Such
play mapped the competitive and combative boy culture ethos onto the adult realm,
thus exaggerating the place of warfare in adult male lives. Through such play, children
tested alternative social roles, examined adult ideologies, and developed a firmer sense
of their own abilities and identities. Boy culture emphasized exuberant spontaneity; it
allowed free rein to aggressive impulses and revealed in physical prowess and
assertion. Boy culture was a world of play, a social space where one evaded the duties
and restrictions of adult society...Men were quiet and sober, for theirs was a life of
serious business. They had families to support, reputations to earn, responsibilities to
meet. Their world was based on work, not play, and their survival in it depended on
patient planning, not spontaneous impulse. To prosper, then, a man had to delay
gratification and restrain desire. Of course, he also needed to be aggressive and
competitive, and he needed an instinct for self-advancement. But he had to channel
those assertive impulses in ways that were suitable to the abstract battles and complex
issues of middle-class men’s work. (55) Today, the boys are using the same
technologies as their fathers, even if they are using them to pursue different fantasies.
(8) In 19th century “boy culture,” play activities were seen as opportunities for social
interactions and bonding. Boys formed strong ties which formed the basis for adult
affiliations, for participation in men’s civic clubs and fraternities, and for business
partnerships. The track record of contemporary video game culture at providing a basis
for a similar social networking is more mixed. In some cases, the games constitute both
play space and playmates, reflecting the physical isolation of contemporary children
from each other. In other cases, the games provide the basis for social interactions at
home, at school and at the video arcades. Children talk about the games together, over
the telephone or now, over the Internet, as well as in person, on the playground or at
the school cafeteria. Boys compare notes, map strategies, share tips, and show off their
skills, and this exchange of video game lore provides the basis for more complex social
relations. Again, video games don’t isolate children but they fail, at the present time, to
provide the technological basis for overcoming other social and cultural factors, such
as working parents who are unable to bring children to each other’s houses or enlarged
school districts which make it harder to get together.
Far from a “corruption” of the culture of childhood, video games show strong
continuities to the boyhood play fondly remembered by previous generations. There is
a significant difference, however. The 19th century “boy culture” enjoyed such
freedom and autonomy precisely because their activities were staged within a larger
expanse of space, because boys could occupy an environment largely unsupervised by
adults. Nineteenth century boys sought indirect means of breaking with their mothers,
escaping to spaces that were outside their control, engaging in secret activities they
knew would have met parental disapproval. The mothers, on the other hand, rarely had
to confront the nature of this “boy culture” and often didn’t even know that it existed.

The video game culture, on the other hand, occurs in plain sight, in the middle of the
family living room, or at best, in the children’s rooms. Mothers come face to face with
the messy process by which western culture turns boys into men, and it becomes the
focus of open antagonisms and the subject of tremendous guilt and anxiety. Sega’s Lee
McEnany (this volume) acknowledges that the overwhelming majority of complaints
game companies receive come from mothers, and Ellen Seiter (1996) has noted that
this statistic reflects the increased pressure placed on mothers to supervise and police
children’s relations to popular culture. Current attempts to police video game content
reflect a long history of attempts to shape and regulate children’s play culture, starting
with the playground movements of progressive America and the organization of social
groups for boys such as the Boy Scouts or Little League which tempered the more
rough-and-tumble qualities of “boy culture” and channeled them into games, sports,
and other adult-approved pastimes.
Many of us might wish to foster a boy culture that allowed the expression of affection
or the display of empowerment through nonviolent channels, that disentangled the
development of personal autonomy from the fostering of misogyny, and that
encouraged boys to develop a more nurturing, less domineering attitude to their social
and natural environments. These worthy goals are worth pursuing. We can’t simply
adopt a “boys will be boys” attitude. However, one wonders about the consequences of
such a policing action in a world that no longer offers “wild” outdoor spaces as a safety
valve for boys to escape parental control. Perhaps, our sons—and daughters — need an
unpoliced space for social experimentation, a space where they can vent their
frustrations and imagine alternative adult roles without inhibiting parental pressure.
The problem, of course, is that unlike the 19th century “boy culture,” the video game
culture is not a world children construct for themselves but rather a world made by
adult companies and sold to children. There is no way that we can escape adult
intervention in shaping children’s play environments as long as those environments are
built and sold rather than discovered and appropriated. As parents, we are thus
implicated in our children’s choice of play environments, whether we wish to be or
not, and we need to be conducting a dialogue with our children about the qualities and
values exhibited by these game worlds. One model would be for adults and children to
collaborate in the design and development of video game spaces, in the process,
developing a conversation about the nature and meanings of the worlds being
produced. Another approach (Cassell, This Volume) would be to create tools to allow
children to construct their own playspaces and then give them the space to do what
they want. Right now, parents are rightly apprehensive about a playspace which is
outside their own control and which is shaped according to adult specifications but
without their direct input.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the “boy culture” is its gender segregation. The
19th century “boy culture” played an essential role in preparing boys for entry into
their future professional roles and responsibilities; some of that same training has also

become essential for girls at a time when more and more women are working outside
the home. The motivating force behind the “girls game” movement is the idea that
girls, no less than boys, need computers at an early age if they are going to be
adequately prepared to get “good jobs for good wages.” (Jenkins and Cassell, this
volume) Characteristically, the girl’s game movement has involved the transposition of
traditional feminine play cultures into the digital realm. However, in doing so, we run
the risk of preserving, rather than transforming, those aspects of traditional “girl
culture” which kept women restricted to the domestic sphere, while denying them the
spacial exploration and mastery associated with the “boy culture.” Girls, no less than
boys, need to develop an exploratory mindset, a habit of seeking unknown spaces as
opposed to settling placidly into the domestic sphere.
Gendered Games/Gendered Books: Towards a Cultural Geography of

Imaginary Spaces
These debates about gendered play and commercial entertainment are not new,
repeating (and in a curious way, reversing) the emergence of a gender-specific set of
literary genres for children in the 19th century. As Elizabeth Segel (1986) notes, the
earliest children’s book writers were mostly women, who saw the genre as “the
exercise of feminine moral ‘influence’” upon children’s developing minds, and who
created a literature that was undifferentiated according to gender but “domestic in
setting, heavily didactic and morally or spiritually uplifting.” (171) In other words, the
earliest children’s books were “girls books” in everything but name and this isn’t
surprising at a time novel reading was still heavily associated with women. The “boys
book” emerged, in the mid-19th century, as “men of action,” industrialists and
adventurers, wrote fictions intended to counter boys’ restlessness and apathy towards
traditional children’s literature. The introduction of boys books reflected a desire to get
boys to read. Boy book fantasies of action and adventure reflected the qualities of their
pre-existing play culture, fantasies centering around “the escape from domesticity and
from the female domination of the domestic world.” (Segel, 1986, 171) If the “girls
game” movement has involved the rethinking of video game genres (which initially
emerged in a male-dominated space) in order to make digital media more attractive to
girls (and thus to encourage the development of computational skills), the “boys book”
movement sought to remake reading (which initially emerged in a female-dominated
space) to respond to male needs (and thus to encourage literacy). In both cases, the
goal seems to have been to construct fantasies which reflect the gender-specific nature
of children’s play and thus to motivate those left out of the desirable cultural practices
to get more involved. In this next section, I will consider the continuity that exists
between gender/genre configurations in children’s literature and in the digital games
marketplace.
Adventure Islands: Boy Space
Alex looked around him. There was no place to seek cover. He was too

weak to run, even if there was. His gaze returned to the stallion,
fascinated by a creature so wild and so near. Here was the wildest of all
wild animals — he had fought for everything he had ever needed, for
food, for leadership, for life itself; it was his nature to kill or be killed.
The horse reared again; then he snorted and plunged straight for the boy.
(27) — Walter Farley, The Black Stallion (1941)
The space of the boy book is the space of adventure, risk-taking and danger, of a wild
and untamed nature that must be mastered if one is to survive. The space of the boys
book offers “no place to seek cover,” and thus encourages fight-or-flight responses. In
some cases, most notably in the works of Mark Twain, the boy books represented a
nostalgic documentation of 19th century “boy culture,” its spaces, its activities, and its
values. In other cases, as in the succession of pulp adventure stories that form the
background of the boys game genres, the narratives offered us a larger-than-life
enactment of those values, staged in exotic rather than backyard spaces, involving
broader movements through space and amplifying horseplay and risktaking into
scenarios of actual combat and conquest. Boys book writers found an easy fit between
the ideologies of American “manifest destiny” or British colonialism and the adventure
stories boys preferred to read, which often took the form of quests, journeys, or
adventures into untamed and uncharted regions of the world — into the frontier of the
American west (or in the 20th century, the “final frontier” of Mars and beyond), into
the exotic realms of Africa, Asia, and South America. The protagonists were boys or
boy-like adult males, who have none of the professional responsibilities and domestic
commitments associated with adults. The heroes sought adventure by running away
from home to join the circus (Toby Tyler), to sign up as cabin boy on a ship (Treasure
Island), or to seek freedom by rafting down the river (Huckleberry Finn). They
confronted a hostile and untamed environment (as when The Jungle Book’s Mowgli
must battle “tooth and claw” with the tiger, Sheer Khan, or as when Jack London’s
protagonists faced the frozen wind of the Yukon.) They were shipwrecked on islands,
explored caves, searched for buried treasure, plunged harpoons into slick-skinned
whales, or set out alone across the dessert, the bush or the jungle. They survived
through their wits, their physical mastery, and their ability to use violent force. Each
chapter offered a sensational set piece — an ambush by wild Indians, an encountered
with a coiled cobra, a landslide, a stampede, or a sea battle — which placed the
protagonist at risk and tested his skills and courage. The persistent images of blood-
and-guts combat and cliff-hanging risks compelled boys to keep reading, making their
blood race with promises of thrills and more thrills. This rapid pace allowed little room
for moral and emotional introspection. In turn, such stories provided fantasies which
boys could enact upon their own environments. Rotundo (1994) describes 19th century
boys playing pirates, settlers and Indians, or Roman warriors, roles drawn from boys
books.
The conventions of the 19th and early 20th century boys adventure story provided the

basis for the current video game genres. The most successful console game series, such
as Capcom’s Mega Man or Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers games, combine the
iconography of multiple boys book genres. Their protagonists struggle across an
astonishingly eclectic range of landscapes — desserts, frozen wastelands, tropical rain
forests, urban undergrounds — and encounter resistance from strange hybrids (who
manage to be animal, machine, and savage all rolled into one). The scroll games have
built into them the constant construction of frontiers — home regions — which the boy
player must struggle to master and push beyond, moving deeper and deeper into
uncharted space. Action is relentless. The protagonist shoots fireballs, ducks and
charges, slugs it out, rolls, jumps and dashes across the treacherous terrain, never
certain what lurks around the next corner. If you stand still, you die. Everything you
encounter is potentially hostile so shoot to kill. Errors in judgement result in the
character’s death and require starting all over again. Each screen overflows with
dangers; each landscape is riddled with pitfalls and booby traps. One screen may
require you to leap from precipice to precipice, barely missing falling into the deep
chasms below. Another may require you to swing by vines across the treetops, or
spelunk through an underground passageway, all the while fighting it out with the alien
hordes. The game’s levels and worlds reflect the set-piece structure of the earlier boys
books. Boys get to make lots of noise on adventure island, with the soundtrack full of
pulsing music, shouts, groans, zaps, and bombblasts. Everything is streamlined: the
plots and characters are reduced to genre archetypes, immediately familiar to the boy
gamers, and defined more through their capacity for actions than anything else. The
“adventure island” is the archetypal space of both the boys books and the boys games
— an isolated world far removed from domestic space or adult supervision, an
untamed world for people who refuse to bow before the pressures of the civilizing
process, a never-never-land you seek your fortune. The “adventure island,” in short, is
a world which fully embodies the “boy culture” and its ethos.
Secret Gardens: Girl Space
If it was the key to the closed garden, and she could find out where the
door was, she could perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls,
and what had happened to the old rose-trees. It was because it had been
shut up so long that she wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be
different from other places and that something strange must have
happened to it during ten years. Besides that, if she liked it she could go
into it every day and shut the door behind her, and she could make up
some play of her own and play it quite alone, because nobody would
ever know where she was, but would think the door was still locked and
the key buried in the earth. (71)---Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911), The
Secret Garden
Girl space is a space of secrets and romance, a space of one’s own in a world which

