Bob Rehak:	Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Bob Rehak, and I couldn't be more pleased or honored to be with you tonight to introduce our guest Professor Henry Jenkins. Who joins us with the support of Swarthmore's film and media studies program, information and technology services, and the Provost office. So my job in the next five or so minutes is to convey to you as succinctly as possible the record of achievements of a remarkable, prolific and influential scholar. It calls for a formidable act of concision, but I hope you'll forgive me for starting with a personal anecdote. Many of us in contemporary media studies have a Henry Jenkins story, and we prize them zealously like collectors items. 
	In fall 2006, shortly after I came to Swarthmore I was corresponding with Professor Jenkins about working together on a panel proposal, for a society of Cinema and media studies presentation. Which I envisioned having something to do with Star Trek and Professor Jenkins' work on the franchise and its fandom. He wrote back with his characteristic mix of politeness and directness, that he was a little weary of being asked to talk about projects he had done 10 years ago, rather than his current research interests. The panel did end up happening under the title of Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Age of Media Convergence. Which neatly solved the problem of bridging our interests old and new.
	But as I reflect on it now, what the story demonstrates for me is that Professor Jenkins is doomed to operate under the trap of his own greatest hits. Even as he continues to forge ahead into new and exciting territory. That his earliest work continues to resonate and inspire, is evidence of the originality and scope that have always marked his thinking. That he receives with friendliness and grace, the demands made by a large and appreciative community of students and colleagues, is evidence of his generous and encouraging character. The work on science fiction audiences to which I am referring is of course, his 1992 book, Textural Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Which did nothing less than jumpstart studies and media fandom in the United States.
	By drawing attention to the ways in which fans roamed nomadically across the media landscape appropriating, remaking, and shaping the content of mass media. Textual Poachers opened up a very valuable breathing space between monolithic conceptions of the audiences cultural dupes or as resistant guerrilla warriors. Instead Professor Jenkins approached popular culture as a terrain of negotiation. A complex economy of overlapping interests in which producers and fans were not so far apart in their aims as conventional wisdom might have it. 
	Along the way he recuperated the figure of the fan as an active creative individual in a community animated by collaboration and creativity, and catalyzed by their eager adoption of media technologies from print zines to the internet and the web. Professor Jenkins continued to map the complexities of audience and industrial relationships through co-edited collections such as, The Children's Cultural Leader in 1998, and Hop on Pop the Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture in 2002. Another co-edited collection from 1998, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, anticipated the video games studies movement by several years. And was essential not just in putting video games on the radar of a media studies just starting to engage with the full impact of digital technologies. But imposing important questions about childhood, imagination and identity through the lenses of gender and new media.
	From Barbie to Mortal Kombat was also significant in its mixture of academic and professional voices. Pairing textual analysis with interviews with game developers. Professor Jenkins' mission to bring together academic and industrial perspectives continued to shape his scholarship in the 2000's. As it expanded to consider media evolution in 2003's, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, and Political Practice in Democracy and New Media also 2003. But it was in 2006 that his current focus emerged full-blown with Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. A book that confronted a media escape profoundly reshaped by web 2.0 and social networks. 
	In which Grassroots Media Production using inexpensive tools constitutes new forms of political and economic power. Forcing change on business models and market ideologies forged during the broadcast era. In the era of network and participatory media Professor Jenkins suggested, "Not just spectatorship but citizenship itself is being transformed by collective intelligence and knowledge communities." As Professor Jenkins himself frequently notes, even this map does not cover the many avenues and side streets of his interest. 
	Recent collections of essays such as 2006's, Fans Bloggers and Gamers, and 2007's, The Wild Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. Present a movable feast of topics important to him on aesthetic, emotional, historical and political levels. From classical film comedy in Vaudeville to Pee-wee Herman, WWF wrestling, comic book heroes and Lassie. An extended section of Fans, Bloggers and Gamers collects Professor Jenkins' writing on the Columbine high school shootings. The aftermath of which saw a fierce return of debates over representations of violence, and the effects of media on children and adolescents.
	His account of testifying in 1999 before a Senate Committee on youth and media violence, remains a couchant and compassionate defense of imaginative freedom in teenage subcultures, whose relevance continues to shine more than a decade later. In addition to his wide-ranging and adventurous scholarship Professor Jenkins has played a central role in media pedagogy, and the building of bridges between desperate communities of production and criticism. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he found that the comparative media studies program in the year 2000. A platform for graduate education, whose options included the Convergence Culture Consortium, and the ongoing futures of entertainment summit. Which brings together fans, professionals and academics in dialogue. A similar ethos underlies, project new literacies. Part of the MacArthur Digital media and learning initiative at the University of Southern California. 
	Where Professor Jenkins has served since 2009 as the Provosts Professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts in a joint appointment with the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Cinematic Arts. In all of these forms, as well as in the blog he has maintained since 2006, Confessions of an Aca-fan. Professor Jenkins continues to feature emerging young scholars and television film and video game producers alongside his own scholarship. Whose central qualities' lucidity, openness, honesty and a perfectly calibrated blend of objective rigor and subjective enthusiasm remain a study beacon. Even as the nature of his thought evolves and expands. And I would just like to add, I found this inspiring as I was looking over his work, that he has written ... That, "We should change our theory every 5,000 miles, just like we change oil in our cars. New injections improve performance and keep us from clogging up the system." 
