Monday, January 30, 2012

Henry Jenkins and the Effects of Transmedia Works

We define ourselves by our stories. We have defined ourselves by our stories since the dawn of sapience in our species. Our stories are how we explain the world, and they are how we convince others to change the world, and how we explain ourselves to the world as well as how we explain the world to ourselves. Stories have always been a kind of universal thing, something that everyone does and can comprehend. While nothing else in our collective of societies and cultures could be called universal, the commonality of telling stories is all pervasive. Henry Jenkins, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, has studied how stories transmute and are used when subjected to multiple forms of media in a continuous whole. The official term for this is transmedia, and one of the most interesting aspects of it is how mutating and transforming as more and more it comes into the hands of normal people rather than specific artisans. One of the Henry Jenkin’s biggest contributions is to the study of transmedia in this manner. He is a public intellectual of the highest degree that has changed how we see the consumption of media and story telling in our new age of interactive and visual media.

Henry Jenkins is a public intellectual who focuses on the study of communications and transmedia objects and trends to explain how and why humans communicate with one another, both through study of stories and of how those stories are told. Henry Jenkins was born on June 4th, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a journalism and political science undergraduate at Georgia State University. He went on to earn his masters in communication studies at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in communication arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later married and went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally gaining a job at the University of Southern California, where he continues to teach at the Annenberg School of Communications. His achievements today include a number of books on the subject of transmedia including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It can be said that few, if any, public intellectuals have done as much as Henry Jenkins has for our understanding of how people communicate with one another through modern media.

Firstly, we must define what a public intellectual is. An intellectual is someone who is an educated, knowledgeable, expert on whatever it is he is talking about. Usually this means an academic though it does not have to. University professors are usually intellectuals on their own subject for example. A public intellectual is one who attempts to take knowledge that is codified in the slang and terminology of his own profession, and decode it for the general masses who do not have the same level of experience or background that the intellectual has, and thus require someone to explain the entire thing in far simpler terms than might normally be done. A public intellectual makes it their goal to explain to as wide an audience as possible their opinions and ideas, as well as educate them on the concepts that underpin those opinions and ideas. A normal intellectual would only write for people who have the basic level of knowledge required to personally understand and decode a profession’s slang and terminology, the public intellectual puts no such restrictions on his own writing.
    Henry Jenkins is most certainly a public intellectual. He has a masters in Communication Studies, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts, as such, it is almost indisputable that he knows his subject: communicating ideas and such through modern media, since that is the focus of both degrees. One need only reference his autobiographical page on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which he explains that in one of his books, Textual Poachers, he defines himself as an Aca/Fan(also the name sake of his blog) someone who is both an academic and a fan of various forms of media. He explains on his blog that through that book he was trying to bridge the gap between academics and fans of various types of media so they might better understand one another. This places him quite firmly in the realm of the public, since he was not directly addressing other academics alone, but attempting to explain things in terminology that both academics and laymen could understand so that his point might be delivered. From his credentials and the purposes of his work (and the majority of the works on his website) we can see that he is most definitely a public intellectual.

Now, most interestingly we can see how the world is transforming so that transmedia is becoming less and less an issue of corporations funneling money into new projects for an existing franchise of a particular setting or story to tap new demographics, and is more and more dependent upon consumer interaction and zeal. As Jenkins explains in his article, Transmedia Storytelling 101 (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html), transmedia is a method of media meant to be used in a collective. That is to say, it is designed with the very idea that networking will play an important role in the telling of the story and the aggregation of information about the story and the setting it is in. It lives and breaths on this idea and without a social network of some sort, whether it be Facebook, cell-phones, or even just random forums on the Internet, without a social network, transmedia cannot function in its entirety. This is an enormous prospect for our world as we know it, it is huge, important, critical even to our understanding of human communication. 