offers you far too little room to explore. Ironically, “girl books” often open with
fantasies of being alone and then require the female protagonist to sacrifice their
private space in order to make room for others’ needs. The “girls book” genres were
slower to evolve, often emerging through imitation of the gothics and romances
preferred by adult women readers and retaining a strong aura of instruction and self-
improvement. As Segel (1986) writes:
The liberation of nineteenth century boys into the book world of sailors
and pirates, forest and battles, left their sisters behind in the world of
childhood — that is, the world of home and family. When publishers and
writers saw the commercial possibilities of books for girls, it is
interesting that they did not provide comparable escape reading for them
(that came later, with the pulp series books) but instead developed books
designed to persuade the young reader to accept the confinement and
self-sacrifice inherent in the doctrine of feminine influence. This was
accomplished by depicting the rewards of submission and the sacred
joys of serving as ‘the angel of the house.’ (171-172)
If the boys book protagonist escapes all domestic responsibilities, the girls book
heroine learned to temper her impulsiveness and to accept family and domestic
obligations (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables) or sought to be a healing influence
on a family suffering from tragedy and loss (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Segel
(1986) finds the most striking difference between the two genre traditions is in the
book’s settings: “the domestic confinement of one book as against the extended voyage
to exotic lands in the other.” (173) Avoiding the boys books’ purple prose, the girls
books describe naturalistic environments, similar to the realm of readers’ daily
experience. The female protagonists take emotional, but rarely, physical risks. The tone
is more apt to be confessional than confrontational.
Traditional girls books, such as The Secret Garden, do encourage some forms of spatial
exploration, an exploration of the hidden passages of unfamiliar houses or the
rediscovery and cultivation of a deserted rose garden. Norman N. Holland and Leona
F. Sherman (1986) emphasize the role of spacial exploration in the gothic tradition, a
“maiden-plus-habitation” formula whose influence is strongly felt on The Secret
Garden. In such stories, the exploration of space leads to the uncovering of secrets,
clues, and symptoms that shed light on character’s motivations. Hidden rooms often
contained repressed memories and sometimes entombed relatives. The castle, Holland
and Sherman (1986) note, “can threaten, resist, love or confine, but in all these actions,
it stands as a total environment” (220) which the female protagonist can never fully
escape. Holland and Sherman claim that gothic romances fulfill a fantasy of unearthing
secrets about the adult world, casting the reader in a position of powerlessness and
daring them to overcome their fears and confront the truth. Such a fantasy space is, of
course, consistent with what we have already learned about girls’ domestic

confinement and greater responsibilities to their families.
Purple Moon’s Secret Paths in the Forest fully embodies the juvenile gothic tradition
— while significantly enlarging the space open for girls to explore. Purple Moon
removes the walls around the garden, turning it into a woodlands. Producer Brenda
Laurel has emphasized girls’ fascination with secrets, a fascination that readily
translates into a puzzle game structure, though Secret Paths pushes further than
existing games to give these “secrets” social and psychological resonance. Based on
her focus group interviews, Laurel initially sought to design a “magic garden,” a series
of “romanticized natural environments” responsive to “girls’ highly touted nurturing
desires, their fondness for animals.” She wanted to create a place “where girls could
explore, meet and take care of creatures, design and grow magical or fantastical
plants.” (Personal correspondence, 1997) What she found was that the girls did not feel
magical animals would need their nurturing and in fact, many of the girls wanted the
animals to mother them. The girls in Laurel’s study, however, were drawn to the idea
of the secret garden or hidden forest as a “girl’s only” place for solitude and
introspection. Laurel explains:
Girls' first response to the place was that they would want to go there
alone, to be peaceful and perhaps read or daydream. They might take a
best friend, but they would never take an adult or a boy. They thought
that the garden/forest would be place where they could find out things
that would be important to them, and a place where they might meet a
wise or magical person. Altogether their fantasies was about respite and
looking within as opposed to frolicsome play. (Personal correspondence,
1997)
The spaces in Purple Moon’s game are quiet, contemplative places, rendered in
naturalistic detail but with the soft focus and warm glow of an impressionistic water-
color.
The world of Secret Paths explodes with subtle and inviting colors — the colors of a
forest on a summer afternoon, of spring flowers and autumn leaves and shifting
patterns of light, of rippling water and moonlit skies, of sand and earth. The soundtrack
is equally dense and engaging, as the natural world whispers to us in the rustle of the
undergrowth or sings to us in the sounds of the wind and the calls of birds. The spaces
of Secret Paths are full of life, as lizards slither from rock to rock, or field mice dart for
cover, yet even animals which might be frightening in other contexts (coyotes, foxes,
owls) seem eager to reveal their secrets to our explorers. Jesse, one of the game’s
protagonists, expresses a fear of the “creepy” nighttime woods, but the game makes the
animals seem tame and the forest safe, even in the dead of night. The game’s puzzles
reward careful exploration and observation. At one point, we must cautiously approach
a timid fawn if we wish to be granted the magic jewels that are the tokens of our quest.

The guidebook urges us to be “unhurried and gentle” with the “easily startled” deer.
Our goal is less to master nature than to understand how we might live in harmony
with it. We learn to mimic its patterns, to observe the notes (produced by singing
cactus) that make a lizard’s head bob with approval and then to copy them ourselves,
to position spiders on a web so that they may harmonize rather than create discord.
And, in some cases, we are rewarded for feeding and caring for the animals. In The
Secret Garden (1911), Mary Lennox is led by a robin to the branches that mask the
entrance to the forgotten rose garden:
Mary had stepped close to the robin, and suddenly the gusts of wind
swung aside some loose ivy trails, and more suddenly still she jumped
toward it and caught it in her hand. This she did because she had seen
something under it — a round knob which had been covered by the
leaves hanging over it....The robin kept singing and twittering away and
tilting his head on one side, as if he were as excited as she was. (80)
Such animal guides abound in Secret Paths: the curser is shaped like a lady-bug during
our explorations and like a butterfly when we want to venture beyond the current
screen. Animals show us the way, if we only take the time to look and listen.
Unlike twitch-and-shoot boys games, Secret Paths encourages us to stroke and caress
the screen with our curser, clicking only when we know where secret treasures might
be hidden. A magic book tells us: As I patiently traveled along [through the paths], I
found that everything was enchanted! The trees, flowers and animals, the sun, sky and
stars — all had magical properties! The more closely I listened and the more carefully I
explored, the more was revealed to me. Nature’s rhythms are gradual and recurring, a
continual process of birth, growth, and transformation. Laurel explains:
We made the "game" intentionally slow - a girl can move down the paths
at whatever pace, stop and play with puzzles or stones, or hang out in the
tree house with or without the other characters. I think that this slowness
is really a kind of refuge for the girls. The game is much slower than
television, for example. One of the issues that girls have raised with us in
our most recent survey of their concerns is the problem of feeling too
busy. I think that "Secret Paths" provides an antidote to that feeling from
the surprising source of the computer. (Personal correspondence, 1997)
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Secret Garden” (1911) is a place of healing and the book
links Mary’s restoration of the forgotten rose garden with her repairing a family torn
apart by tragedy, restoring a sickly boy to health, and coming to grips with her
mother’s death: So long as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts

about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determined not to be pleased by
or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child....
When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with
children...with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day....there was
no room for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and
made her yellow and tired. (294)
Purple Moon’s Secret Paths has also been designed as a healing place, where girls are
encouraged to “explore with your heart” and answer their emotional dilemmas. As the
magical book explains, “You will never be alone here, for this is a place where girls
come to share and to seek help from one another.” At the game’s opening, we draw
together a group of female friends in the treehouse, where each confesses their secrets
and tells of their worries and sufferings. Miko speaks of the pressure to always be the
best and the alienation she feels from the other children; Dana recounts her rage over
losing a soccer companionship; Minn describes her humiliation because her immigrant
grandmother has refused to assimilate new world customs. Some of them have lost
parents, others face scary situations or emotional slights that cripple their confidence.
Their answers lie along the secret paths through the forrest, where the adventurers can
find hidden magical stones that embody social, psychological, or emotional strengths.
Along the way, the girl’s secrets are literally embedded within the landscape, so that
clicking on our environment may call forth memories or confessions. If we are
successful in finding all of the hidden stones, they magically form a necklace and when
given to the right girl, they allow us to hear a comforting or clarifying story. Such
narratives teach girls how to find emotional resources within themselves and how to
observe and respond to others’ often unarticulated needs. Solving puzzles in the
physical environment helps us to address problems in our social environment. Secret
Paths is what Brenda Laurel calls a “friendship adventure,” allowing young girls
rehearse their coping skills and try alternative social strategies.
The Play Town: Another Space for Girls?

Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town.’See, first you make up the
name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it.....
Then when you know who lives there, you make up what they do. For instance, Mr.
Charles Hanley runs the filling station on the corner...Harriet got very businesslike.
She stood up, then got on her knees in the soft September mud so she could lean over
the little valley made between the two big roots of the tree. She referred to her
notebook every now and then, but for the most part she stared intently at the mossy
lowlands which made her town. (3-5)— Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (1964)
Harriet the Spy opens with a description of another form of spatial play for girls —
Harriet’s “town,” a “microworld” she maps onto the familiar contours of her own
backyard and uses to think through the complex social relations she observes in her
community. Harriet controls the inhabitants of this town, shaping their actions to her

desires: “In this town, everybody goes to bed at nine-thirty.”(4) Not unlike a soap
opera, her stories depend on juxtapositions of radically different forms of human
experience: “Now, this night, as Mr. Hanley is just about to close up, a long, big old
black car drives up and in it there are all these men with guns....At this same minute
Mrs. Harrison’s baby is born.” (6) Her fascination with mapping and controlling the
physical space of the town makes her game a pre-digital prototype for Sim City and
other simulation games. However, compared to Harriet’s vivid interest in the distinct
personalities and particular experiences of her townspeople, Sim City seems alienated
and abstract. Sim City’s classifications of land use into residential, commercial, and
industrial push us well beyond the scale of everyday life and in so doing, strips the
landscape of its potential as a stage for children’s fantasies. Sim City offers us another
form of power — the power to “play God,” to design our physical environment, to
sculp the landscape or call down natural disasters (Friedman, 1995), but not the power
to imaginatively transform our social environment. Sim City embraces stock themes
from boys’ play, such as building forts, shaping earth with toy trucks, or damming
creeks, playing them out on a much larger scale. For Harriet, the mapping of the space
was only the first step in preparing the ground for a rich saga of life and death, joy and
sorrow, and those of the elements that are totally lacking in most existing simulation
games.
As Fitzhugh’s novel continues, Harriet’s interests shift from the imaginary events of
her simulated town and into real world spaces. She “spies” on people’s private social
interactions, staging more and more “daring” investigations, trying to understand what
motivates adult actions, and writing her evaluations and interpretations of their lives in
her notebook. Harriet’s adventures take her well beyond the constricted space of her
own home. She breaks and enters houses and takes rides on dumbwaiters, sneaks
through back allies and peeps into windows. She barely avoids getting caught.
Harriet’s adventures occur in public space (not the private space of the secret garden),
a populated environment (not the natural worlds visited in Secret Paths). Yet, her
adventures are not so much direct struggles with opposing forces (as might be found in
a boys book adventure) as covert operations to ferret out knowledge of social relations.
The games of Theresa Duncan (Chop Suey, Smarty, Zero Zero) offer a digital version
of Harriet’s “Town.” Players can explore suburban and urban spaces and pry into
bedroom closets in search of the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life. Duncan
(this volume) specifically cites Harriet the Spy as an influence, hoping that her games
will grant young girls “a sense of inquisitiveness and wonder.” Chop Suey and Smarty
take place in small Midwestern towns, a working class world of diners, hardware
stores, and beauty parlors. Zero Zero draws us further from home — into fin de siecle
Paris, a world of bakeries, wax museums, and catacombs. These spaces are rendered in
a distinctive style somewhere between the primitiveness of Grandma Moses and the
colorful postmodernism of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Far removed from the romantic
imagery of Secret Paths, these worlds overflow with city sounds — the clopping of

horse hooves on cobblestones, barking dogs, clanging church bells in Zero Zero — and
the narrator seems fascinated with the smoke stacks and signs which clutter this man-
made environment . As the narrator in Zero Zero rhapsodizes, “smoke curled black and
feathery like a horse’s tale from a thousand chimney pots” in this world “before
popsicles and paperbacks.” While the social order has been tamed, posing few dangers,
Duncan has not rid these worlds of their more disreputable elements. The guy in the
candy shop in Chop Suey has covered his body with tattoos. The Frenchmen in Zero
Zero are suitably bored, ill-tempered, and insulting; even flowers hurl abuse at us. The
man in the antlered hat sings rowdy songs about “bones” and “guts” when we visit the
catacombs, and the women puff on cigarettes, wear too much make-up, flash their
cleavage, and hint about illicit rendezvous. Duncan (this volume) suggests:
There's a sense of bittersweet experience in Chop Suey, where not