	So in that spirit I don't wanna hold it against Professor Jenkins that he is going to talk about something new and emerging tonight. Just as I hope he doesn't hold it against me that I continue to revere him for the groundbreaking work he did on Star Trek and his fandom. Which so inspired me as a Graduate Student. And of course I fully expect that 10 to 15 years from now, people will continue to be asking you about Convergence Culture even as you have moved on to what I'm sure will be exciting new frontiers. For such a figure, one whose proud assumption of the label Aca-fan reflects the great reverence in which he is held, by his large circle of peers, students and friends. I have no reservations tonight in outing myself as a lifetime fan of Henry Jenkins. Whose 20 years of scholarship, journalism and activism seemed both like a landmark career in themselves, and just the start of something much larger. Please join me in welcoming Professor Henry Jenkins.
Henry Jenkins:	Thanks. Well Bob thanks for that incredibly generous introduction. It's very very touching to me. I often in such moments after having my head pumped full of hot air, and looking out over a crowd I'm reminded of a quote from HL Mencken. The American humorist who said that, "Even a whale, a dead whale on a flat car will draw a crowd. It's what they think of you afterwards that matters." And so it's that peak moment before I start to deteriorate before your eyes. When you have probably the highest level of esteem for me, and I should say, "Thank you," and sit down. But instead I'm gonna open my mouth and say some stuff that'll hopefully, rattle and amuse or, whatever. Now, what I'm gonna share tonight is work on a new book that's coming out in September. So it's at that moment where it is already starting to the decay. That is, it's the point of no return where the author has turned the text over to the publisher, and you're simply waiting out the clock until contemporary publishing gets the book out into the hands of the readers. 
	So it's always a great relief to talk about the work at that moment, because I do always have this dread that by the time the book comes out it's gonna be completely dated. Its why I love the blog so much, is that I can throw out my ideas while I'm still working on them. And get response the same day, that same hour, and so forth. I find something interminable about the rate of academic publishing right now. That just, slows everything down so that anything that's contemporary will be aged, and not necessarily for the better by the time it comes out. I went through this exact same set of anxieties with Convergence Culture, when I was writing it. And its sort of worth thinking about some of the stuff that's happened both while the book was waiting to come out, and subsequently that sort of in some ways challenges the arguments of the book and in some ways supports them. This is sort of the fear that any writer goes thorough. You've laid out an account of contemporary culture in transition, and of course it's gonna keep changing. So, for example, Second Life, was barely out in the world when I was writing Convergence Culture. 
	Now it's had a rise and a fall, and I suspect it'll be cool again soon, because that's the nature of these kinds of developments. The Long Tail book came out between when I finished my writing, and when the book finally reached the public. And it was a significant argument about the role of the internet and shaping the back list of getting new ideas out. In truth the book that I don't have on the slide, but the book that I most wanted to have read before I finish Convergence Culture was Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. And he's actually said the same thing about Convergence Culture, that we both were writing in parallel about a set of developments, and we both needed what the other one had to say to really fully achieve our own projects. But the social network's era really has taken root since Convergence Culture was in at least in the printing process. YouTube, was barely out, and HULU certainly was not out at the time that I was writing Convergence Culture. Twitter certainly has come since that moment in time. 
	A whole variety of other web 2.0 things Even the concept of web 2.0, 'cause Tim O'Reilly and the folks in Silicon Valley were meeting and developing the framework, that would become web 2.0 at about the moment that I was putting the last touches on Convergence Culture. That framework, and this will become important later 'cause I'm gonna talk a bit about my relationship to the concept of web 2.0. Because I think there's been a lot of confusion, by the fact that word didn't appear in the book. And so people have speculated about whether I'm talking about web 2.0 or not. And in a wholesome battery of IE products, the cover of the book has an iPod on it. Once they decided they wanted to put an iPod on the cover of my book then I had to go back and write three or four paragraph for the book at the last possible moment that actually reference the iPad. Otherwise it would not have been in the book at all. And I had to retrofit the book to match the cover image they had. 
	Leave aside the iPhone, the iPad and so forth. So now there's a really embarrassing thing at the beginning of Convergence Culture where I go off on telephones and mobile phones. And now of course I'm proud owner of an iPhone that I think has addressed most of complaints about the first wave of mobile phones. But it's still there in the book, the sense of me frustrated where that was at, and not really necessarily wanting to go into an age of iPhones. So in general sense it just "Pew, pew, pew" change everywhere. This is the nature of writing about new media at the present time. So the project, Spreadable Media grew out of the Convergence Culture Consortium that we started at MIT. This was an attempt as Bob suggested to create a dialogue between academy and industry at a moment when everyone was talking about, our culture becoming more participatory. But there was not widespread agreement about the terms of our participation. 
	And I see, the terms of our participation as an essential battleground, by which cultural and political power is going to be resolved in the 21st century, it's an important find. And so, I saw creating this consortium, one of many things that were going on there was, how do academics get a seat at the table? How do we become part of a dialogue? I don't think you can change people by hurling criticism at them and language they can't understand, in journals they don't read, when you're never in the same room with them. 
