Transmedia Missionaris:
A Polylogue
I’m sitting at my desk listening to music not through earbuds but through my open windows. The street’s alive with salsa. It’s definitely not transmedial. You’d have to be here now.
I’ve listened to Henry Jenkins talking about transmedia missionaries on Youtube. I tried to listen to someone named Jeff Gomez, who’s also championing transmedia storytelling on Youtube, though he’s in the entertainment industry and not an academic. I’ve got little stomach for all the applause. So many hands, so little variation. If there are indeed innumerable hands clapping along to The Matrix—or “Yes, We Can”—does this necessarily mean a shift in the content of public discourse?
Jenkins talks about a transmedia revolution that will wrest control from power structures, whether the government’s or those of the entertainment industry, and allow the storytelling power of “real” people to redefine social priorities. He sees us as moving from a spectator culture to a participatory one, and I agree, but has our constant participation really challenged the old Situationist model of the society of the spectacle? As we real people Tweet and update our status on FB, most of us seem happy to be images, snapshots, even. It seems to me that we have internalized the dominant models of image and discourse, which we then propagate across lo these many platforms, calling them proof (after proof) of our very own unique participation, shot round and round the flattening globe. It makes me think of Neil Postman’s argument that we are simply entertaining ourselves to death, at the cost of losing the habit, if not the ability, to engage in subtle and effective discourse.
Ok, I realize that Obama couldn’t have become president without tapping into the phenomenon of transmedia. But there were also a lot of people who went out and knocked on doors in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I know MoveOn did and does a lot. Bless us! Yet it hurt to see the “Yes, We Can” video (whose Gap-style production values made me squeamish from the start) quoted, without comment, in Jenkins’s Youtube bit, knowing now how hope has withered as the interests of industries from health care to finance remain the powers that can and do. Or to see again in Jenkins’s piece the images from Abu Ghraib and know that the Obama administration has not released the torture memos or closed Guantanamo. Is the passing frisson of the mere feeling of hope or outrage enough? If so, doesn’t it become just another instance of entertainment? Still, one has to acknowledge the Tea Party people, who certainly are using transmedial and messianic strategies, although subtlety isn’t their long suit.
Jeanne Marie Wasilik
While leaving a recent Los Angeles screening of Harmony Korine’s new film, Trash Humpers (2009), I overheard a couple of my peers (twenty-somethings) lampooning the series of interrelated sixty-or-so-second vignettes of frenzied humping, wild screeching, improvised tap-dancing, TV smashing, old-man-mask wearing, BMX bicycle riding, haunting folksy chanting, and late-night Nashville antics that comprise the film. “What the fuck was that? I could have made that,” one said. The other replied, “But you didn’t.”
Shot using grainy, out-of-date 16mm film stock, outmoded VHS tapes, and old-school video cameras, Trash Humpers is about more than, well, humping trash. It weaves American avant-garde cinema riffs (e.g., Jack Smith, William Eggleston), mass-culture aesthetics (Youtube), and a hip nostalgia for outmoded technologies into the same shot. But it is also about hardcore grinding on inanimate objects and what making that a legitimate area of artistic concern might look like.
In an age where spectatorial media has been usurped by participatory media—in what Henry Jenkins describes as “convergence culture”—there is the assumption that a democratization of media production and its dissemination via digital technologies will potentially directly benefit an increasingly collectivized intelligentsia. But what happens when the forms produced are not intelligible to consumers?
I don’t know if those two filmgoers continued their conversation beyond the few words I overheard. That would be a different task; one requiring a taste for sustained attention, a capacity for informed looking, and a desire to articulate some additional meaning and context. I’m just not sure that a 140 million views of a baby biting a toddler’s finger (“Charlie Bit My Finger”), one of the top five most watched Youtube videos of all time, points to much beyond a public looking for a way to kill time at work. Try fucking your desk instead.