everyone has had a perfect life but they're all happy people. Vera has
three ex-husbands all named Bob....Vera has problems, but she's also
filled with love. And she's just a very vibrant, alive person, and that's
why she fascinates the little girls.
Duncan rejects our tendency to “project this fantasy of purity and innocence onto
children,” suggesting that all this “niceness” deprives children of “the richness of their
lives” and does not help them come to grips with their “complicated feelings” towards
the people in their lives.
Duncan’s protagonists, June Bug (Chop Suey), Pinkee LeBrun (Zero Zero), are smart,
curious girls, who want to know more than they have been told. Daring Pinkee
scampers along the roofs of Paris and pops down chimneys or steps boldly through the
doors of shops, questioning adults about their visions for the new century. Yet, she is
also interested in smaller, more intimate questions, such as the identity of the secret
admirer who writes love poems to Bon Bon, the singer at the Follies. Clues unearthed
in one location may shed light on mysteries posed elsewhere, allowing Duncan to
suggest something of the “interconnectedness” of life within a close community. Often,
as in Harriet, the goal is less to evaluate these people than to understand what makes
them tick. In that sense, the game fosters the character-centered reading practices
which Segel (1986) associates with the “girls book” genres, reading practices which
thrive on gossip and speculation.
Duncan’s games have no great plot to propel them. Duncan (this volume) said, “Chop
Suey works the way that real life does: all these things happen to you, but there's no
magical event, like there is sometimes in books, that transforms you.” Lazy curiosity
invites us to explore the contents of each shop, to flip through the fashion magazines in
Bon Bon’s dressing room, to view the early trick films playing at Cinema Egypt or to
watch the cheeses in the window of Quel Fromage which are, for reasons of their own,
staging the major turning points of the French revolution. (She also cites inspiration

from the more surreal adventures of Alice in Wonderland!) The interfaces are flexible,
allowing us to visit any location when we want without having to fight our way
through levels or work past puzzling obstacles. Zero Zero and Duncan’s other games
take particular pleasure in anarchistic imagery, in ways we can disrupt and destabilize
the environment, showering the baker’s angry faces with white clouds of flour, ripping
off the table clothes, or shaking up soda bottles so they will spurt their corks. Often,
there is something vaguely naughty about the game activities, as when a visit to Poire
the fashion designer has us matching different pairs of underwear. In that sense,
Duncan’s stories preserve the mischievous and sometimes anti-social character of
Harriet’s antics and the transformative humor of Lewis Carroll, encouraging the young
gamers to take more risks and to try things that might not ordinarily meet their parent’s
approval. Pinkee’s first actions as a baby are to rip the pink ribbons from her hair!
Duncan likes her characters free and “unladylike.”
In keeping with the pedagogic legacy of the girls book tradition, Zero Zero promises us
an introduction to French history, culture, and language, Smarty a mixture of “spelling
and spells, math and Martians, grammar and glamour,” but Duncan’s approach is sassy
and irreverent. The waxwork of Louis XIV sticks out its tongue at us, while Joan
D’Arc is rendered in marshmallow, altogether better suited for toasting. The breads
and cakes in the bakery are shaped like the faces of French philosophers and spout
incomprehensible arguments. Pinkee’s quest for knowledge about the coming century
can not be reduced to an approved curriculum, but rather expresses a unrestrained
fascination with the stories, good, bad, happy or sad, that people tell each other about
their lives.
Harriet the Spy is ambivalent about its protagonist’s escapades: her misadventures are
clearly excite the book’s female readers, but the character herself is socially ostracized
and disciplined, forced to more appropriately channel her creativity and curiosity.
Pinkee suffers no such punishment, ending up the game watching the fireworks that
mark the change of the centuries, taking pleasure in the knowledge that she will be a
central part of the changes that are coming: “tonight belongs to Bon Bon but the future
belongs to Pinkee.”
Conclusion: Towards a Gender-Neutral Play space?

Brenda Laurel and Theresa Duncan offer two very different conceptions of a digital
play space for girls — one pastoral, the other urban; one based on the ideal of living in
harmony with nature, the other based on an anarchistic pleasure in disrupting the stable
order of everyday life and making the familiar “strange.” Yet, in many ways, the two
games embrace remarkable similar ideals — play spaces for girls adopt a slower pace,
are less filled with dangers, invite gradual investigation and discovery, foster an
awareness of social relations and a search for secrets, center around emotional relations
between characters. Both allow the exploration of physical environments, but are really
about the interior worlds of feelings and fears. Laurel and Duncan make an important

contribution when they propose new and different models for how digital media may
be used. The current capabilities of our video and computer game technologies reflect
the priorities of an earlier generation of game makers and their conception of the boys
market. Their assumptions about what kinds of digital play spaces were desirable
defined how the bytes would be allocated, valuing rapid response time over the
memory necessary to construct more complex and compelling characters. Laurel and
Duncan shift the focus — prioritizing character relations and “friendship adventures.”
In doing so, they are expanding what computers can do and what roles they can play in
our lives.
On the other hand, in our desire to open digital technologies as an alternative play
space for girls, we must guard against simply duplicating in the new medium the
gender-specific genres of children’s literature. The segregation of children’s reading
into boy book and girl book genres, Segel (1986) argues, encouraged the development
of gender-specific reading strategies — with boys reading for plot and girls reading for
character relationship. Such differences, Segel suggests, taught children to replicate the
separation between a male public sphere of risk taking and a female domestic sphere of
care taking. As Segel (1986) notes, the classification of children’s literature into boys
books and girls books “extracted a heavy cost in feminine self-esteem,” restricting
girl’s imaginative experience to what adults perceived as its “proper place.” Boys
developed a sense of autonomy and mastery both from their reading and from their
play. Girls learned to fetter their imaginations, just as they restricted their movements
into real world spaces. At the same time, this genre division also limited boys’
psychological and emotional development, insuring a focus on goal-oriented,
utilitarian, and violent plots. Too much interest in social and emotional life was a
vulnerability in a world where competition left little room to be “lead by your heart.”
We need to design digital play spaces which allow girls to do something more than
stitch doll clothes, mother nature, or heal their friend’s sufferings or boys to do
something more than battle it out with the barbarian hordes.
Segel’s analysis of “gender and childhood reading” suggests two ways of moving
beyond the gender-segregation of our virtual landscape. First, as Segel (1986) suggests,
the designation of books for boys and girls did not preclude (though certainly
discouraged) reading across gender lines: “Though girls when they reached ‘that
certain age’ could be prevented from joining boys’ games and lively exploits, it was
harder to keep them from accompanying their brothers on vicarious adventures through
the reading of boys’ books.” (175) Reading boys books gave girls (admittedly limited)
access to the boy culture and its values. Segel finds evidence of such gender-crossing
in the 19th century, though girls were actively discouraged from reading boys books
because their contents were thought too lurid and unwholesome. At other times,
educational authorities encouraged the assignment of boys books in public schools
since girls could read and enjoy them, while there was much greater stigma attached to
boys reading girls books. The growing visibility of the “quake girls,” female gamers

who compete in traditional male fighting and action/adventure games (Jenkins and
Cassell, this volume), suggests that there has always been a healthy degree of
“crossover” interest in the games market and that many girls enjoy “playing with
power.” Girls may compete more directly and aggressively with boys in the video
game arena than would ever have been possible in the real-world of backyard play,
since differences in actual size, strength, and agility have no effect on the outcome of
the game. And they can return from combat without the ripped clothes or black eyes
that told parents they had done something “unladylike.” Unfortunately, much as girls
who read boys books were likely to encounter the misogynistic themes that mark boys’
fantasies of separation from their mothers, girls who play boys games find the games’
constructions of female sexuality and power are designed to gratify preadolescent
males, not to empower girls. Girl gamers are aggressively campaigning to have their
tastes and interests factored into the development of action games.
We need to open up more space for girls to join — or play alongside — the traditional
boy culture down by the river, in the old vacant lot, within the bamboo forest. Girls
need to learn how to explore “unsafe” and “unfriendly” spaces. Girls need to
experience the “complete freedom of movement” promised by the boys games, if not
all the time, then at least some of the time, if they are going to develop the self
confidence and competitiveness demanded of contemporary professional women. Girls
need to learn how to, in the words of a contemporary best-seller, “run with the wolves”
and not just follow the butterflies along the Secret Paths. Girls need to be able to play
games where Barbie gets to kick some butt. However, this focus on creating action
games for girls still represents only part of the answer, for as Segel (1986) notes, the
gender segregation of children’s literature was almost as damaging for boys as it was
for girls: “In a society where many men and women are alienated from members of the
other sex, one wonders whether males might be more comfortable with and
understanding of women’s needs and perspectives if they had imaginatively shared
female experiences through books, beginning in childhood.” (183) Boys may need to
play in secret gardens or toy towns just as much as girls need to explore adventure
islands. In the literary realm, Segel points towards books, such as Little House on the
Prairie or Wrinkle in Time, which fuse the boys and girl genres, rewarding both a
traditionally masculine interest in plot action and a traditionally feminine interest in
character relations.
Sega Saturn’s Nights into Dreams represents a similar fusion of the boys and girls
game genres. Much as in Secret Paths, our movement through the game space is
framed as an attempt to resolve the characters’ emotional problems. In the frame
stories that open the game, we enter the mindscape of the two protagonists as they toss
and turn in their sleep. Claris, the female protagonist, hopes to gain recognition on the
stage as a singer, but has nightmares of being rejected and ridiculed. Elliot, the male
character, has fantasies of scoring big on the basketball court yet fears being bullied by
bigger and more aggressive players. They run away from their problems, only to find

themselves in Nightopia, where they must save the dream world from the evil schemes
of Wileman the Wicked and his monstrous minions. In the dreamworld, both Claris
and Elliot may assume the identity of Nights, an androgynous harlequin figure, who
can fly through the air, transcending all the problems below. Nights’ complex
mythology has players gathering glowing orbs which represent different forms of
energy needed to confront Claris and Elliot’s problems — purity (white), wisdom
(green), hope (yellow), intelligence (blue) and bravery (red) — a structure that recalls
the magic stones in Secret Paths through the Forest.
The tone of this game is aptly captured by one Internet game critic, Big Mitch (n.d.):
“The whole experience of Nights is in soaring, tumbling, and freewheeling through
colorful landscapes, swooping here and there, and just losing yourself in the moment.
This is not a game you set out to win; the fun is in the journey rather than the
destination.” Big Mitch’s response suggests a recognition of the fundamentally
different qualities of this game — its focus on psychological issues as much as upon
action and conflict, its fascination with aimless exploration rather than goal-driven
narrative, its movement between a realistic world of everyday problems and a fantasy
realm of great adventure, its mixture of the speed and mobility associated with the boys
platform games with the lush natural landscapes and the sculpted soundtracks
associated with the girls games. Spring Valley is a sparkling world of rainbows and
waterfalls and Emerald Green forests. Other levels allow us to splash through
cascading fountains or sail past icy mountains and frozen wonderlands or bounce on
pillows and off the walls of the surreal Soft Museum or swim through aquatic tunnels.
The game’s 3-D design allows an exhilarating freedom of movement, enhanced by
design features — such as wind resistance — which give players a stronger than
average sense of embodiment. Nights into Dreams retains some of the dangerous and
risky elements associated with the boys games. There are spooky places in this game,
including nightmare worlds full of day-glo serpents and winged beasties, and there are
enemies we must battle, yet there is also a sense of unconstrained adventure, floating
through the clouds. Our primary enemy is time, the alarm clock which will awaken us
from our dreams. Even when we confront monsters, they don’t fire upon us; we must
simply avoid flying directly into their sharp teeth if we want to master them. When we
lose Nights’ magical, gender-bending garb, we turn back into boys and girls and must
hoof it as pedestrians across the rugged terrain below, a situation which makes it far
less likely we will achieve our goals. To be gendered is to be constrained; to escape
gender is to escape gravity and to fly above it all.
Sociologist Barrie Thorne (1993) has discussed the forms of “borderwork” which
occurs when boys and girls occupy the same play spaces: “The spatial separation of
boys and girls [on the same playground] constitutes a kind of boundary, perhaps felt
most strongly by individuals who want to join an activity controlled by the other
gender.” (64-65) Boys and girls are brought together in the same space, but they
repeatedly enact the separation and opposition between the two play cultures. In real

world play, this “borderwork” takes the form of chases and contests on the one hand
and “cooties” or other pollution taboos on the other. When “borderwork” occurs,
gender distinctions become extremely rigid and nothing passes between the two
spheres. Something similar occurs in many of the books which Segel identifies as
gender neutral — male and female reading interests co-exist, side by side, like children
sharing a playground, and yet they remain resolutely separate and the writers, if
anything, exaggerate gender differences in order to proclaim their dual address. Wendy
and the “lost boys” both travel to Never-Never-Land but Wendy plays house and the
“lost boys” play Indians or pirates. The “little house” and the”prairie” exist side by side
in Laura Wilder’s novels, but the mother remains trapped inside the house, while Pa
ventures into the frontier. The moments when the line between the little house and the
prairie are crossed, such as a scene where a native American penetrates into Ma
Wilder’s parlor, become moments of intense anxiety. Only Laura can follow her pa
across the threshold of the little house and onto the prairie and her adventurous spirit is
often presented as an unfeminine trait she is likely to outgrow as she gets older.
As we develop digital playspaces for boys and girls, we need to make sure this same
pattern isn’t repeated, that we do not create blue and pink ghettos inside the playspace.
On the one hand, the opening sequences of Nights into Dreams, which frame Elliot and
Claris as possessing fundamentally different dreams (sports for boys and musical
performance for girls, graffiti-laden inner city basketball courts for boys and pastoral
gardens for girls), perform this kind of borderwork, defining the proper place for each
gender. On the other hand, the androgenous Nights embodies a fantasy of transcending
gender and thus achieving the freedom and mobility to fly above it all. To win the
game, the player must become both the male and the female protagonists and they must
join forces for the final level. The penalty for failure in this world is to be trapped on
the ground and to be fixed into a single gender.
Thorne finds that aggressive “borderwork” is more likely to occur when children are
forced together by adults than when they find themselves interacting more
spontaneously, more likely to occur in prestructured institutional settings like the
schoolyard than in the informal settings of the subdivisions and apartment complexes.
All of this suggests that our fantasy of designing games which will provide common
play spaces for girls and boys may be an illusive one, one as full of complications and
challenges on its own terms as creating a “girls only” space or encouraging girls to
venture into traditional male turf. We are not yet sure what such a gender neutral space
will look like. Creating such a space would mean redesigning not only the nature of
computer games but also the nature of society. The danger may be that in such a space,
gender differences are going to be more acutely felt, as boys and girls will be repelled
from each other rather than drawn together. There are reasons why this is a place
where neither the feminist entrepreneurs nor the boys game companies are ready to go,
yet as the girl’s market is secured, the challenge must be to find a way to move beyond
our existing categories and to once again invent new kinds of virtual play spaces.