	So I was very impatient with academic critical studies work that seems to wanna change the culture, but never gets anywhere near the decision-makers that the culture is involved with. So part of what we're trying to do was create a space where I could go into boardrooms, and talk to companies about the policies they were doing, that affected fans, bloggers and gamers. And to bring the campus to create some resources where the public had greater access to the thinking that was shaping media change. Alongside that, we create an opportunity for graduate students who wanted to go into the industry to think critically and apply the theory they were developing. To thinking about the future jobs they were moving toward. And so what came out of that were a series of white papers, one of which was called, If it Doesn't Spread its Dead. This is a white paper that I personally helped to develop with Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb Krauskopf who were two of my graduate students at the time. 
	They really worked through a set of ideas about what I'm gonna call Spreadable Media in the central focus of denying. Sam Ford with another of my graduate students, Joshua Green was the research director on this project. Sam Ford has since gone on to be a guru in the PR world working for Pepper Tree Communications. And Joshua Green has been sort of a Think Tank Leader in the advertising world. So we put our heads together, took the original white paper, flushed it out into a book. And around the book we now have about 40 essays by scholars and industry people who are affiliated, and have been affiliated in one way or another with either Futures of Entertainment Conference or the Convergence Culture Consortium. Bob has a piece that's tied to that. And those will all be circulated freely on the web alongside the book. So the book is a physical object, will consist of Sam, Josh and I's argument around which will circulate about 40 essays that are gonna jumpstart we hope, the discussion the book will be involved with.
	Take in a variety of different conceptual directions, apply it to different case studies and so forth. So this is less a book then an event in a certain way. And that sort of puts in the practice the ideas of the book itself. Oops, that did not come out the way I was expecting, but we will go ahead. This is a collage of images it was meant to be images I click through one by one. But this is a collage of images of Occupy, which I think gives us a way to begin to think about what I mean by Spreadable Media Culture. So I was lucky enough to be giving a talk at the new school in New York in the fall. Went over to Washington Square Park, saw some of the protesters who had gathered there And I arrived at Washington Square Park just as a bus load of zombies who had come to a local horror con showed up to participate in the protest march. The protest gathering that were taking place that particular day. 
	So it was a really fascinating entry zone, where all these guys dressed up like zombies are talking to little old Jewish ladies, who are just stopping off on the way to their bridge club meetings.  And they're asking what is the connection between Occupy and zombies? And you sort of picture the beginning of a discussion where what they saw would be the topic of discussion at the local bridge club meeting, and would spread across the little old ladies clubs and so forth. There would be a kind of discursive flaw. And that's part of what I think Occupy is all about. The mainstream media has responded as, they don't understand Occupy because they keep looking for a leader, a spokesperson, a platform, an agenda, demands. These are all things about centralized communication. 
	This is what we expected in the age of broadcasting was this idea, that we would have someone stand up and say what we're about. Well Occupy to my mind is less a movement in that sense and more of a provocation. Part of the problem was we all knew that there were vast inequalities of the distribution and access to wealth in the United States, and we weren't talking about. It was an unstated truth about our time. The numbers had been there for a decade, and it wasn't being responded to by the political leadership, by the news media, by the American public. So the challenge Occupy had faced was how to get people talking. How to create a conversation that changes the nature of political reality. And I would argue the ways they have done it has been, not by creating a centralized message, but by creating a multiplicity of messages. By using any and every available vehicle to get the message out.
	To attach themselves particularly as these images that are on the screen here suggests onto the backs of particularly popular culture on the one hand, and participatory culture on the other. So it's no shock that say zombies would show up at an Occupy gathering. There were also folks there from Game of Thrones who kept talking about the Lanchester's as the 1%, and the winter is coming and so forth. Here we see Richie Rich and Batman, and if we weren't stacked on top of each other you'd see Occupy Sesame Street. There are all kinds of images that have been generated by the Occupy movement. All kinds of videos that spread across YouTube, all kinds of Twitter feeds. Where I bet a team back at USC that's collecting and monitoring massive numbers of Twitter tweets coming out of the Occupy movement. 
	So we can develop a sense of the flow of information that's taking place there. So each of these reaches someone different. It's not that there's one unified image that everyone's talking about. If this stuff comes at you from every available side, often in unexpected ways with mixing pop culture and political culture, then it creates a context where we can't not talk about the issues that Occupy was concerned with. If you wanna measure the success of Occupy look at how much the GOP right now is using a set of languages and terms that come out of the Occupy movement. Sarah Palin's talking about Crony Capitalism, Rick Santorum is talking about Vulture Capitalism, Newt Gingrich is going after Mitt Romney for his Bain connections. They are positioning themselves trying to claim ownership over some of the discourses of Occupy. Going into an election where the visual is gonna be a billionaire who helped close lots of companies, running against Barack Obama in the year of Occupy. 
	The discursive frame has shifted, much the same way that two years ago the tea party shifted the discursive frame and made it very difficult for Obama to manage some of the policies that he'd been elected. As his platform struggled with the tea party movement, a similar sort of thing where a combination of centralized and decentralized activities many, many, images emerging from it. Which are spread and circulated through a range of different media channels and platforms. Where particularly take advantage of the realities of social media to get their message out. And this is I think a different configuration of politics than we've necessarily seen before. Now this is existing alongside the moment of Transmedia storytelling for example, which I wrote about in Convergence Culture. And these are just some examples of campaigns that have been developed around media properties, we see District 9, we see Dark Knight, we see True Blood. These are campaigns that were designed to get people talking about the film well before it opened, by creating, by dispersing information across the media scape.