Gavin Williamson
The mainstream and the avant-garde have conflated into a new form, a convergence made possible through new media technologies and the Internet. What for generations was the status quo—the intelligentsia/proletariat divide—is quickly dissipating as information becomes accessible to people in all walks of life on a global scale. Intellectual exchange is privileged over material commodity culture, creating a new type of society in which goods matter less and ideas or identity formed through ideas matter more. The global downturn may merely reflect the global shift towards a new type of consumption.
Music videos are once again on the cutting edge of these technologies and are disseminated through viral marketing. Artists can share videos, including narratives of both original inspiration and final production, with millions of people within seconds, while fans participate through instantaneous synthesis and reaction. These videos now also blur the lines between art, fashion, video, and film, as well as previously established music genres. It is no longer a collage; it is the form itself. Works and artists are discussed in multiple forums, breaking down the walls that typically compartmentalized genres.
This is an exciting shift for the world at large. Accessibility is key, the exchange of ideas fluid and rapid, cultural diversity flourishing. But this shift is troublesome as well for the avant-garde. What happens to art in this new forum? Who are the makers and the consumers when the trends of today seem to point to a more virtual and less tactile world, in which art can and is moving out of the gallery and onto (or into) the new venue of the Internet? We have to consider that artists may be forced to reject the institutionalization of art and deny the academy and gallery in favor of an art that engages a wider public through the new media now emerging.
Lisa Madonna
I’ve been playing the Chinese game Go a lot lately. The game goes by many names (Othello, Reversi), and there are many who claim to be its inventor. Played on a gridded board, Go is a game of strategy that distills the narrative of epic struggle down to a contest between two differences—black and white disks, or “stones.” The goal is to end up with more of your stones on the board than your opponent, and a pivotal strategy is to take over the borders of the grid. From this vantage point, you can convert your opponent’s stones to your own color. The essence of the game is converting the opponent to your side, thus propagating your “difference” in a total endgame.
There is a proprietary element in the game wherein the person who owns the boundary eventually owns the board. So it is with the phenomenon that Henry Jenkins terms “convergence culture,” in which participants experience the intersection point of a singular cultural phenomenon as it crosses multiple media and forms. This is the moment when a facet of culture goes viral¬—changing all in its path to a permutation of its own content. The content shifts between the original (be it an image or a sound) and variations on that original (parody, imitation, reproduction). As the two intersect, both forms are redefined. Change happens at the boundaries, like in the game Go. Who will prevail? The black or white pieces? The intersection point, a kind of moving boundary as content goes viral, creates a ripple of constant shift. To put a turn on Jenkins’s transmedia missionaries idea, it is less a matter of convergence and more a matter of continuum, as meaning evolves through mediated intersections.
A good example of this is the dissemination of variations on a meme from the film Downfall, an Academy-nominated film about the last days of Hitler. Its pivotal scene of Hitler coming unglued as he faces losing the war has become one of the most parodied performances on Youtube. People have taken the scene and inserted their own subtitles, creating diatribes on a variety of issues in Hitler’s voice. The permutations are endless as Hitler rants on everything from Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards to Usain Bolt’s world-record-breaking hundred-meter sprint. (The meme comes full circle and folds in on itself in Hitler’s rant on the popularity of the Downfall parodies.) What affects what? Do the parodic videos shift the construct of Hitler in the film or vice versa?
At the core of this interchange is a refashioning of both original and variant. Those who have experienced both the film and the parodies cannot forget one while watching the other, even if the goal of makers of Downfall was to humanize the monolithic bad guy. Let’s face it, Hitler ranks up there in terms of villains. Still, as a recent historical figure, we can put a human face on him. As the film’s director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, stated in New York Magazine, “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality.” Hirschbiegel also said he loved the memes and that he thought they complemented the movie’s theme. Taken together, the film and its memes dismantle the mythology of the man from demigod status to that of a pathetic human being. There is perfection in myth; by putting flesh and bone on the archetype that is Hitler, the iterations of the Downfall meme break down the myth. Challenging the Hitler myth is the core purpose of the film, and the script, the acting, and the total mise en scène all work to this end. Hence its structure remains even in the midst of parody. While the film humanizes through drama, the parodying does it via sheer multiplicity and variation. Both end up doing the same thing, breaking down the mythos of Hitler; one does it with utter seriousness and the other raucously laughs the whole way through. Watching the film with the memory of the parodies, you can’t help but hear a bit of faint laughter in the midst of the dramatic silence in the film.