HENRY JENKINS Digital Renaissance
Convergence? I Diverge.
hat’s all this talk about ally describing at least five processes: telling, the development of content
W “media convergence,” this

dumb industry idea that all
media will meld into one, and
■ Technological Convergence: What
Nicholas Negroponte labeled the trans-

formation of “atoms to bits,” the digi-
across multiple channels. As produc-
ers more fully exploit organic con-
vergence, storytellers will use each
we’ll get all of our news and enter- tization of all media content. When channel to communicate different
tainment through one box? Few con- words, images and sounds are trans- kinds and levels of narrative infor-
temporary terms generate more formed into digital information, we mation, using each medium to do
buzz—and less honey. Consider this expand the potential relationships what it does best.
column a primer on the real media between them and enable them to flow ■ Global Convergence: The cultural
convergence, because it’s on the verge across platforms. hybridity that results from the inter-
of transforming our culture as pro- ■ Economic Convergence: The horizon- national circulation of media content.
foundly as the Renaissance did. tal integration of the entertainment In music, the world-music movement
Media convergence is an ongoing
process, occurring at various intersec- No single medium is going to win the
tions of media technologies, indus- battle for our ears and eyeballs. And
tries, content and audiences; it’s not an when will we get all of our media fun-
end state. There will never be one black
box controlling all media. Rather,
nelled to us through one box? Never.
thanks to the proliferation of channels industry. A company like AOL Time produces some of
and the increasingly ubiquitous nature Warner now controls interests in film, the most inter-
of computing and communications, television, books, games, the Web, esting contempo-
we are entering an era where media music, real estate and countless other rary sounds, and in cinema, the global
will be everywhere, and we will use all sectors. The result has been the restruc- circulation of Asian popular cinema
kinds of media in relation to one turing of cultural production around profoundly shapes Hollywood enter-
another. We will develop new skills “synergies,” and thus the transmedia tainment. These new forms reflect the
for managing information, new struc- exploitation of branded properties— experience of being a citizen of the
tures for transmitting information Pokémon, Harry Potter, Tomb Raider, “global village.”
across channels, and new creative Star Wars. Much as the historical Renaissance
genres that exploit the potentials of ■ Social or Organic Convergence: Con- emerged when Europe responded to
those emerging information structures. sumers’ multitasking strategies for the invention and dispersion of mov-
History teaches us that old media navigating the new information envi- able type, these multiple forms of
never die. And before you say, “What ronment. Organic convergence is what media convergence are leading us
about the eight-track,” let’s distinguish occurs when a high schooler is watch- toward a digital renaissance—a period
among media, genres and delivery tech- ing baseball on a big-screen television, of transition and transformation that
nologies. Recorded sound is a medium. listening to techno on the stereo, word- will affect all aspects of our lives. The
Radio drama is a genre. CDs, MP3 files processing a paper and writing e-mail first Renaissance was a period of
and eight-track cassettes are delivery to his friends. It may occur inside or political and social instability, and the
technologies. Genres and delivery tech- outside the box, but ultimately, it old monastic order crumbled. Today,
nologies come and go, but media per- occurs within the user’s cranium. media convergence is sparking a range
sist as layers within an ever more com- ■ Cultural Convergence: The explosion of social, political, economic and legal
plicated information and entertainment of new forms of creativity at the inter- disputes because of the conflicting
system. A medium’s content may shift, sections of various media technolo- goals of consumers, producers and
its audience may change and its social gies, industries and consumers. Media gatekeepers. These contradictory forces
status may rise or fall, but once a convergence fosters a new participa- are pushing both toward cultural
medium establishes itself it continues tory folk culture by giving average diversity and toward homogenization,
to be part of the media ecosystem. No people the tools to archive, annotate, toward commercialization and toward
one medium is going to “win” the appropriate and recirculate content. grassroots cultural production.
battle for our ears and eyeballs. Shrewd companies tap this culture to The digital renaissance will be the
Part of the confusion about media foster consumer loyalty and generate best of times and the worst of times,
convergence stems from the fact that low-cost content. Media convergence but a new cultural order will emerge
when people talk about it, they’re actu- also encourages transmedia story- from it. Stay tuned. ◊
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW June 2001 93

henrys essay.html
Media and Imagination:

A Short History of American Science Fiction
by Henry Jenkins
853 words
posted: july 7, 1997
Science fiction, sometimes called "speculative

fiction," has long provided "thought experiments"
which imagine alternative worlds where current
developments -- social, political, scientific,
technological, cultural -- are pushed to their logical
extremes. In some cases, these visions of the future
embrace the dominant American ideology of
technological utopianism -- that is, the belief that
technological advances (especially in
communication and transportation) will dramatically
improve human social and cultural relations. Other
writers have offered more pessimistic and
apocalyptic visions, linking advanced technologies
with concentrations of political power, coercive
mechanisms of social control, or weapons of mass
destruction. Science fiction writers have rarely
sought to "predict" the future in a literal sense.
Rather, they have used their imagined futures to
question, challenge, and comment on changes they
observe or intuit in contemporary society. One
notable exception: Arthur C. Clarke, recognized as a
significant influence on the development of global
communications satellites.
As a genre, science fiction has provided a space for

popular debates about change, including
increasingly changes in our media culture. Science
fiction writer Alan E. Norse explains, "The science
fiction reader is encouraged by his reading not to
fear or dread change, but rather to accept it as a
fresh and exciting challenge. After all, science
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henrys essay.html
fiction seems to say, the winds of change -- however

violent they may seem -- are of man's making in the
first place, and it should be within man's power to
temper them." Norse argues, provocatively, that
science fiction readers may be better able to adjust
to "future shock" because they have worked through
alternative futures in their imaginations and have
come to accept that change is part of all human
societies.
From the start, the American science fiction

tradition has been linked to the increasingly visible
role of communications media in our national
culture. The technological utopians, a group of late
19th-century social reformers who wrote utopian
fictions about future societies, often saw
improvements in communication as vitally linked to
the restructuring of the social order. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887), for example,
included speculations about credit cards and
broadcasting.
Hugo Gernsback, founder of the American science

fiction tradition, was himself a key figure in
promoting radio as a socially transforming
technology, and the earliest American science
fiction appeared alongside articles on amateur radio
and popular science. The writers who contributed to
Gernback's magazine Amazing Stories were
technophiles, translating the ideals of the
technological utopians into colorful entertainment.
The Gernsbackian tradition reached its zenith at the

1939 New York World's Fair, where corporations
and governments sought to construct their own
visions of "the world of tomorrow," based on
technological utopian ideologies. It is no
coincidence that the first public display of television

henrys essay.html
in the United States occurred at the 1939 Fair, in the

context of this highly publicized attempt to translate
the visions of science fiction into reality. The
World's Fair moved science fiction's speculations
about the future out of the pages of the pulps and
into broader national consciousness, where it would
remain for the remainder of the 20th century.
The representations of technology, science, and

media in American science fiction grew darker in
the wake of the Second World War. Science fiction
of the 1950s, including works by Henry Kuttner,
Cordwaner Smith, Frederik Pohl and C.M.
Kornbluth, offered satirical perspectives on the rise
of television and advertising. Not unlike the radical
cultural critics of the Frankfort School, these writers
were disturbed by the ways in which the mediated
culture of the post-War era seemed to encourage
mass conformity and blind consumption. Yet at the
same time, such fiction also envisions characters
that use new media to resist dominant social
institutions and to challenge state and corporate
power -- themes that will find their fullest
expression in the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s.
Other science fiction writers have examined the
place of surveillance technologies and information
management in the modern political and economic
bureaucracy.
The 1960s saw the broadening of science fiction to

embrace new social and political visions and to
reach new constituencies. Media theorists like
Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler embraced
science fiction themes and imagery as part of their
attempt to anticipate change in our technological
environment. Their theoretical works were read
alongside science fiction written by and for novels
the counter-culture and helped to shape the images
of mediated culture that ran through the genre. This

henrys essay.html
period also saw the increased participation of

women as both readers and writers of science
fiction, resulting in alternative visions of utopian
futures, grounded in transforming social relations
rather than changing technologies and in alternative
conceptions of media. Some of this fiction deployed
a feminist critique of the media's exploitation of
women's bodies and emotions.
William Gibson's Neuromancer (1989) and

subsequent "cyberpunk" short stories and novels
have dealt with the "digital revolution," the
expanding roles of multinational corporations, the
proliferation of alternative subcultures, and the
centrality of information management to modern
life. Gibson coined the term, "cyberspace," and his
conceptions of virtual reality have influenced the
development of digital media. Some science fiction
writers, such as Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card,
and Vernor Vinge, have published powerful critical
essays on real-world media in addition to their
speculative fiction about the future of media.
Rev 1.0
WebPosted: zachary strider mcgregor-dorsey
´ Back to Science Fiction Top Page

Science Fiction-Media in Transition
Media and Imagination

home
Written and Edited by Henry Jenkins
calendar
conferences
How writers of science fiction understand and
forums imagine modern media is the defining theme of
»science fiction a series of readings and discussions begun in
dialogue 1997 by the Media in Transition Project.
articles
archive Most programs pair a distinguished senior
search figure with a younger writer. After their
about this site readings, the invited writers speak briefly about
feedback the notion of "media in transition" and
participate in a question-and-answer session
with the audience. Transcripts of the series have
been posted. They are a record of the thoughts
and responses of some of the best living sf
writers.
2000
● Nalo Hopinkson/Connie Willis

● Ben Bova
● Greg Bear/Gregory Benford
Fall 1998-Spring 1999
● Hal Clement/Jeffrey Carver

● Pat Cadigan
● Michael Resnick/Alexander Jablokov
● Neil Gaiman/Craig Shaw Gardner
Fall 1997- Spring 1998
● Octavia Butler/Samuel Delany

● J. Michael Straczynski/Alexander
Jablokov
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Science Fiction-Media in Transition
● Frederick Pohl/James Patrick Kelly

● Joe Haldeman/Gregory Benford
● Orson Scott Card/Allen Steele
● Ellen Kushner/Sarah Zettel
To create a context for the series, Henry Jenkins Author Profiles

has written a series of critical essays and author Gregory Benford
profiles specifically for this site. The essays Octavia Butler
encourage us to read science fiction as a mode Orson Scott Card
of "vernacular theory," aiming to make current Joe Haldeman
debates about new media accessible to a James Patrick Kelly
popular audience. These essays also explain Ellen Kushner
why our chosen writers are particularly relevant Frederick Pohl
to the larger theme of "Media in Transition." Allen Steele
The central essay, "Media and Imagination: A Sarah Zettel
Brief History of American Science Fiction,"
sketches the evolution of the genre and tries to Author Statements
clarify the important connections between Octavia Butler
science fiction and our culture's shifting ideas
about the role of media technologies in
everyday life.
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DDN Articles - Discussion: MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA)
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Username: and Deleting Online Indian Community