This reveals something both terrible and wondrous about the transformation of the art of story telling. With a transmedia work, the individual characters and plots become almost insignificant when compared to the world that is being built. Where in a single book the setting exists merely as scenery and is important for that reason alone, it is not the reason you are reading the book. You are reading the book because the plot grips you and the characters intrigue you on some level. While these reasons might be the reason you are initially introduced to a transmedia work’s world, it is usually not why you continue to explore and look into the rest of the works within the overarching transmedia work. Jenkins uses The Matrix franchise as an excellent example, since while it started as a movie, it now includes several comics, a line of toys and action figures, several video games, an anime, and several books written in the same universe, as he points out in "We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html). You do not buy or consume any of the other products because you found them fun, or enjoyable, or intriguing in and of themselves, though they might be all of those things, but that is secondary to the fact that they were related to the initial object of the transmedia work that got you hooked into the world of the transmedia work’s story. You don’t usually buy the action figures made for The Matrix because you saw them and thought they were cool in and of themselves. There are many other action figures with cooler features, more options to play with, and that may even be cheaper that you could just as easily buy if it were an enjoyment of playing with action figures in and of themselves. You buy The Matrix action figures because they are action figures of the characters in The Matrix, because it is related to the central work you enjoy, and suddenly, you are able to continue the stories with your own imagination by acting things out with the toys! And it is this last fact that has transformed our society in ways we could never have believed.

Something relatively new to the world, something that found its roots in one of the first transmedia works ever made: Star Trek, is fan-fiction. Never before in history did someone sit down, and decide to write a story about some other kids who lived in Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s home town and had interactions with both of Mark Twain’s iconic characters. No, that started when people began to be more interested in a setting than they were in plot of the work they were consuming. Now, it is hardly possible to find a work of any sort of media that has not had some sort of fan fiction written about it. A fan might draw pictures or make a comic, or, as is most common across the Internet, write a story. There are entire websites devoted to allowing people to expand and explain and talk about and write stories within the universe of a single particular setting. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are the works most famous for generating enormous amounts of layman, or fan, created fiction to add to the setting of the central work, but almost everything now has somebody making some form of extra media to add to the whole of a single works franchise in some way, shape, or form.

Suddenly, the art of telling a story has gone critical, it has fractured and fragmented and transformed into something strange and wondrous, and only recently have people even admitted this was a real phenomenon. Before Henry Jenkins’ research, the commonly held belief among academics was that audiences passively consumed media, rather than taking it a part and rebuilding it within the rules in place within the setting of the media. Suddenly, academics have to admit to the fact that there is nothing special in taking an interest in a particular work of media and deconstructing and reconstructing and analyzing it up and down for meaning, because it is something that is constantly done by audiences and fans to remake those works with their own imaginations. Academics cannot claim, as they so often do, a kind of elite status in this analysis of works of art and fiction and literature. (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?”, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2007/08/public_intellec.html) Normal people are taking charge of processes that we once thought had to be controlled and directed by someone who was an artisan, and while the artisans certainly put out cleaner, critically better works, we cannot say that they are absolutely necessary to the process any more once the ball has gotten rolling.

Without Henry Jenkins, we may never have learned this, or at the very least, it would have taken far longer. Jenkins’ work has transformed how we approach media, it has changed how we advertise, and how we actually make and distribute media. Without his research, would we have noticed that consumers want to participate more in their chosen works? Would we have developed the complex Alternate Reality Games that preceded works like the video game Halo 3, Nine Inch Nail’s album Year Zero, and the film District 9? By codifying and studying how audiences interact with settings that transcend a single form of media, he has set off an explosion of transmedia that, in turn, has unlocked enormous creative potential locked within the consumer populace who was once considered meek and passive.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Morality, and What It Means to Me.

Many people have said many things about morality, what is right, what is wrong, and nothing conclusive has ever been reached. Even so, I feel it is necessary to talk about my own personal views about morality, if only so that readers might understand where I am coming from, what my base line view is. I will speak about this morality quite a bit, though perhaps not with the term moral in future posts, since it's such a loaded word, people don't like to talk about morality really, after all, it's all opinion correct? Maybe, maybe not, but I think that something universal can be said about morality, or at least, personal morality. My personal morals can be described in two sentences:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.
What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

These pair of sentences are my moral axioms. I know that I have done wrong when I have significantly broken one of them, that is to say, I have done something that is not only good for myself, but benefits me at the cost of others. This, I feel, is something people have lost touch with in our world, especially the overwhelming majority of libertarians, social conservatives, and neoconservatives, as well as the vast majority of corporations and the people who pander to them. It was the lack of these axioms that has slowly, but steadily destroyed the tax system and economic regulations that were set up in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, it is the lack of these axioms that causes people to stand aside and watch as laws steadily strip us of our social liberties, of our environment, of everything that makes tomorrow worth living for. It is the lack of these axioms, I feel, that on the whole has caused more ills for humanity than everything else combined in all of human history.