	So that no one person found all of the pieces of a Transmedia story. Each person had a sense of discovery, had bragging rights, brought that information back to their community, but it created a discursive event of provocation again around which, the awareness of these mass media properties have been at work. And I think it says something about the era of social media that increasingly mass media properties which in the past would've had the power to blank at the broadcast, and everyone would know what was on. Now increasingly rely on social media to reach people who are hard to get like, the young men particularly in this audience. The 18 to 27 year old that Hollywood's preoccupied with, that are turning off their TV set, turning on the games and the internet and are not necessarily watching the blockbuster films, or their television shows. Things like Transmedia has been the strategy to break into the social media sector. 
	These images are from a project being done by the USC Cinema school. And the USC Cinema school has been developed an ARG and Alternate Reality Game for the incoming freshmen in the Cinema school, that's functioning as their orientation. So almost every freshmen in the Cinema school is involved in this game, Wills collectors card, that's my card up there. And they collect cards, the cards encourage a little to produce films together in various configurations. The more it'd be different themes of elements on the cards they can fit in the more point values they get. They rewarded students by connecting them to the alumni network of USC. So that they go on set or go take a tour of a favorite art museum of a filmmaker who graduated from USC. It connects faculties together, it's connecting students together across the sub majors within the school. But it's all again, about creating a social environment around the school. Creating a learning environment that takes advantage of the realities of social media. 
	Let me start to anchor this with some basic concepts. Most of the work that I've done so far around fandom has been about fans as either consumers of media or producers of media. What spreadable media is about is about the moment of circulation. Is the fundamental shift in the way's media travels through the culture. The distinction I'm making here is, distribution is a top-down corporately controlled calculated strategy of rolling out content. Date in this, date in region sort of based, sending things out, the network buys a show, it's available in this country and not that country. This whole process of distribution that is carefully calculated by the Corporations. Circulation is a hybrid system now, that's partially top-down still, but low increasingly bottom-up. In so far as people are, moving media across the country, both ways that are authorized and ways that are unauthorized. Now I'm using the phrase unauthorized here to avoid the word pirate. And I wanna avoid that word because piracy comes with this huge moral frame around the set of activities that doesn't allow us to look very closely at what's actually going on.
	How value is being produced while meaning is being produced, and so forth. Some of what we're gonna talk about tonight is piracy yes. Some of it may be damaging to the culture or to the companies that produce culture. Some of it may be very valuable to the companies that are producing culture. Part of what those companies need to be doing is figuring out what the value is, of certain kinds of unauthorized distribution and increasingly there is a wink and nod relationship to this unauthorized distribution. This unauthorized circulation that I think we wanna pay attention to. So what spreadable media is trying to get at is understand this new system of circulation, and how it impacts everything else about the way we live in relation to media. And it turns out there's lots of great work on circulation. I thought it was a largely neglected subject but we rarely call it that. And so we're collecting in the book, pieces of theory, pieces of analysis from many different fields, and trying to distill them down to understand what the debates have been about circulation in the past, and how we might understand, this world where circulation is largely in the control of the public. 
	So I said piracy's a word I'm trying to avoid, but this slide sort of illustrates the core debate that's going on around circulation at the present. We've got, piracy kills music and we've got, sharing is caring. These are diametrically opposite statements that are being made about the same basic, all sharing technologies that are emerging at the present time. Early in my career I use this term moral economy from EP Thompson, the Social Cultural Historian. And Thompson's writing about early modern Europe and peasant uprisings. But what he argues I think has a larger application. He's detesting that when there is a disruption ... He starts with a premise that underline any economic system is a moral system. That before you and I can trade with each other we basically have to trust each other. We have to accept on some level the terms of our exchange has to be in place. 
	Now where the system gets disrupted, through social change, culture change, economic change, technological change theirs a kind of destabilizing effect on our transactions with each other. So that the moral economy breaks down when the shared sense of understandings we have about what's legitimate, or fair or equitable. And in exchange, breaks down when there's a crisis in the system as a whole. As that happens he argues, that's the moments when peasant revolts started to happen. Peasants who had otherwise been under feudalism, and accepted the terms of feudalism, shifted to the point of being angry enough to try to burn down the manor house, or to try to have a riot or whatever to try to change their conditions. 
	So as that happens what Thompson says, is a moment of legitimization. There's a process by which everyone sort of stays to stake their claim. The old system broke down, they're trying to create a legitimacy around a new economic system. So everyone's gonna argue that what they want is the moral high ground, that's the right way to do it. And I think it's a pretty good description of what's going on here, that we've shifted how music gets distributed. We've shifted from a world where mixed tapes were pretty normal, but now mixed tapes are on the internet. They're affecting the industry, the industry's uncertain how to deal with that. There's a kind of back-and-forth tug-of-war, and people are making strong moral claims on both sides about, "This the right to do it. No, this is the right way to do it."
	And that moral debate clouds any discussion about what's actually happening on this. We can't really adequately understand it while we're in it. But somewhere over time, what we have to do is renegotiate our new social contract so that there's an understanding of what all parties need in order for there to be a legitimate and equitable transactions again. And that's the moment we're in, a moment of destabilization where the society is trying to sort out their relationships that are gonna exist between consumers and producers, in this new digital era. There's lots of inequality to go around, there's lots of anger to go around, and so forth. All right so one of the things that inspired the original spreadable media white paper was this moment right here. 