Predators Act (DOPA) Welcome To Community
Password: Author: Henry Jenkins, Media Center, MIT | of One
May 30th, 2006 The Weaklings
Communities: Community Technology 2.0 , Information2knowledge
Go! Access, Content, Cool Tools, CyberEd Global Warming Student
Resources : ICT's and Education, Games Speakout
Not a member? and Education,
Join DDN now! [ more ]
Forgot your password? The following interview with Henry
Jenkins (co-director of the Discussions
Navigate DDN
Comparative Media Studies Program at Hello!
MIT) and danah boyd (PhD student at juanraul | 03:09 AM
Home
the School of Information, University Youth Visions for
Stronger Neighborhoods
Featured Communities of California-Berkeley) was conducted curriculum
via email by Sarah Wright of the MIT
Access CTCNet | 02:32 PM
News Office. An abbreviated version
Content Digital divide images
was published by the MIT News Office
dzucker | 11:24 AM
Cool Tools on 24 May 2006. We are providing a
Hello
DDN Member Map full transcript of our interview online
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Literacy & Learning because we believe that it provides
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valuable information for parents,
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legislators and press who are
Headlines
Communities concerned about the dangers of
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MySpace.
Browse Communities 80s ringtones | Jul 13
Go to the source for a printable, PDF
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Hierarchies" - Interview
Browse Articles
to re-publish this interview (or portions with Sarbuland Khan
of this interview) with proper IPS | Jul 12
Blogs attribution.
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Browse Blogs Q: What is MySpace? Why is it Ugandan refugees go

important? How big is it (and its online
Yahoo! News | Jul 12
Events cousins such as Facebook)?
Upcoming Events danah: MySpace and Facebook are [ more ] [ xml ]
social network sites where individuals

Discussion Boards Events
create profiles and link to others
(“friends”) within the system. The Localizing Global Change
7/19/07 - 7/22/07
About DDN profile serves as an individual’s digital
Chicago, United States
representation (similar to homepages)
Contact Us The Stonington Retreat:
of their tastes, fashion, and identity. In
An Educational
crafting this profile, individuals upload Technology Conference
Copyright 7/31/07 - 8/03/07
photos, indicate interests, list favorite
New York, NY, United States
musicians and describe themselves
Help
textually and through associated 2nd IEEE International
Conference on Wireless
media. The social network feature Broadband and Ultra
allows participants to link themselves Wideband
to others within the system, revealing Communications
8/27/07 - 8/30/07
their affiliations and peer group. These Sydney, Australia
sites also allow friends to comment on
Free Credit History
each other’s profiles. Structurally, 8/29/07 - 11/29/07
social network sites are a cross kathmandu, Nepal
between a yearbook and a community [ more ] [ xml ]

website.
Latest Blog Posts
These sites also provide numerous
80s ringtones @@ green
communication tools. Both have a
day ringtones
messaging system similar to email; 80sringtones ringtone | July 13
MySpace also has a bulletin board
80s ringtones @@ green
where people can post messages that day ringtones
all friends can read and a blogging 80sringtones ringtone | July 13
service where people can post entries ICTs, Training help

for either friends or the public at large. children to access
information world
When youth login, their first task is
Nabil Eid | July 12
typically to check messages in order to
see who has written them. While email

is still used to communicate with adults ICTs, Training help

children to access
and authorities, MySpace is the
information world
primary asynchronous communication Nabil Eid | July 12
tool for teens. After checking personal

[ more ] [ xml ]
messages, youth check friend
additions, bulletin board posts, event
announcements and new blog posts by
friends. They visit their friends’ pages
to see new photos or check out each
other’s comments. The vast majority of
social network site use amongst youth
does not involve surfing to strangers’
profiles, but engaging more locally with
known friends and acquaintances.
MySpace has over 78 million registered

accounts while Facebook has
approximately 8 million. While over
85% of college students participate on
Facebook if it exists on their campus,
MySpace is a cultural requirement for
American high school students. Or, as
one teenager said, “If you’re not on
MySpace, you don’t exist.” Not all
MySpace users are teenagers, but
most American teenagers have
accounts on MySpace.
These sites play a key role in youth
culture because they give youth a
space to hang out amongst friends and
peers, share cultural artifacts (like
links to funny websites, comments
about TV shows) and work out an
image of how they see themselves.

They also serve as digital publics,

substituting for the types of publics
that most adults took for granted
growing up, but are now inaccessible
for many young people – neighborhood
basketball courts, malls, parks, etc.
Youth are trying to map out a public
youth territory for themselves,
removed from adult culture. They are
doing so online because their mobility
and control over physical space is
heavily curtailed and monitored.
Q: What is the controversy over

MySpace? Is it that site in particular or
as a genre of web-based-social-
networks?
danah: Like previous digital publics
(blogs, discussion boards, chatrooms,
newsgroups), MySpace is very open –
anyone can join, participate and
communicate with others. While
MySpace allows 14 and 15 year old
users to restrict who can see their
page and contact them, most users opt
to make their profiles public. The
primary concern is that this openness
puts youth at risk, making them
particularly vulnerable to predators
and pedophiles.
Henry: More broadly, there are
concerns about what aspects of their
lives teens reveal through their online
profiles. Adults are confronting images
of underage drinking or sex,

discussions of drug use, and signs of

bullying and other abusive behavior. In
some cases, teens and adults have
developed different notions of privacy:
young people feel more comfortable
sharing aspects of their lives (for
example, their sexual identities) that
previous generations would have kept
secret. In some cases, teens do not
fully understand the risks of making
certain information public.
In many cases, schools are being

forced to respond to real world
problems which only came to their
attention because this information was
so publicly accessible on the web.
Schools are uncertain what level of
responsibility they should have over
what their students do online – some
are worried about what they are doing
on library computers and others seek
to extend their supervision into what
teens are doing on their own time and
off school grounds. Much of the
controversy has come not as a result
of anything new that MySpace and the
other social software sites contribute
to teen culture but simply from the fact
that adults can no longer hide their
eyes to aspects of youth culture in
America that have been there all
along. All of this is coming to head with
the proposal of new federal legislation

which would require all schools and

libraries which receive federal funds to
restrict access to these digital tools
and online communities.
Q: What is the direction of your

current research on new media, and
how does it relate to the controversy?
danah: For my doctoral dissertation, I
am investigating why and how youth
are engaging in digital publics like
MySpace, how this affects identity
development and how youth
socialization has changed over the last
century. This work is being funded by
the MacArthur Foundation to help
understand the nature of informal
learning. Understanding why moral
panics emerge when youth socialize is
central to my research.
Henry: I am currently finishing up a
white paper, commissioned by the
MacArthur Foundation, which seeks to
identify the core social skills and
cultural competencies young people
need in order to become full
participants in the cultural, political,
economic, and social life of the 21st
century. In doing this research, we are
reviewing the current state of
educational research surrounding
participatory culture and examining
how teachers are currently deploying
these technologies through schools.
We want in the long term to develop

new curricular materials which help

parents and teachers build a more
constructive relationship with new
media. I also have a new book coming
out this summer, Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide, which provides some
frameworks for thinking about the new
forms of participatory culture which
are emerging in the digital era.
Q: What do 'social networking software

programs' provide participants? What's
their down side?
danah: By giving youth access to a
public of their peers, MySpace provides
a fertile ground for identity
development and cultural integration.
As youth transition from childhood,
they seek out public environments to
make sense of culture, social status
and how they fit into the world.
Interacting with strangers helps them
understand who they are and
communities of interest allow them to
explore ideas and values. Although
youth are able to socialize privately
with one another in the homes of
friends, most are not allowed to spend
time hanging out in public,
unaccompanied by parents or adults.
They view MySpace as a place where
they can be who they are, joke around
with friends and make certain to stay

in the loop about everything that is

going on around them.
While integrating into cultural life is a

critical process that takes place during
these years, the actual process is not
always smooth or pleasant. Bullying,
sexual teasing, and other peer-to-peer
harassment are rampant amongst
teenagers, as these are frequently the
tools through which youth learn to
make meaning of popularity, social
status, roles, and cultural norms.
MySpace did not create teenage
bullying but it has made it more visible
to many adults, although it is not clear
that the embarrassment online is any
more damaging to the young victims
than offline. Regardless of medium,
the humiliation occurs when the entire
school or social community knows of
the attack; MySpace and other online
mediums may help spread rumors
faster, but they have always spread in
the halls of schools pretty quickly. No
one of any age enjoys being the target
of public tormenting, but new media is
not to blame for peer-to-peer
harassment simply because it makes it
more visible to outsiders. In fact, in
many ways, this visibility provides a
window through which teen mentors
can help combat this issue.
Q: What skills do students/children

learn in working in social networks?

How does these contribute (or not) to
their development?
Henry: As a society, we are at a

moment of transition when the most
important social relationships may no
longer be restricted to those we
conduct face to face with people in our
own immediate surroundings but may
also include a large number of
relationships which are conducted over
vast geographic distances. Over the
past decade or so, we have been
learning how to live in communities
which are grassroots but not
necessarily geographically local. We
are learning how to interact across
multiple communities and negotiate
with diverse norms. These networking
skills are increasingly important to all
aspects of our lives. Social networking
services are more and more being
deployed as professional tools,
extending the sets of contacts that
people can tap in their work lives. It is
thus not surprising that such tools are
also part of the social lives of our
teens. Just as youth in a hunting
society play with bows and arrows,
youth in an information society play
with information and social networks.
Our schools so far do a rather poor job
of helping teens acquire the skills they
need in order to participate within that

information society. For starters, most

adult jobs today involve a high degree
of collaboration, yet we still focus our
schools on training autonomous
learners. Rather than shutting kids off
from social network tools, we should
be teaching them how to exploit their
potentials and mitigate their risks.
Q: What educational use might/does

MySpace or other social network
software have?
Henry: Much of the current policy

debate around MySpace assumes that
the activities there are at best frivolous
and at worst dangerous to the teens
who participate. Yet, a growing
number of teachers around the country
are discovering that these technologies
have real pedagogical value. Teachers
are beginning to use blogs for
knowledge sharing in schools; they use
mailing lists to communicate
expectations about homework with
students and parents. They are
discovering that students take their
assignments more seriously and write
better if they are producing work which
will reach a larger public rather than
simply sit on the teacher's desk.
Teachers are linking together
classrooms around the country and
around the world, getting kids from
different cultural backgrounds to share

aspects of their everyday experience

with each other and thus learn to
communicate across differences. Social
networking sites generate a great
amount of statistical data about their
users which can be used as raw
materials for projects in social studies
or math classes. Student-made videos
are used for class projects, which get
shared through free public sites like
YouTube; students, in turn, get
feedback on their work from broader
audiences and begin to develop
connections with other young artists
which can push them to the next level.
Classes are taping podcasts of lectures
at other educational institutions,
making the best speakers in the world
available to students at the most
remote locations. Students are doing
their own research and contributing to
sites like Wikipedia. Teachers are
discovering that the design of web
pages or personal profiles may function
like autobiographical essays,
encouraging adolescents to reflect
more deeply on their own lives and
identities and to exert more control
over their self presentation. Many of
these activities would be threatened by
the proposed federal legislation which
would restrict access to these sites via
public schools or library terminals.

Q: What is the essence of the proposed

legislation? If passed, how would it
affect students? Teachers? Librarians?
Parents?
danah: Recent federal legislation,

Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA)
would require schools and libraries that
receive federal aid “to protect minors
from commercial social networking
websites and chat rooms.” The
proposed law would extend current
regulations that require all federally
funded schools and libraries to deploy
internet filters. The law is so broadly
defined that it would limit access to
any commercial site that allows users
to create a profile and communicate
with strangers. This legislation is
targeting MySpace, but it would also
block numerous other sites, including
blogging tools, mailing lists, video and
podcast sites, photo sharing sites, and
educational sites like NeoPets.
Henry: In theory, the bill would allow

schools to disable these filters for use
in educationally specified contexts, yet
in practice, most schools will simply
lock down their computers and walk
away. Teachers who wanted to exploit
the educational benefits of these tools
would face increased scrutiny and
pressure to discontinue these
practices. And students would lack the

ability to explore these resources

through independent research or social
activities. Teens who lack access to the
Internet at home would be cut off from
their extended sphere of social
contacts.
danah: Most major technology
companies are moving in the direction
of social software. They are using
social features to help users find
information, get recommendations,
and share ideas. This would all be
restricted. Even if its application were
restricted solely to MySpace, this
legislation assumes that nothing
positive can be gained through the
socialization that occurs there. For
example, high school students
currently contact college students
through MySpace to learn about their
schools and decide whether or not to
apply.
Henry: Suppose, for the sake of

argument, that MySpace critics are
correct and that MySpace is, in fact,
exposing large numbers of teens to
high-risk situations, then shouldn't the
role of educational institutions be to
help those teens understand those
risks and develop strategies for dealing
with them? Wouldn't we be better off
having teens engage with MySpace in
the context of supervision from
knowledgeable and informed adults?