Before I continue, I wish to fully explain what these axioms stand for, how they function for me, and then move onto how a lack of them has caused more evil in human history than any one human has ever committed, and how it is the lack of them that has allowed the most evil things to be done. At the same time, it may be a truer statement that rather than completely lacking these axioms in their personal mental vocabulary, most people simply do not consider them, think on them, or consider the implications, which is every bit as bad as lacking them completely, if not worse. I'm hoping that by this time you have had a little time to mull over the pair of sentences above, and have actually bothered to consider them a little by reaching this point, if you have not, then I ask that before continuing on, read them once more:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.
What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

On the one hand, our first axiom is simple and self explanatory, its meaning should be immediately obvious to everyone. When I do something that benefits myself, there is absolutely nothing that says it helps anyone else, or even that it avoids harming someone else. Let us consider the act of theft for example: I walk into a store, grab some item on sale, and bolt. I've certainly benefited myself here, but I have caused some amount of damage to the owner of the store. I might not even have caused damage to the owner of the store, whoever owns the store, assuming it is a chain store for example, most certainly has more than enough money to cover the loss. The damage done to that person is probably infinitesimally small to the point of practical nonexistence. But what about the store employees? The ones who must answer to the owner for the theft? What about the security guard or the system put in place that did not prevent me from making my theft, surly someone in this interaction between the person who actually bought or produced the merchandise to sell, and myself who stole it, has been harmed by this action. Thus, we can see that simply because something benefits myself, that doesn't mean I have not harmed someone. At the same time, the first axiom does not state, nor even imply that what is good for me, necessarily harms others, this is an important distinction to make, as far too many systems of morality seem to believe that certain pleasurable acts, "victimless crimes" are in fact morally reprehensible. There should be no law preventing me from, for example, singing in the shower provided I'm not harming anyone else by it (and I do hope that my singing is not so incredibly awful that it might actually cause someone who heard it physical, mental, or spiritual harm.). At the same time, there should be no law preventing me from drink alcohol or partaking of drugs that do not cause me harm or do harm to others (for example, marijuana). If there is no victim of a "crime", then how can it legitimately be called a crime?

The second axiom is trickier, and this is the one far, far too many people do not consider, I am especially looking at the libertarian crowd in this case, for they seem to actively ignore evidence of the truth of this statement in many cases. When I do something that is good for everyone, or support something that benefits all, I am part of that all, part of that everyone. When I support a tax that pays for better schools, when I support an additional fee in some process to gain a type of license so that it might pay for better funding to park rangers, I am hurting myself a bit, I am losing something of myself in the immediate, but the benefits are enormously spread out to everyone, myself included. The same can be said of social security, public health care, and in general, a whole lot of things the government should be able to provide yet does not due to a lack of funding and from political lobbyists who out of selfishness seek to destroy such efforts. This is a much more obvious example of something I'm giving up in order to benefit not just myself, but everyone, and in a far less obvious way. When I give money in taxes to public health care, social security, the fire and police departments, and make efforts to defend those things, I know, since I am obviously well off enough to be at least middle class in our society simply by virtue of having the free time to post this blog and pursue a career in game development as well as maintain a multitude of geeky hobbies (and those are all expensive), that I will likely never ever use any of these services. My house is unlikely to be burned down, or robbed, or that I will ever find myself in a situation so economically desperate that I will require social security or public health care. So why do I support it? Sure it's useful for other people who need it but if I'm never likely to use it in my life, then why should I support it? How is the second axiom maintained? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will never use these things, that I will never need them. Bad luck, disaster, or any number of horrors can dash my good fortunes, and I may have need of these things in that time. Simply by knowing there is a safety net there, I am better off than I would be without it, able to take greater risks, strive harder to succeed, worry less about falling into squalor or economic ruin, because I know such things will be there to catch me before total ruination. Not enough people seem to realize this, not knowing that they are shooting themselves in the foot by choosing lower taxes over greater benefits. Similar things apply to internet neutrality, unions, economic regulations, and all of these highly "liberal" and "progressive" things that give power to the government to protect us from what it truly be protecting us from: Random Chance and Human Evil/Stupidity from fellow citizens, not from nebulous, far off "enemies" and "terrorists".