	Up there, I wrote in Convergence Culture about American Idol this happens to be the final episode of American Idol a couple years ago. That final episode seen by about 40 to 45 million people depending on which numbers you trust. It was one of the highest-rated moments on American television that season. This video, by Susan Boyle that was produced commercially for British television circulated on the web about that same time period. In over about a two week period, again depending on what numbers you trust, it attracted somewhere around 200 million viewers. The Grassroots circulation of a Susan Boyle video, which was never on ... American's never had access to on a specific time and date totally swamped, the highest rated moment on American television that season. Now that interested me a great deal, that is, Susan Boyle traveled because people passed her along. If you saw Susan Boyle almost ... Many of us had that sense of discovering Susan Boyle.
	It came to us in some obscure way, we saw it and we said, "This is cool." And I know I passed it to my wife and my son and some other people said to pay attention to it. And I customized the notes, and so forth, and people used a variety of different media to pass that content along, and it became a phenomena. And by the end of the first week it's being parodied by Jay Leno, whose doing his spoof. It's on Saturday Night Live, it's being fed back into the broadcast channels, which creates the next wave of awareness and conversations. But probably a lot of us in this room, we were part of that first week when the video was just spreading on the internet. And we felt some degree of connection to it, and became part of it. Now it doesn't spread for any one reason.
	It spreads because it can, because we have the infrastructure, because we know how to spread content. But it also spreads because people wanna talk about it. And as they talk about it, they sit it into a range of different discursive frameworks. So here, if you trace Susan Boyle across the blogosphere you start to see it. So here's a science blog that's interested in vocal cords and body size and so forth, and trying to just understand how that voice comes out from someone who shaped the way Susan Boyle is shaped. This is a blog for karaoke fans. Susan Boyle got thrown out of her karaoke club because she was no longer an amateur, 'cause she's appeared on British television. 
	And this was a kind of minor event for most of us. But for this community it raises a whole set of questions about what's the status of the amateur? Can one be an amateur on a reality show, but a professional in a karaoke club? There's a lot of interesting things to talk about there. This is a prayer blog. She's a church lady, lots of Christian groups immobilized around Susan Boyle both in the UK and beyond. And so she becomes the center of prayer circles and discussion of religion and so forth. This is a mommy blog, she's taking care of her elderly mother, and so the sense of the mother daughter relationship generates a whole set of discussions that people are part in.
	This is a fashion blog, and people are assessing the makeover of Susan Boyle from who she was in the first video to who she became on subsequent seasons. So in other words, these are just a snapshot of a bunch of the responses that are out there. She is moving through all kinds of different circles, and she's moving because she gives a set of shared cultural currency to talk to each other about something that matters to us. We could trace this back, feminist writers in the 60's forward, reclaim gossip as a mode of communication. And part of what they said was gossip was less about the people being gossiped about, and more about the social relationships that cements between the people exchanging gossip. 
	That when you and I talk about someone, we're really saying, this is what my values are, and we're exchanging a dialogue about values, and we're creating a set of trust and intimacy among that circle. So Susan Boyle may be less important as herself than she was as a vehicle which allows a whole set of conversations to take place in the culture. That she created currency, something new to be introduced in those conversation and allow those groups to coalesce and talk about things they would've been interested in otherwise. Now all this stuff is going on, 200 million people are spreading the Susan Boyle video, but what's going on in the commercial side of this? Well the company Fremantle that produces Susan Boyle can't figure out how to make any money out of the success of Susan Boyle. It's too late. Once the Susan Boyle things hits you get Britain's Got Talent onto American television. They try and negotiate deals with cable, they try to negotiate deals with the network they just can't move that fast. 
	They didn't succeed in getting the whole show up on iTunes, and figure out a way to sell that content to Americans. And they didn't even figure out how to cut a deal with YouTube quickly enough, even monetize the ad revenue off of the circulation of the Susan Boyle video. They didn't throw it out there, someone pirated and stuck it out there, it's generating this buzz. So if you're an American who's excited about Susan Boyle, you can't watch Britain's Got Talent in the United States. Despite the fact that there's a demonstrable market demand for watching the show. 
	You can watch it on this site, TV links from China, which is a pirated site, one of many sites that you could watch Britain's Got Talent. So the content got through, but it only got through because of pirate capitalism. And it only got through because of the ability to cobble something together that was outside of the legal circuits to allow people to watch the content. And so one of the messages, of this from the company's point of view is, they had better develop more nimbleness to respond to fluctuations of taste and interest in a world where the audience can see something, push it out to the world, have it move across national borders, and create enormous demand for content that can only be satisfied by people breaking outside the system. So one of the observations about piracy right now is while it's being framed as a moral debate, it really is often as not motivated by market failures. 
	It's not the moral failures of the consumers that lead into growth of piracy, it's the failure of markets to respond quickly enough, of companies to respond quickly enough to dramatic shifts in public demand, at a moment when we have greater communication resources and access to media from around the world than we ever had before. And that shift is one that I think is gonna bring the entertainment industry into more and more crisis because it doesn't know how to respond to something like this. Now you can imagine this was her 10 minutes of fame, Susan Boyle, so so two years ago. Well end of the year's 6, 7 months later her first album comes out and low and behold she makes it to the top of the Billboard charts. That Album was in one of the top-selling albums in the United States that year.