Historically, we taught children what to

do when a stranger telephoned them
when their parents are away; surely,
we should be helping to teach them
how to manage the presentation of
their selves in digital spaces. The
proposed federal legislation does
nothing to help kids confront the
challenges of interacting with online
social communities; rather, it allows
teachers and librarians to abdicate
their responsibility to educate young
people about what is becoming a
significant aspect of their everyday
lives. Our responsibilities as educators
should be to bring reason to bear on
situations which are wrought with
ignorance and fear, not to hide our
eyes from troubling aspects of teen
culture.
danah: Police currently patrol

MySpace, just as they patrol other
areas where youth hang out. Many are
thankful to know where youth go
online because it helps them do their
job. Too often, predators know youth
haunts better than police and
decentralized systems make it difficult
for police to do their job. Blocking
known sites will encourage teens to go
further underground and seek out
places to socialize that adults are
unaware of. This puts youth at

increased risk and means that neither

educators nor law enforcement will be
around to help.
Q: The proposed bill appears to offer
protection to minors from online
predators, by limiting their mutual
access. Is predation a real danger with
MySpace? Are there other issues
people should be aware of in weighing
this legislation?
danah: The media coverage of

predators on MySpace implies that 1)
all youth are at risk of being stalked
and molested because of MySpace; 2)
prohibiting youth from participating on
MySpace will stop predators from
attacking kids. Both are misleading;
neither is true.
Unfortunately, predators lurk wherever

youth hang out. Since youth are on
MySpace, there are bound to be
predators on MySpace. Yet, predators
do not use online information to abduct
children; children face a much higher
risk of abduction or molestation from
people they already know – members
of their own family or friends of the
family. Statistically speaking, kids are
more at risk at a church picnic or a boy
scout outing than they are when they
go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all
youth abductions nationwide are
stranger abductions and as far as we

know, no stranger abduction has

occurred because of social network
services. The goal of a predator is to
get a child to consent to sexual
activities. Predators contact teens
(online and offline) to start a
conversation. Just as most teens know
to say no to strange men who
approach them on the street, most
know to ignore strange men who
approach them online. When teenagers
receive solicitations from adults on
MySpace, most report deleting them
without question. Those who report
responding often talk about looking for
attention or seeking a risk. Of those
who begin conversations, few report
meeting these strangers.
The media often reference a Crimes

Against Children report that states one
in five children receive a sexual
solicitation online. A careful reading of
this report shows that 76% of the
unwanted solicitations came from
fellow children. This includes unwanted
date requests and sexual taunts from
fellow teens. Of the adult solicitations,
96% are from people 18-25; wanted
and unwanted solicitations are both
included. In other words, if an 18 year
old asks out a 17 year old and both
consent, this would still be seen as a
sexual solicitation.

Only 10% of the solicitations included

a request for a physical encounter;
most sexual solicitations are for
cybersex. While the report shows that
a large percentage of youth are faced
with uncomfortable or offensive
experiences online, there is no
discussion of how many are faced with
uncomfortable or offensive experiences
at school, in the local shopping mall or
through other mediated channels like
telephone.
Although the media has covered the
potential risk extensively, few actual
cases have emerged. While youth are
at minimal risk, predators are regularly
being lured out by law enforcement
patrolling the site. Most notably, a
deputy in the Department of Homeland
Security was arrested for seeking sex
with a minor.
The fear of predators has regularly
been touted as a reason to restrict
youth from both physical and digital
publics. Yet, as Barry Glassner notes in
The Culture of Fear, predators help
distract us from more statistically
significant molesters. Youth are at far
greater risk of abuse in their homes
and in the homes of their friends than
they ever are in digital or physical
publics.
Q: You have written before on anti-

electronic/anti-new media attitudes.

Where does this proposed bill fit into

those?
Henry: History shows us a recurring

pattern surrounding the adaptation of
any new communications technology.
Young people are often early adopters:
they are more open to new ideas and
experiences; they are looking for ways
to leave their mark on the world and
they are seeking places where they
can socially interact with minimal adult
interference. Parents and teachers are
often frightened by these new kinds of
communication technologies which
were not part of the world of their
childhood: they don't really understand
what their young people are doing with
them and they don't know how to
protect or supervise their children
while they are engaged in these
activities. The situation is thus ripe for
moral panic.
A single high profile incident – some

kind of tragedy or crime – can spark
backlash. Political leaders, seeking
headlines, and journalists, seeking
readers, exploit those anxieties and
feed those fears. Soon, there is a call
to take action "even if it is wrong," a
call to action which races well ahead of
any serious research or thoughtful
reflection on the matters at hand. The
new legislation is being embraced by

politicians in both parties eager to woo

cultural conservatives and suburban
voters as they enter what everyone
knows is going to be a hotly contested
election.
Over time, as these technologies

become better integrated into
everyday life, as the generation which
grew up with these technologies takes
on adult responsibilities, things calm
down again. People develop a more
balanced perspective which sees both
the benefits and risks associated with
these activities. Rather than restrict
access, we educate our young people
in the safe, ethical, and creative use of
these technologies.
Right now, MySpace is at the most
disruptive point in this cycle: people
are reacting in ignorance and fear and
in doing so, they increase the risks and
discard the benefits of these emerging
cultural practices.
Q: Most people know there is a digital

divide - are the issues raised by this
legislation related to the widening or
narrowing of the gap or to other things?
Henry: Over the past decade, there

has been intense public concern about
the digital divide. Many of us have
worked hard to insure that every kid
has access to the Internet via schools

and public libraries, if not through their

own homes. And these efforts have
been largely successful, outside of
Indian reservations and some other
rural pockets, in insuring at least
minimal levels of access. Now, the
problem shifts from concerns about
technical access to concerns about
participation in the key social and
cultural experiences which are defining
the emerging generation's relationship
to these technologies. What a kid can
do at home with unlimited access is
very different from what a kid can do
in a public library with ten or fifteen
minutes of access at a time and with
no capacity to store and upload
information to the web. We further
handicap these children by placing
filters on the Internet which restrict
their access to information which is
readily available to their more affluent
classmates. And now this legislation
would restrict their ability to
participate in social networks or to
belong to online communities.
The result will be to further isolate

children from poorer economic
backgrounds, to cut kids at risk from
support systems which exist within
their peer culture, and to limit the
social and cultural experiences of kids
who are already behind in acquiring
important networking skills that will

shape their professional futures. All of

this will compound what we are now
calling the participation gap. The early
discussion of the digital divide
assumed that the most important
concern was insuring access to
information as if the web were simply
a data bank. Its power comes through
participation within its social networks.
The authors of the law are reading
MySpace and other social software
exclusively in terms of their risks; they
are not focusing on the opportunities
they offer for education and personal
growth. In protecting children from
those risks, they would cut them off
from those educational benefits.
Q: You have said elsewhere (and

several years ago) that virtual gaming
experiences of today are analogous to
the unfettered play in the backyards of
the 1950s -- very core & essential
experiences. Have social networking
like MySpace or games or other new
media technology become core
experiences now?
Henry: As I suggested above, most
parents understand their children's
experiences in the context of their
memories of their own early years. For
the baby boom generation, those
defining experiences involved playing
in backyards and vacant lots within

suburban neighborhoods, socializing

with their friends at the local teen
hangout, and participating within a
social realm which was constrained by
the people who went to your local
school. All of that is changing.
Contemporary children and youth

enjoy far less physical mobility, have
less time outside of adult control, and
have fewer physical places to hang out
with their friends.
Much of this activity is being brought

online. What teens are doing online is
no better and no worse than what
previous generations of teens did when
their parents weren't looking. The
difference is that as these activities are
being digitized, they are also being
brought into public view. Video games
bring the fantasy lives of young boys
into the family room and parents are
shocked by what they are seeing.
Social networks give adults a way to
access their teens’ social and romantic
lives and they are startled by their
desire to break free from restraints or
act older than their age. Parents are
experiencing this as a loss of control
but in fact, adults have greater control
over these aspects of their children's
lives than ever before.
Indeed, one of the biggest risks of

these digital technologies is not the
ways that they allow teens to escape
adult control but rather the permanent
traces left behind of their transgressive
conduct. Teens used to worry about
what teachers or administrators might
put in their permanent records since
this would impact how they were
treated in the future. Yet, we are
increasingly discovering that
everything we do online becomes part
of our public and permanent record,
easily recoverable by anyone who
knows how to Google, and that there is
no longer any statute of limitations on
our youthful indiscretions.
danah: Because of mobile phones,

current college students report greater
ongoing communication with their
parents than in previous generations.
As Misa Matsuda has argued,
networked technologies are allowing
today’s youth to maintain “full-time
intimate communities.” While the
socialization that takes place in digital
publics is equivalent to that which
occurs in physical publics, new media
is allowing youth to be more deeply
connected to their peers and their
family members, providing a powerful
open channel for communication and
sharing.
Q: The proposed bill is a political

response to a social/technological

development - could you offer a

political framework for considering
MySpace and laws to limit access to it?
Henry: Right now, MySpace and the

other social network tools are being
read as threats to the civic order, as
encouraging anti-social behaviors. But
we can easily turn this around and see
them as the training ground for future
citizens and political leaders. Young
people are assuming public roles at
earlier and earlier ages. They are
interacting with larger communities of
their peers and beginning to develop
their own styles of leadership. Across a
range of issues, young people are
using social network software to
identify and rally like-minded
individualism, forming the basis for
new forms of digital activism.
Current research shows that teens who

participate in massively multiplayer
games develop a much stronger ability
to work in teams, a greater
understanding of how and when to
take appropriate risks, an ability to
rapidly process complex bodies of
information, and so forth. At the same
time, these teens are facing an array
of ethical challenges which are badly
understood by the adults around them.
They have nowhere to turn for advice
on how to confront some of the choices

they make as participants within these

communities. Part of the work we will
be doing for the MacArthur Foundation
involves the development of an ethics
casebook which will help parents,
teachers, and students work through
some of these issues and make
sensible decisions about how they
conduct their online lives. We see this
kind of pedagogical intervention as far
more valuable than locking down all
public computers and then sending
kids out to deal with these issues on
their own.
Q: What suggestions do you have for

parents or other adults eager to learn
more about MySpace and to
understand what's going on with it,
kids and political reactions?
Henry: Parents face serious challenges

in helping their children negotiate
through these new online
environments. They receive very little
advice about how to build a
constructive relationship with media
within their families or how to help
their offspring make ethical choices as
participants in these online worlds. As
a culture, we have deeply conflicted
assumptions about adolescence which
functions as a period of transition:
Most of us recognize that teens need
to take on a greater degree of

autonomy as they prepare for adult

lives, even as they still need some
degree of adult supervision to help
them make sane and safe decisions;
we simply disagree about the relative
balance of freedom and autonomy that
teens should receive.
We respect the fact that the decisions

families make about media reflect
some of their most deeply held values;
different families have different
concerns and make different decisions.
For that reason, we think decisions
about youth access to digital
technologies should be made in the
context of individual families and not
form the basis of one-size-fits-all
federal legislation. Recognizing that
different parents will approach these
issues in different ways, we would still
offer the following as our governing
philosophy for dealing with MySpace
and other social software.
1. Communication with your daughter

or son is key. Build a trusting
relationship through dialogue. It is
important to talk with them about your
concerns; it is even more important to
listen to what they have to say about
their online experiences and why these
sites are such an important part of
their interactions with their peers. You
need to recognize that some unfamiliar

experiences look scarier from the

outside than they are. Take time to
understand what you are seeing and
what it means to participants.
2. Create an account to understand

how the site works, but not to stalk
your kids. They need room to explore,
but if you are familiar with the media
and technology that they consume,
you can provide valuable guidance and
suggestions. Surveillance, while
possible, damages a trusting parent/
child relationship.
3. Ask your kids how they choose to

represent themselves and why. Use
MySpace as a resource to start a
conversation about contemporary
fashion, ideals, and media images.
4. Talk about private/ public issues

with your kids. Help them to
understand the consequences of
making certain information publicly
accessible. Get them to think through
all of the possible audiences who might
come into contact with their online
information. Teens often imagine
MySpace as a youth-only world. It isn't
and they need to consider what the
consequences would be if their
grandparents, their teachers,
admissions officers or a future
employer read what they said about

themselves. Helping your children
learn how to negotiate such public
environments is a great educational
opportunity.
5. Talk through what kids should do if

they receive unwanted attention online
or if they find themselves the victims
of cyberbullying. A growing number of
sites provide useful information about
how to confront such problems,
including Net Family News , NetSmartz
and SafeTeens. The “Safety Tips”
section of MySpace also provides
information for both parents and teens,
including MySpace policies.
Henry and danah: We welcome further

questions from parents. Our feeling is
that there should be more public
discussion of the opportunities and
risks represented by MySpace and
other social networks. Please send
your questions to myspaceissues@mit.
edu and we will do our best to respond.
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BigShinyThing » Henry Jenkins: On Convergence Culture
BigShinyThing Need To Know