Now that I have fully explained both Axioms, it comes to the idea of why such things have lead to the worst human evils. In the words of Winston Churchill, who was quoting Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And unfortunately it is almost programmed into the human consciousness to do nothing against evil if it does not benefit us directly to do so. Our instincts work against us, they tell us to do only what benefits ourselves and those who are immediately close to ourselves: friends and family and people in our immediate community. Our instincts tell us to fear opposing anything that doesn't immediately effect us, especially when it is being enacted by those we see as powerful, for that is to risk security. This instinctive cowardice is what has allowed such evils as Stalin's reign of terror, the holocaust, genocide, McCarthyism, and heaven knows how many other evils and atrocities across human history, and will no doubt allow for infinitely more. Those who do not consider these pair of axioms, who allow themselves to think only of themselves and their immediate peers, while not evil in their intentions or actions, certainly allow for evil to occur, and will continue to do so until they begin to contemplate, and act, upon the spirit behind these axioms.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Introduction and Thoughts on Interactivity

Hello, and welcome to Blower Boy's Thoughts and Musings, a little blog I've made because occasionally (say, once a week or so) I get it into my head something that just needs to be said, and I might as well get those thoughts out there. Now, rather than talk about myself, my world view, I'm just going to give you a preview of those things by telling you that I'm a young adult, male, born in southern Louisiana, the Acadiana region to be specific, and am a student of interactive media (a fancy way of saying game design) at the University of Southern California. For this reason, as you might imagine, I am quite interested in interactivity, that is to say, two things that interact with one another. This might sound like it is stating the obvious, but considering how much the term "Interactivity" gets bandied about these days, I feel it is appropriate to state the obvious in this case.

For the moment I'd like you to watch the following video:
Gear Ring Video - Youtube

Now, this is an example of interactivity in a way that has not occurred before, at least it has not occurred on a large scale. A ring is not an interactive object, it is not designed to be. You put it on your finger, other people look at it. The ring might have significance in some way, it might designate your marital status, or your high school or college, it might simply be a display of wealth or any number of other things, but it is certainly not meant to be interacted with. You put it on your finger and forget about it, it is decoration. But here, we have something that is new, that is fascinating. It is a ring you can DO something to, and it will visibly have something done to it. Now, obviously this can be done with any ring, you can turn it about your finger, or wear it on different fingers, but they are not constructed with this in mind, they rarely, if ever have been constructed with such things in mind. Yet, here we have a ring that quite obviously is meant to be played with and interacted with. This may not seem all that miraculous to you, but consider that more and more, such objects are appearing in our homes, in our clothing, in our pockets. More and more we are finding our selves in an increasingly interactive world, where things are meant to be touched, to change, to be done to, rather than to sit there and look pretty.

What could have brought about this change though? I think the answer lies in the computer. The computer was a device that not only could, for example, have things done to it, but it could do things back in response to the things done to it. Yes, there have been machines throughout the ages that have functioned like this, but none so effectively or with so wide a basis in technology that we have today. The computer, I feel, as a device than can react in complex and meaningful ways to a variety of stimuli, has transformed, fundamentally, how people today think and feel. The gear ring is an example of this in a fundamental way, since it is a normally non interactive accoutrement that has been made interactive. Don't believe me? Look at the other things that have been made interactive in recent years: Phones (look at your cellphone and tell me it isn't interactive), advertisements (those little game banners on top of your webpage), comics (quite a few interactive webcomic games out there now, but a good example you can find on drowtales.com in the form of Path to Power). I could go on, but my point is made. Take a look around yourself some time, find things that have become interactive that even ten years ago were passive devices.