While this convergence may appear to be the ultimate synthesis, there remains the issue of property. Proprietary rights are the killjoy of Jenkins’s convergence idea. There is always an owner of content. In the case of Downfall, it is Constantin Film, which initially professed an “ambivalent” attitude to the memes but is now actively requesting that certain of them be pulled off the Net. Can they do this? If so, what does it mean in terms of power within the idea of convergence culture? In the game Go, the one who takes over the boundary wins. Similarly, regardless of the permutations of content, whoever owns the original source material can ultimately shut it down. Or at least try to. Constantin is making an effort to take these memes off the Net. But as many as they pull down, more go up. In essence, the board that this game is played on can be infinite, and in the end its limit only comes once the phenomenon has outlived its currency and mass cultural use/diversion.
Convergence or continuum? While there are meeting points or nodes of interaction that encompass multiple media forms, they never remain static. If anything, they keep on shifting, constantly changing and mutating, leaving behind the idea of the original source as a myth in itself.
Christina Valentine
What were you watching in the video? I was watching Times Square. It has been a few years since the last time I visited, so I was curious. There are plenty of things I recognize and just enough increase in density to make me believe. I wonder how much of a cynic Henry Jenkins is. I hope he is a cynic and not an idiot, staging his statement in the home of branded ownership. All I see are logos and “brand experiences.” Jenkins talks about freedom in the belly of corporate slavery. I know why the caged bird sings.
Undoubtedly, the magic of new media is its newness. It has yet to be fully understood, contextualized and made sense of. Viktor Shklovsky asks us to find beauty in the not immediately commensurable, and I find his approach to be one of the most useful when thinking about the recent developments in the technology of interconnection, but unlike Jenkins, I have no interest in the illusions of effect.
On the surface, Jenkins appears to be following in a long line of Marxist-inflected American thought. He casts himself as the savior of the proletariat, a witness to the revolution that invests each of us with the power of our overlords. As he pops from billboard to cell phone to web page, Jenkins idealizes his subject and lavishes in the feeling it produces. For Jenkins, feeling free and being free are the same. I am sorry to have to be the one to remind you that they are not.
A formalist and a Marxist walk into a bar. The Marxist says, “I think I’ve been here before.” The formalist tells him, “You are a punch line.” For this reason, I will digress briefly. The people need opiates whether they want them or not. Opiates dull the more bitter effects of being a cog in a machine. Families nightly flop down in front of their glowing idols for their dose. In old media, which no one of Jenkins’ stature seems to talk about anymore, this process was passive like the high of heroin. Essentially, the cog came briefly to rest and the machine idled: a baseball game and a beer, the reward for a hard day’s work. The most new thing about new media is that it appears to obviate rest. The new high is a meth high; tweakers leave their day job for a night job of updating statuses, uploading videos, tweeting, friending, tagging, consuming, and responding. Jenkins has named slavery as freedom; he is taking his part in developing the ideal workforce of the future, one in which leisure is only the work we do without pay.
Make no mistake. Youtube is work. Jenkins’ own video is just another site for advertising. It is owned and managed and proprietary. It is a commodity bought for free and sold at a profit. Marx was not a fan of capitalism. His exploitation was buying for a dollar and selling for two. By what order of horror would he review the user agreements of facebook, myspace, and twitter? If this is the current state of Marxist thought, then we are lost.