Always Touched by
Your Presence, Dear.
Henry Jenkins: Facebook, poking and Being
Here.
On Convergence Culture Wii vs. TV

In a fantastic bit of PR, the
Monday 14 August 2006 Nintendo Wii is apparently
hacking into TV ratings in
Japan.
Henry Jenkins’ new book tells the story of emergent participatory Insurgent Media
media. He kindly granted BigShinyThing an exclusive email Networks
A new report offers a
interview. perspective on the media war
being fought by Sunni
For a while now, we’ve been paying great attention to the insurgents in Iraq…
writings of Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media New Gold Dream?
Is it just us, or…
Studies graduate program at MIT.
Something Wikid
Wikipedia reports on the
Over the last few years, he’s argued that the participatory death of Chris Benoit’s wife
creation led by fans and gamers heralds a transformation in 14 hours before the police
find her body.
creative media. His new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old
Prince Covermount Deal
Irks Retailers
Enter search text Search research, and was recently published to rave reviews from all Legendary musician cuts out
the middleman for release of
sides. his next album
Enter email address Subscribe The MySpace/FaceBook

While impatiently waiting for our copy to arrive, we caught up Class Divide
with Jenkins via email to get our readers the lowdown on his Young Americans’ choice of
MySpace or FaceBook says a
persuasive arguments about fan culture, collaborative production, lot about their place in the
offline world…
and the social networking site backlash.
What Goes On The Way We Live Now
BST: We’re still waiting for your book to turn up in the mail! Can Modelling 9/11.
● THINGS TO SEE & DO TODAY PhotoSynth: Making the
you tell us a little about its premise?
World…
● Camouflage
…One snapshot at a time
❍ They say: "Find out how and why a JENKINS: We live in an age where every story, image, brand,
revolution in camouflage occurred during Arse About Facebook II
the First World War; how teams of artists relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible array It’s not often we post back-to-
back on the same topic, but
and designers were employed to conceal of media channels. This convergence is shaped top-down by today we’re fired up about
and distort everything from soldiers to Facebook…
decisions made in corporate boardrooms by companies wishing to
battleships and how camouflage concepts Arse about Facebook
and designs have influenced contemporary tap their cross-media ownership and bottom-up by decisions Social networking and the
art and fashion from street-style to made in teen’s bedrooms as they want to consume the media they culture of me.
couture." We say: "DAZZLE SHIPS! DAZZLE
want where they want it and when they want it. What Goooogle
SHIPS!"
Knoooows about Yoooou
Is there any part of our lives
Consumers are gaining a new power as they learn to operate online and offline that Google
within the knowledge cultures emerging within a networked doesn’t know about?
society and as they learn to share media they’ve produced with Save the Spitz
A London music landmark
each other. needs your help.
Right now, they are acquiring and mastering these skills through
their play with popular culture, but soon they will be applying
them towards other powerful institutions. And Stuff.
You are a fan of fans, and argue that fans have long been ahead
of the convergence curve, with their understanding that the ‘text’
of the stories they care about is open to engagement,
involvement, transformation. Now a much wider community is
participating in cultural creation. Is there an essential difference
between fan-created content and other content contributions
from the ‘former audience’?
Fans have been and are likely to continue to be the shock troops
in this transformation of our culture — highly motivated,
passionately committed, and socially networked. They are early
adopters of new technologies and willing to experiment with new
relationships to culture. (We might also throw into this category
http://www.bigshinything.com/henry-jenkins-on-convergence-culture (1 of 8) [2007-07-29 00:59:44]

other highly motivated groups such as bloggers and gamers.)

Nice To Know
There are signs that fan culture practices and products are The Simpsons meet Couture
spreading throughout the culture. Recent statistics from the Pew

Center of Internet and American Life found that more than half of
teens online produce some form of media and many of them
shared what they produced by others. They are part of the
participatory culture I am describing. So are people who join
discussion forms or sign up for RSS feeds to get more information
about their favorite band or television program.
As writers like Will Wright and Raph Koster have suggested, there
is a pyramid of participation. Not everyone will want to spend
massive amounts of time generating new content — some will
simply want to engage with content others have produced. Not
Trannies Got Talent
everyone will write fan stories — some may share critical
Blaira
responses with the authors. Not everyone will want to spoil reality
television programs — some will simply enjoy the new
relationships to the program the spoiler community helps to
create for them. But the expansion of this participatory culture
changes the context in which media content gets produced and
distributed and thus it impacts all of us one way or another. Given
this, I would imagine fans may still enjoy a privileged status in
participatory culture but more and more people will benefit from
the once invisible cultural work of fans.
As you define it, is ‘convergence’ an historical event, which has

already occurred, an epoch (like the Renaissance), during which
we are living, or something experiential, which is happening to
different groups of people at differing times, in different ways?
That’s an interesting question. In some ways, each of these would

be accurate.
In the book, I challenge those who think of convergence as a Rather Lovely

technological process and feel that we are a long way from
integrating our communications technologies. I suggest we are
already living in a convergence culture if we take advantage of the
many kludged together ways that content travels across media
platforms right now.
But I also see convergence as an ongoing process — not an

endpoint — so it doesn’t make sense to read it as a historical
event that has already occured, even if some aspects of the
change have been building over an extended period of time at this
point. I do think convergence is going to define our relationship to
media for an extended period of time forward so it is in some
ways an epoch.
But I also think the transitional nature of the present moment, as

well as the uneven distribution of media technologies, means that
we are not all living in convergence culture in the same ways or
the same degrees. If it is an epoch, then, it is one that is just
beginning and the long term consequences of these shifts are
going to play themselves out for years and years to come.
The ‘Renaissance Man’ was a new creature, in that ‘his’ identity

was open to invention, construction, reassembly, interrogation.
What defines the ‘Convergence Person’, if such a person exists as
a type? Who exemplifies this, and why?

The Renaissance Man was someone who sought to contain within

their own individual intellect as much as possible of what anyone
on the planet at that time knew.
Today, with the explosion of information we are all experiencing, it

is simply not humanly possible to know everything. Most of us
alive today know more about a broader range of topics than most
of the people living in the Renaissance but we know a much
smaller portion of what could be known that the idealized vision of
the Renaissance Man suggests.
This is where Pierre Levy’s notion of Collective Intelligence enters

the picture. Today, we see knowledge as dispersed across social
networks. Everybody knows something, nobody knows everything,
and what is known by any member is accessible to the group on
demand. The Convergence Person thus knows how to tap that
network to get the knowledge they need and knows how to make
meaningful contributions back to the group in return. The
Renaissance Man was a creature of hierarchy and expertise; the
Convergence Person is a creature of adhocracy and pooled
information.
Do you feel that converged culture offers specific opportunities to

— or imposes particular obligations on — the ‘official’ creators of
fictional worlds (open-endedness, unresolved story arcs etc)?
In the book, I offer two terms to refer to the aesthetic goals of

convergence culture.
First, works seek to be cultural attractors. If consumption is now

social and communal, then certain works will attract together
people of similar interests so that they can begin to pool
knowledge together. To do that, they often must tap existing
cultural references in the way that Lost or The Matrix or Harry
Potter can be said to do.
Second, works seek to be cultural activators. They give audiences

something to do — some activity, some roles and goals, some
meaningful form of participation. This can be literally the case in
terms of the mechanisms of participation that surround reality
television or computer games. Or it can simply be the show
embeds lots of secrets and thus opens itself up to a prolonged
process of decryption, as seems to be the case of Lost. There are
plenty of shows that achieve the first, far fewer which achieve the
second.
Once you’ve designed a cultural attractor and activator, the next

step out would be to provide raw materials which fans then want
to recombine in new ways and thus generate new forms of
cultural expression. And the final step in this process may be to
find ways to monitor and amplify the creative energies of these
fan communities to sustain popular interest in your program.
To achieve the first two, you need the skills and creativity of
professional creators. To achieve the second two, you have to
create a context where grassroots creativity is respected rather
than shut down.
Lost would seem to be a show which does very well by the first

two criteria: a decade ago, Lost would be a cult show like Twin
Peaks was in its time. Now, it is one of the highest rated shows on
American television despite the fact that, as Steven Johnson has
pointed out, it is also one of the most intellectually demanding
shows on American television (or more precisely because it is so
demanding.) It is designed in a way to generate constant secrets
which we want to uncover and thus providing fuel for the
participation of large scale knowledge communities. The map
which was flashed across the screen for a split second in a single
episode is, as Jason Mittell has noted, emblematic of that new
relationship with the consumer.
As of this summer, the Lost Team has pushed this one step
further by creating an alternate reality game that will generate
new opportunities for participation and socialization around the
series. There has been some suggestion that the Lost writers also
monitor online communities and reshape the story in response to
their speculations.
There has so far been fewer signs of audiences recreating Lost or

creating the next generation of Lost on their own. This may be
because the series is so demanding and people are still so
unsettled in their expectations about what is actually going on
there. In that regard, Lost may generate more new culture once it
is finished than it has so far. This was certainly the case with Twin
Peaks which only really started to inspire fan fiction once it was off
the air. It is spectacular though to recognize that Wrapped in
Plastic, a fanzine produced when the show was first aired, is still
being produced and read — and if anything, it has more
subscribers now, a decade plus later, than when the series was
first broadcast. This is a classic illustration of the ways that fans
can help extend the shelf life of media products.
With the advent of weightless digital media, we’ve anticipated

some global crossover hit from somewhere other than the ‘first
world’, but so far, it’s not happened — music in particular seems
to exist in tight local (spatial or cultural) ghettos of genre. Any
thoughts on what it would take for a truly converged global music
culture and if/when it will happen?
I think you are measuring success by the old standards — looking

for mega-hits — whereas the greatest impact of globalization in
media content so far comes on the other end of Chris Anderson’s
long tail. Global media in the West remains niche media.
Indeed, you can argue that it is the most vivid example of the
potential of niche media for market success. Music is, as you note
above, in general, defined right now by ever more precise niches
or “ghettos of genre” to use your term. While music can be a
shared resource within subcultural communities, there is very little
music we listen to as a culture at large.
The Nichification of music is suggested by something like MySpace

which emerged initially as a vehicle for helping people to find
music that they liked by tapping their social networks. The
massification of music might be suggested by something like
American Idol — which has self consciously sought to generate
music that will appeal across a broad demographic (though in
reality, the best Idols have turned out to be second run

performers on the show who then get pulled into specialized

niches once they depart it.)
Right now, I see people consuming more and more media from
other parts of the world — global fusion music, anime and manga,
Bollywood films, Latin America soaps, Nigerian horror films, etc.
but in fairly localized communities of interests. We are seeing this
culture brought into the western market by a mixture of Otaku
(fans) and Desi (immigrants): fans seek out difference where-ever
they can find it in the world; immigrants seek to maintain ties
back to the mother country which they left. Both contribute to a
cultural landscape where global media is more readily available.
And the results can take off dramatically.
Do you think that the diversification of modes of media

consumption (iPod, PVR/DVR, home cinema, mobile phone)
makes for a fundamental challenge to creators of ‘content’? If so,
what’s the challenge, and where do you see this challenge
leading?
Ok — there are two potential challenges — one a dead-end, the

other a new possibility for gifted entertainers.
The dead end is the idea of developing content that simply gets
reconfigured easily across all of those platforms. This is an idea
that’s been kicking around for a while and this practice shows little
to no appreciation of the aesthetic and social dimensions of those
various media.
The result will be something like the pan and scan prints of films
which have been reconfigured to fit our television screens as
opposed to the letterboxed prints that reflect a recognition of the
aesthetic practices that shaped the original product and seek a
meaningful compromise as it is moved into the new medium.
To create media content that is mechanically reconfigured across

all of those platforms is to produce content that really exploits the
potentials of none of those media. We’ve seen this in cinema
where the expressive uses of cinemascope found in the 1950s
when films were designed for the big screen have given way to
the pretty limited use of the frame edges that characterize current
filmmaking practice. However big the screen looks in the theatre,
the significant action has to play out within the boxed window
which will be visible on the television screen.
There will of course be some content that moves easily from

platform to platform but in general, I think one has to develop
strategies appropriate for each space. We are already seeing that
there are television series that do spectacularly well on video iPod
that are not ratings champs on broadcast and other shows,
sitcoms, dramatically under-perform in these new contexts.
The alternative is what I am calling transmedia storytelling or

more broadly transmedia entertainment. This is a system where
each medium makes a distinct contribution to the media
franchise, each is left to do what it does best, and the reader is
able to expand on their experience of a favorite story by pulling
together bits and pieces of information from various sources.
I discuss this in the book in terms of The Matrix where the films,

animation, games, and comics each made unique and integral

contributions to the whole. This is similar to the “media mix”
culture that has emerged in Japan, for example. I believe that
transmedia storytelling represents the most compelling way to use
convergence to expand the canvas on which our most creative
entertainers work.
We are convinced that the current proliferation of hardware and