	It wasn't bought probably by a lot of people in this room, but it was probably bought by your parents or grandparents or whatnot. But it was nevertheless a huge commercial success. And one can argue it was success because the people who bought the album felt that they discovered Susan Boyle. That they felt connected to her story, they felt that they were subverting the entertainment industry's glamor machine, by supporting someone that didn't come through the traditional channels that stuff comes thorough. All right so one way we might talk about what happened with Susan Boyle is we can say, she just went viral. And that's a word that's being used rather a lot. And, to be honest with you the word viral makes me sick. And that's part of the problem. Here is Neal Stephenson the science fiction writer in Snow Crash helped create the frame around viral. 
	So we are all susceptible to the pool of viral ideas like mass hysteria or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes, urban legends, crackpot religions, Marxism no matter how smart we get there's always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self replicating information. So as someone that comes out of cultural studies, I got a bunch of problems with that description. This idea of susceptibility of hysteria, of being crackpot, of being irrational, of being host and self replicating information all are problematic, if you actually believe human beings have agency, that they exert through the choices they make within the culture. And culture is not self replicating. 
	Culture is a human product, it comes out of human processes, we actively shape the culture around this, all of these things seem to be problematic. So in many ways the viral media theory is a smallpox infected blanket account of communication. If someone designs a killer host, infects it into something we like, and we take back home with us, and then it starts to spread from us unknowingly to our friends our family members and so forth, and just infects the entire population. And to go to the viral theory to me, just is it gives up everything that cultural studies has been about for the last 30 years. Every claim, every ground we've ever gained, in terms of thinking about the agency of fans and audiences goes away, if we buy into a hard-core version of viral media. Now I know that there are other versions of it and when they use the word meaning today, they often mean something is actually humanly produced, that calculate and design to circulate and so forth. But I find the viral concept particularly problematic for talking about what we're dealing with here. Which is why we're proposing the word spreadable media instead. 
	And it's a stupid word, and it's intentionally a stupid word it's about peanut butter, it's about jelly. I've heard all the jokes over the last two years, I've made a lot of those jokes. But the point is, to focus us to think about a different way of thinking and to get out of ... To not let the metaphor do all our thinking for us. But to say "I don't care what you call it." I'm calling it spreadable media because spreadable ... First of all spreadable set's up an opposition to stickiness. Which was a sort of essential and dominant way of talking about media for a long time. 
	And I think what we're seeing is a shift from, a destination focus a sticky model, to one where content moves, and we take the content we want, to the communities we're parts of. And so that shift, from sticky to spreadable seems like a useful thing to talk about. But I'm also spreadable implies a kind of agency or activity. The act of spreading, is the central focus of it not, the passive act of being infected. But the active process of choosing to spread something from place to place. That's why we propose that word but, I don't care if you pick it up or not. I'm hoping that the conversation spreads, I'm hoping the framework, and the bait spreads, but it would be great if you use my word, but at the end of the day, we need to talk about it and if, words are getting in our way, as long as we rely on the word viral to describe this process. And so that's clearly a way viral, is far more important to me then embracing spreadability. 
	So just some data points on this process, and the way it's playing out. Most of these data points are about news, but the same principles apply to entertainment content as well. So these are some data points about how we get news today. How much of this stuff is going on, and these are already a year or two out of date so it's probably much more of it's going on now. But these are all numbers from the Pew Center for the internet and American life. The average global internet user receives 26 stories per week, via social media and email, and shares 13 stories online. 92% of those surveyed said they got their news from multiple media platforms. So we're becoming browsers, scavengers, 52% sought information from both online and off-line sources. 72% follow the news because they enjoy talking about what is happening in the world. 
	Some news is increasingly a social resource in the way we've been describing it. 69% keep up with the news as a social or civic obligation. So it's not just, we wanna talk to other people about it, but we feel an obligation to be part of the conversations that other people are having. 50% rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know. So we're increasingly mutually dependent for information. 75% get news forwarded through email or post on social network sites. 52% share links to news with others via those means. 51% gets news items from people they follow. So there's some contradiction with these because they're taken from multiple studies but, they give us a picture of a world where many of us, in almost every case the majority of us, are involved in acts of communication which involve the circulation and exchange of bits of information and bits of media with each other. And that's increasingly essential to how we make sense of the world around us.
	That that process of exchange is fundamental to the way the news media operates, and the way that entertainment industry operates. We close this book with a metaphor that I really like from Corey Doctorow the science fiction writer, visual activists and he says, "The problem with our current moment is that we treat intellectual property from the perspective of mammals" he says. "So mammals have a small number of young, they look after them very closely, you always wanna know where your child is it doesn't wander off very far.
	You're deeply protective of your brain child, as it goes out in the world." And it's all about protecting and holding close. As if value came from being able to directly control what happens to the content you create. What Doctorow says is, "The modern artist should think about it as to put it in perspective as the dandelion. The dandelion creates lots of seeds, the dandelion loses control of those seeds, they travel everywhere on forces the dandelion doesn't directly control. But none of us worry about the dandelion being an endangered species. The dandelion will be there with the cockroach, at the end of the earth the dandelion and the cockroach may be the last two species left on the planet. 
	They come up everywhere. They crack up through holes in the sidewalk and bits of asphalt and so forth, because they don't control dispersion. It's about rapid production, rapid prototyping sending a lot of stuff out to the world. So what Doctorow was arguing is, in this world of networked communication, the ability to see things is far more important than the ability to control things. The ability to spark conversations is far more important than the ability to regulate conversations. And Doctorow puts this in the practice as an author because he gives all of his books away for free. And his argument is, that more authors suffer from obscurity than suffer from piracy. He gives his stuff away free, he puts it on the creative Commons license, he allows people to remix his stuff, he also sells it. And what he's found is the more he gives away books for free, the more visible he becomes, the more books he actually sells.