I am wary of redeeming social value. In general, I am against people doing things that are not in their direct best interest. If there is a truly revolutionary potential in new media, it is nowhere near Jenkins or Times Square. Jenkins is an elite just like Times Square’s other inhabitants: Virgin, ABC and Nasdaq. How could he be expected to speak against the foundation of his own power? If you want a more likely path to the true power of transmedia, look to the static that Jenkins deploys as decoration. Signal interference drowns even the loudest voices. We have been taught that having a voice means speaking collectively with one voice; the thing we have to learn from static is that a million or a billion voices like a swarm of locusts can destroy even the mightiest center of power.
Isn’t being free better than feeling free? Melville’s most revolutionary sentence was “I prefer not to.” With it, the foundations cracked, the order was upset, the machine became slave to the cog. I know why the caged bird sings, but when it comes to Transmedia Missionaris, I prefer not to.
Jason Mahanes
An Oral History of the 21st Century
“Hey, where are you?”
“On the train.”
“Cool.
“Where are you?”
“Walking.”
“Cool.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“You wanna meet later?”
“Sure.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
***
MIXTAPE
Qaryzthma – Teat Dis (Dirtybird)
Wylie Cashmore – Dumbongo (R2)
DJ Gyorgy – Darma al Salaam (Numbers)
Fooly G – Kinarsty (Build)
Gynys feat. Ms Gynamite – Get it Down Low (Rinse)
Russka – Levelated Evel – Klingdom REdit (Defected)
Darmage – Ohm My Gawd (Unreleased)
Joy Orbitson – Green Tourniquet (Forthcoming Numbers)
Raul y Fidelity – Don’t Taze Me Faze, Bros (MMM)
Russka & Ivor – Long Ranger (Dance Mania)
Playground Equipment – Work This Cheeky Booty (Unreleased)
Doppelferret – Fermentation Edit (Gigolo)
Russka – Diggs Hold On This Higgs Boson (Hyperdub)
Mandelo – Go Down On Me Night Hunter (Unreleased)
Irregular Enemies – Multi Ordinance Tracking Splooge – Remix (Canny Remember)
MADson Grove – Crabfood ’81 (Swamp 81)
Russka & BeLuRus – Ryddym Thrylla (Planet Pu)
Russka & BeLuRus feat. Missi Po – Polizi Ar Come Run (Planet Pu)
Tamz PipeSmokr – Robocto (City Of Quartz)
So Solid Crew – Woah (Unreleased)
Tres Hermanos – No Tres (Dos Hermanos)
Skynny Z – Feel My Bonez (Unreleased)
***
– Cn i brw yr cat food?
– yeah for sure dude
– Thx
– sweet
***
@: Target Field for the Twins opens TOMORROW, you moron.
@: I’m exited about the Twins too, but Christ’s resurrection beats the heck out of Target
Field any day.
@: Tday is the gr8tst day in history. My Saviour Lives! He conquered the grave! The
curtain has been torn! He is Risen! He’s Risen Indeed!
@: Preach on, brother!
@: Amen!
***
It’s incredible hot today, as was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. We watered our lawn/ garden at 5:30AM today, because we didn’t get to do it last night. I was up at 4AM since Denny barfed several times, and I was wide awake by then. He eats lots of crap when we are outside, I’m just hoping it wont be stones. Happy didn’t like to be disturbed so early, and went into the bathroom (to hide) have his peace, until it was over.
How do you deal with this broiling heat? I’m just glad we have A/C and electricity to use it!
***
– izzit a d8?
-K
– ROTFLOL
***
——-
Robert;
The version of the koan I have does not have your final line in it. I did a Google for the koan elsewhere, and all the others I found match mine.
I like your version, but I wonder where you got it?
May 1, 2009
——–
on the 25th anniversary of my wedding, i found that my wife was having an affair with
someone. on this day, she decided to leave me. i had known this koan for many years.
emptiness in my hands!