software is but a moment ie netflix, PVRs, chargeable film
downloads, before content moves entirely online (reaches
convergence). However, the media industry at large appears to
be in denial about this — do you agree?
I am much more interested in predicting where our culture is

going than predicting where technology is going. My hunch is that
we are going to see a variety of delivery mechanisms for the
foreseeable future and indeed, that there will be no steady state
of media convergence, no fully integrated technological
infrastructure.
We are seeing that divergence as demonstrated by specialized

devices is part of the process by which convergence operates. I
don’t happen to like the idea of my cell phone as a media
appliance, for example, and I find that I prefer to watch dvds on a
portable dvd player rather than my laptop. These are probably
idiosyncratic choices but then, the point is that every consumer
wants their own unique mix of media appliances because they like
certain affordances each offers in specific contexts.
My hunch is that as soon as some media functions get integrated,

someone else will offer a new appliance that seperates them out
again for consumers who want a different relationship to media
content. This goes back to what I say about convergence being a
process rather than an endpoint. We are going to see ever more
complicated configurations of media, ever more complex
integrations of media content, but we may never reach a
technological steady state.
This doesn’t mean that all of the stop gap measures you are
referring to above are here to stay. They will only last if they are
seen by consumers as serving necessary functions or if they serve
a clear niche in the new media infrastructure.
Nobody I suspect imagines the video iPod say is the best possible
way to watch television. It simply came along at the right moment
to provide an infrastructure to support television content on
demand. And we will see a better solution emerge. We are already
seeing Netflix and other services experiment with new ways to get
movies into the hands of consumers besides mailing dvds. On the
other hand, there are signs that people still want to buy books
even where they can download the content for free on the web.
danah boyd and yourself seem to have become (reluctantly) the

most visible defenders of young people’s rights to explore and
create identity using emergent media. We remember when
‘learning-though-doing’ with technology and media was at the
core of education, but it seems that the young people growing up
now have to reclaim reedoms that have somehow subsequently
been lost without a fight — any thoughts on what went wrong
with the relationship between children and tools/media, and what

we grownups can do to help them maintain and/or win back their

right to play (with technology, identity, etc)?
In a way, each generation of young people across history have

had to fight their own battles for expressive freedom and for the
right to play with technology and identity. Young people have
always been on the cutting edge of media change as they search
for ways to escape the surveillance of their parents and define
their own space in the world. They gravitate towards the new and
the shiny and they are willing to put in the time to adopt it to their
needs and interests.
Parents are often spooked by their relationship to these

technologies that were not part of the culture of their own
childhoods. They don’t know how to protect their children as they
go into that space — and this is part of the point.
All it takes is one shocking tragedy — something like the

Columbine shooting — to turn their ignorance into fear and then it
takes the mixture of moral reformers, sensationalistic media, and
opportunistic politicians to turn their fear into a moral panic which
results in laws and regulations that try to put the genie back in
the bottle again. It can take a generation to reverse those
constraints — more particularly, it takes the generation which
came of age with those technologies to take on adult roles as
parents, teachers, lawyers, and citizens. Then, we see a reversal
of course which allows us to adopt a more normalized attitude
towards those technologies and practices.
With Columbine and video games, we were lucky that few of the
laws passed in that phase of moral panic withstood judicial review.
With MySpace, we are apt to be less lucky because if DOPA
passes, it will be a law that is going to be hard to challenge in
courts. Technically it isn’t censorship. Schools are not prohibited
for allowing youth to access MySpace. They simply lose federal
funding if they do so. And the Federal government can make any
stipulation it wants on how it distributes its funds.
The result is going to be a law which we will actively have to repel

once the generation that has grown up using social network
software becomes adults. This is going to be a huge step back for
participatory culture and a big step back for those of us who want
to see Web 2.0 applications used more fully in the classroom.
What is shocking is that it is occuring with so little real public
discussion because the mainstream media has done everything it
can to scare people about MySpace and has little interest in
reporting the truth about this story.
That said, I think there was a fatal mistake in the discourse about
youth and digital media in the 1990s. It became all about the
digital divide which got defined in terms of access to technologies.
This wasn’t true of [Seymour] Papert and a few others but it
became the mantra. “Let’s build a bridge to the 21st century. Let’s
wire our classroom.” Well, we wired the classroom — now what?
We now face the participation gap — the gap between those who
have unlimited access to new media outside of school (and more
importantly, the skills and experiences they enable) and those
who have limited bandwidth, limited access, on filtered
computers. We dealt with the technological challenges but not the

social and cultural challenges. And we have been held hostage by

a culture war discourse that has been very effective at
transforming adult ignorance into fear and backlash against those
forms of cultural experience teens have found for themselves in
the online world.
I am very involved right now in developing the case for a very

different form of media education — one which grows out of a
desire to enable kids to become more active participants in the
participatory culture I describe in my book.
That’s where Convergence Culture ends — with the call for new
media literacies — and that’s where my new book begins. We are
going to be releasing a white paper later this fall that paves the
way for a whole range of pedagogical activities designed to help
teachers and parents better appreciate the value of gaming, social
networking, fan fiction writing, and all of the other things the most
digitally adept kids are doing now.
Posted by Darrell | Tags: books, co-creation, Convergence Culture, fan culture,
future, games, Henry Jenkins, interview, iPod, media theory, MySpace, television,
transmedia, youth
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SEE ALSO:
● Transmedia: The Future of Television Isn't What It Used To Be:
Anyone see the season finale of Criminal Minds?...
● The Legend of LonelyGirl15: An online fiction with a life of its
own....
● Not OurSpace. TheirSpace. Elseware.: This Year's Moral Panic
about young people's safety concerns social networking sites.
We think parents are missing the generational sea change that
really should scare them....
LICENSE:
This article is provided under a Creative Commons license.

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube
« Chris Williams Respond to Our Questions Switching Channels: Branding Network TV

Main
about FanLib in an Era of Mass-less Media(Part One) »
May 28, 2007
Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

The following is adapted from remarks I made at the International Communications Association conference in San Francisco
this past week. I was asked to be part of a plenary session organized by Fred Turner, "What's So Significant about
Social Networking?: Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential," which also featured Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, and
Tiziana Terranova. We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place
of YouTube in contemporary culture. Many of these ideas will be familiar to regular readers of this blog since most of them
have evolved here over the past year, but I thought you might find them interesting distilled down in this form. (For those
who may be joining us from the ICA crowd, I've included links back to the original posts from which these ideas have evolved.)
Convergence
Culture
1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks -- a space
Buy at Amazon
where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever
Buy at Powells
more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power.
One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf -- fake grassroots media -- through which very powerful
Fans, Bloggers
and Gamers groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past,
Buy at Amazon these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass market media but now,
Buy at Powells
they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture.
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html (1 of 7) [2007-09-06 05:08:26]

The Wow Climax 2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production
and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies
Buy at Amazon
Buy at Powells has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures
of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use
of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through
this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across
these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact
that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed
in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most
powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form
of cultural collaboration.
3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various
niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media
by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding
clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which
they originated. A classic example of this might be the Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The
media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing
on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and
his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed
from YouTube
4. YouTube's value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites -- with content gaining much
greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace, and the like. While some people come and
surf YouTube, it's real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that
regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickiness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your
site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active
agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content.)
5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most
people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples

of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn't thought to record them
as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen's "macaca" comments, the tazering incident in
the UCLA library, Michael Richards's racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein's execution, are
a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution.
6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways
that Apple's "1984" advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the
political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may
best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream:
Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy:
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives
these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should
have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input
of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us
to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and
shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended:
setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows
are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or
replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.
Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the
bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should
anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and
norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans,
Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.
7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and
remixes content from the mass media industry; the mass
media industry monitors trends and pulls innovations back into the system, amplifying them and spreading them to
other populations. Yet as they do so, they often alter the social and economic relations which fueled this cultural production in

the first place. We will see increasing debates about the relations between the gift economy of participatory culture and
the commodity relations that characterize user-generated content. There is certainly a way that these sites can be seen as a way
of economic exploitation as they outsource media production from highly paid and specialized creative workers to their
amateur unpaid counterparts.
8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that
young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to
be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do
with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people
acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks.
9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us,
minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to
come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore
what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within
the new participatory culture.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
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» Ypulse Essentials from Ypulse
Is Disney fueling the growth of tween mags? (if they've revived jump roping, it makes sense that their stable of tween stars
would be a big draw to titles like J-14 and Bop. Plus tweens still love the pin-ups [I... [Read More]
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in San Francisco on Friday, May 25, 2007 was not recorded. The following is an attempt to re-create faithfully (of the course
the [Read More]
Tracked on May 29, 2007 9:22 PM
Comments
In regards to point 9: the popular videos on Youtube may in fact be less than diverse, but in the total body of contributions,
there appears to be quite a strong international representation. As an example, a quick look at the Most Recent Uploads page
this morning showed that of the 20 links on the page, 12 of them (60%) led to videos that were non-English in either spoken
or written content.
I've been doing some examination of Youtube contributions for the past few months, and while unpublished, this seems
ballpark-consistent with what I've been seeing throughout. This observation might also be read as support for points 1 and
2 above.
Posted by: Eric Cook | May 29, 2007 11:44 AM
An interesting question is also how 2008 presidential candidates negotiate their participation on YouTube. Clearly they
cannot perform authenticity in the way other YouTube members do, by broadcasting from their bedrooms, clipping their
favorite TV shows, and pajama-dancing. There seems to be an interesting contradiction between the culture of
YouTube dominated by parody and spoofing, and the seriousness of the role of presidential candidates who aspire to lead
the nation. So far this contradiction made it difficult for presidential candidates to fully leverage the potential of YouTube as
a social medium.
Posted by: Sonja Baumer | May 31, 2007 12:14 AM
Here's an interesting bit:
EU regulators apparently currently view Youtube as a medium which is not only "neither TV nor TV-like" but also apparently
not "a linear or non-linear audiovisual service" and **therefore not an "audio-visual media service" altogether.**

So consequently, the likes of youtube is subject to far less EU regulation (to the chagrin of broadcasters and cable/DTH operators)
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-youtube-is-not-yet-tv-ec-says-clarifying-new-rules/
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB118004402666113909-lMyQjAxMDE3ODIwNTAyNDU0Wj.html
Posted by: Zhan | May 31, 2007 7:04 PM
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What is Henry Jenkins' perspective on the relationship between media and democracy?

What is Henry Jenkins' perspective on the relationship between media and democracy?

How does Henry Jenkins contrast his perspective with other scholars like Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney?

How does Henry Jenkins contrast his perspective with other scholars like Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney?

Henry Jenkins

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/ [2007-06-28 02:09:07]

MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

A traditional account of democracy might focus on institutions, policies, laws, and

THE INFORMED CITIZEN

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (1 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

"Media in Transition: An Introduction," which I co-authored with David Thorburn,

The Boston Review recently asked me to respond to an essay written by political

"Information Cosmos," one of my Technology Review columns, deals with information

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (2 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (3 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

THE CULTURE OF DEMOCRACY

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

COMBATING THE CULTURE WAR

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (4 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF CHILDHOOD

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (5 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/democracy.html (6 of 6) [2007-06-28 02:09:32]

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/genre.html (1 of 4) [2007-06-28 02:09:50]

"Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination Through Hollywood Film",

"Never Trust a Snake!': WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama", which appeared in

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/genre.html (2 of 4) [2007-06-28 02:09:50]

My dissertation dealt with the impact of vaudeville on the development of the

Classical Hollywood Comedy, co-edited with Kristine Karnack, provided me with an

GENRES OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

In "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Playspace", which

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/genre.html (3 of 4) [2007-06-28 02:09:50]

"Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty': The Sentimental Value of Lassie", which

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/genre.html (4 of 4) [2007-06-28 02:09:50]

media in transition book series - http://web.mit.edu/transition

http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/ [2007-06-28 02:10:37]

David Thorburn, editor

click on images or titles for tables of content and sample chapters

Rethinking Democracy and New Media Neo Baroque

| Comparative Media Studies | Communications Forum

http://web.mit.edu/transition/ [2007-06-28 02:11:06]

NEO BAROQUE AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA

Angela Ndalianis, author

click on highlighted title to see chapter

1. Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque 4. Virtuosity, Special-Effects Spectacles,

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neobaroque.html [2007-06-28 02:11:28]

Introduction to Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT

The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque

Postclassical, Modern Classicism, or Neo-Baroque? Will the Real Contemporary

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (1 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

Click image for detailed view.

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (2 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

extension into multiple media formats is increasingly reliant on an active audience

In "Modern Classicism," the first chapter of Storytelling in the New Hollywood:

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (3 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (4 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (5 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

... Of Things Baroque

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (6 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:09]

http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html (7 of 30) [2007-06-28 02:12:10]