	He sells a small percentage of books compared to a number of people who read his work, but as an author he's not torn up by that either because he wants to get his ideas out more than he wants to make money. But he's making plenty of money because he's built a following that is willing to pay to buy the book, even though they could read it for free. And all of those acts of sharing that that book it receives, generates more awareness, more interest in the product that Doctorow was involved with. So he's in many ways the poster child for, what we're calling spreadable media. Someone took the spreadable white paper a Madison Avenue Executive named Mont Ares and made this slide, it's sort of his summary of some of the ideas in the original white paper. "If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand it's not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends."
	And that cuts to the core of this thing. We give things to each other, we share things with each other because it's a meaningful act of reciprocity of social exchange. That's why we trust the information that comes to us from our friends more than we trust the information that's marketed to us directly, or that comes over broadcast channel and so forth. So what the industry's getting at in terms of viral marketing, why they're excited by that framework, is they imagine in a way that we become advocates for their brands as we pass things along. What they lose track of, is that we're never the advocate for the brand per se. 
	We're the advocate for the relationship and if the brand is useful for us, in that relationship we may use it like we use any other content. It is one cultural resource among others, that we use to cement our social relationships together. And so, the idea that there are brand communities that function like fan community, probably don't quite get it, in terms of understanding why people talk about brands, and why people trade brand and goods with each other. So that led us to think about the whole concept of the gift economy, which is a whole category out of anthropology. And this is a cartoon that I saw years ago and I just, always loved. It is, "If I had to dead rats I'd give you one." 
	Now for most of us, the dead rats not a great piece of currency. I don't particularly want a dead rat. When I had a pet cat, and he showed up at the doorstep with the a dead rat, he looks really really proud, and I'm looking really disgusted. And, so that moment is not one of reciprocity. But for those two cats, not only the dead rat, but the idea of a dead rat, is a way of cementing a social bond. It is the exchange of dead rats, for cats for whom their valuable currency matters in a strong way. And this is not about, "I'll sell you a dead rat," that's a commercial economy. It's, "I will give you a dead rat," because the social benefits of that dead rat, and this exchange between the two of us, are more valuable to me than the price of item itself, or the effort produced to receive it. 
	So this is the essence of what, anthropologists have called a gift economy. Now I'm not suggesting that we live in a full on gift economy, of the sorts that operate in some traditional societies. That's not the point. The point is this exists alongside a commercial sector. In fact we are very adapt at, moving items that we buy at stores into gifts. That's most of the time when we give someone a gift now, we bought at a store. Imagine I went to dinner, and I brought a bottle of wine to the host of the dinner. I bought it at a store where I had no strong social ties to the sales clerk. I paid money for it, and I paid what the price was agreed upon. 
	We don't leave in a barter economy in the United States, I paid what the price tag says. I take it home and there's this magic moment of transformation where I remove the price tag before I give it to someone else. And that's the moment where it moves from commodity to gift. At that moment, I'm saying the social meaning of this bottle of wine, is more important than the economic value of this bottle of wine. Doesn't mean the economic value disappears. I mean I'll still look at it, if I look at a bottle ... You brought me a box of wine. And I look at it and I say, "What a cheapskate they paid $6 bucks for that. And I put on a really nice dinner here." And I can, damage my social relations by inappropriate level of gift giving. But, by in large, we will say it's the thought that counts, that it's a social reciprocity. 
	But the exchange of the gift is more a social obligation than it is an economic obligation. And that seems like a really important part of that transaction. So if we think about that as just a routine part of how we live in the 20th century, then we can understand why giving media to each other, giving information to each other, it is a social meaningful act without regards of economic frames we wanna put around it. It may or may not benefit a company, the company's hoping we will do it in some cases. Hoping to stop us in others, wants to collect rents on that the exchange. We got all kinds of economic baggage around that process, but essentially people are giving media to each other right now as a sad of token of their social relations to each other.
	And that in one way or another puts in a crisis to, another set of expectations about that media which are governed by the logics of consumer capitalism, that are governed by commercial relationships. So as we think about spreadable media, what makes a piece of media valuable? It's when it's available, when and where the audience wants it. When it's portable, that I can move it from place to place. When its easily reusable in a variety of ways so a variety of communities can take up the content and use it. Where it's relevant to multiple audiences. This is anything but, the lowest common denominator theory of media consumption. 
	We're saying, the more meanings that media produces for the more different audiences, the more widely it's gonna circulate and therefore in theory, the more value it accumulates. And value of all kinds, emotional, sentimental value, symbolic value, economic exchange value all kinds of values are generated by that process. And it becomes part of a regular stream of material, that it's particularly valuable, if we know we can get more of stuff we like. Those set up a set of expectations about how media travels through the culture. Now, I said I would say something about web 2.0 and, part of what I wanna say about web 2.0 is that its important for us, to make distinctions between web 2.0 and what I'm calling participatory culture. Participatory culture, there's a long history of Grassroots efforts to build structures to enable control over cultural production and circulation. We can trace this back through hundreds of years of human history. 