September 28, 2009
-#-
Nicholas Frank
Source texts:
http://www.maddecent.com/blog/numbers
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=105976542775622&id=99139450026
http://yarnloopie.blogspot.com/2010/07/water-babies.html
http://www.dailybuddhism.com/daily-buddhism-posts/2009/3/25/koan-no-water-no- moon.html
Watching Jenkins bounce from screen to screen (all within the comfy confines of my own screen), I am tempted to join him in his conviction that, at the dawn of this new media age—and in spite of the contrary effects of the ongoing global economic crisis—the possibilities for the future truly are richer than ever before. And why shouldn’t I? The faith Jenkins places in what he seems to see as an almost exponential expansion and extension of the means by which even the most marginalized and disenfranchised can create and disseminate “their” stories brings to mind a passage from the introduction to Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that I have long held close to my heart. “In my Utopia,” Rorty writes there, “human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.” For Rorty, it is precisely by way of narrative—by sharing our stories with one another—that we can achieve the kind of mutual empathetic identification he calls “human solidarity,” and which he views as a potential corrective to the suffering attendant upon global late capitalism.
The assumption underpinning the potential and arriving Utopias Rorty and Jenkins respectively imagine—namely, that the kind of identification with the other produced by the encounter with the narrative he tells of himself renders his suffering intolerable, and thereby leads us to do what we can to alleviate it—indeed appeals to the always still aspiring writer in me, the one still (always) trying to explain (to himself? his parents?) why he persists, and insists, in what is perhaps the most quixotic of artistic pursuits. At the same time, my instinct against unguarded optimism compels me, confronted with Jenkins’ celebratory postures, to find ways of calling the same assumption into question. Luckily, one need not look too far to find them. On the one hand, it may well be true that the stories of others produce identification, and empathy, in those who hear or see or read them; and it may be equally true that when we thusly identify with others, when we live their suffering as though it were our own, that suffering becomes intolerable to us, and we feel compelled to try to alleviate it. But is it not also the case that any desire to alleviate the suffering of others is impotent without a proper understanding of the real conditions within which it is determined? In this case, the transformation of the massive injustices perpetrated along the margins (and for that matter right at the bloody core) of the postmodern global village, by way of its plurality of user-generated media, into endless and endlessly disseminated stories may make us more compassionate to that suffering—but by locating it, as stories do, within the lived drama of the individual, it may at the same time obscure the political, historical, and above all material conditions within which that suffering, even if lived within the drama of individual experience, is in fact more broadly determined.
And what of those conditions, in this moment of, as Jenkins imagines it, arriving Utopia? We have, of course, all read of the Apple product manager in China who recently committed suicide after realizing that a fourth generation iPhone prototype for which he was responsible had gone missing. But for the moment, I am less interested in product managers than those who do the actual labor of production—the most victimized of the victims of global late capitalism, and the most marginalized of its marginalized—and in that regard I offer a few other facts this year made public, in a sort of vacant gesture toward ethical accountability, by Apple itself: 1. At nearly 50% of the company’s production facilities, employees work over than the officially allowable 60 hours per week. 2. Nearly 50% of those facilities are not in compliance with safety regulations. 3. 3 of the company’s factories employ children as young as 15 years old. 4. At 23 of Apple’s facilities, workers salaries fell below minimum wage. 5. At 46 facilities pay deductions have been used as a method of discipline. In short, all indications are that, whether it is black-and-white television sets or white-on-black newspapers or backlit iPads that come rolling off the line, the processes of production, at the dawn of this new media age, are working according to the same old exploitative model as always. With how much zest, then, should we really be celebrating the fact that the most exploited of all may increasingly be offered, and seize upon, the opportunity to join the rest of us, aspiring writers and otherwise, in performing the altogether unpaid labor of creating the “content”—that which in old world of print media and local news programs at five and six were often referred to as “stories”—for the ultimately still profit-making media forms Jenkins celebrates.
Eli S. Evans
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post