	That we want to be on the Grassroots level to produce media that expresses our every day realities and experiences, that becomes an object of exchange often outside of commercial transactions. That becomes a tool for activism and civic participation. This process, this struggle is an ongoing one. Web 2.0 is a business model, pure and simple. It is a way in which companies have built platforms and tools to capture and commodify, and make money from, the desire of the public to create and share media with each other. And I think it's important to hold those two things at arms link with each other. What we often talk about his web 2.0 made it possible for people to participate in their culture.
	And that makes the companies our liberators, and I don't think any of us actually believes that. That we've seen over the last four or five years, every major web 2.0 portal has a one or another kind of battle with its consumers over terms of privacy, over issues of copyright, over issues of censorship, and the regulation of content. Over how they monetize and make money off of the labor. Over, data mining issues and so forth. There are all these debates, that are going on. Because the interest of the fans and participants, are not easily aligned, with the interest of the companies that are trying to make money on it. Granted, we like the tools, Yahoo provides or Google provides, we wanna use those platforms 'cause they allow us to easily share media with each other. But we don't necessarily like the terms of our participation. 
	And there's often a clash between the two. Now if we hold on to the idea of participatory culture, describe the social behavior. We can then critique web 2.0 for the ways in which it does or doesn't support, the ways in which it does or doesn't exploit, the desires of the community to participate. It gives us a base from which to criticize the logics of web 2.0, and that base seems like very very important. Because what that allows us to do is actually say, maybe critical studies and cultural studies should be talking to each other right now because we're coming at this problem from the opposite side of the equation. So critical studies has been the strongest job of critiquing issues of unpaid labor, of exploited dimensions of digital capitalism. The writers there have done the really powerful critique. 
	Cultural studies writers have done the really powerful investigation of what's at stake. What are we fighting for as opposed to what are we fighting against. What are communities seeking when they create context of communication online? What is motivating them, to share, to collaborate and crowdsource, and create new kinds of content and so forth? So we need both of those conceptual toolkits in order to fully understand, the relationships that are emerging. And I don't see them as incompatible with each other. We can say that, yes, people are trying to create meaning through creating media and sharing media, under conditions of economic exploitation. 
	Some of which are intolerable and need to change, some of which we're ready to do some trade-offs with in order to have the access and capacity that we're seeking for our communication. And that that's a struggle, that we have to understand. And so rather than pinning critical studies and cultural studies against each other which happens, with stunning frequency right now, especially around digital media. I think it's far more useful for us to put our resources together, toward a common cause which should be to democratizing and diversification of our culture. That's to me what's at stake when I talk about participatory culture. Now, as the book goes a long we talk about a variety of examples of the spread of media across borders of all kinds. The example of global media's interesting in this regard, what we've seen has been opening up of ... We have access now, starting with the Susan Boyle example we've already seen it, to more transnational media content than ever before. 
	That the success for example, anime and Manga has been astronomical. That is by some accounts Manga outsells American comic's four to one in the US market. The only internationally produced media content that outsells domestic content in the United States. Pretty spectacular success story and one would argue, that it got there not by commercial companies battering the door, but by amateurs trading tapes initially videotapes, doing their own translations, creating an infrastructure which allowed the stuff to travel. The amateur took the risk, of creating a new market around anime in the United States, and elsewhere around the world. 
	And in doing so, they tried out content to see what Americans could be interested in. They identified properties that people cared about, they put resources behind ensuring accessibility of that content. They created blogs and websites that educated people about that content. The end of which, a sizable chunk of, probably anyone in this room under 30, grew up reading Manga and watching anime. As part of the mix of cultural content that they're involved with. And that, same thing, same process is starting to play itself across many many countries around the world. Bollywood has become a global phenomenon over the last 10 to 15 years, in part, because of its spread by a combination of immigrants and fans working together. Kind of strange, collaboration between this diasporic audiences, which are seeking connections back to their mother country, and pop cosmopolitan audiences that are seeking to escape the parochialism of their own culture end up working together, to create some pretty powerful infrastructures that are supporting the flow of content across national borders.
	Now this is not to say that the world is flat, the world is anything but flat. There are all kinds of obstacles that prevent this or create inequalities in it, but the phenomenon of communication across national borders that is going on right now, is truly remarkable. And we need to understand, how values being created, how meanings being created, at these intersections where culture travels from one site to another. As we look at the logics of capitalism, one of the ways we break outside of those logics is, we look ... In the book we talk about religious media. If capitalism is sought to control the flow of media content in order to capitalize on our consumption of it, to charge rent on our attention. Religious media is calling a very different bind. The Christian media world comes out of evangelical tradition, you're supposed to spread the word, you're supposed to communicate the gospel to all parts of the planet. 
	It's supposed to be God's gift to the world, we have all of those metaphors that run through the Christian religion in particular. I'm against the idea that you could steal a piece of religion. That piracy doesn't seem to be the right category to describe what happens when people trade media that's of a religious nature. And in fact, what we see there, there is a heated debate among Christian media producers. They obviously wanna make enough money to support the infrastructure that's producing things. Yet there's also an ethical obligation, many of them feel to ensure people have access to their content. So it becomes really interesting to look at in terms of the contradictions, that the commercial industry's in right now. To think about this is an alternative model, for how people are working through the flow of media. 
	We look somewhere else, we can think about the independent media world, and some very interesting developments around circulation, that are taking place for independent media makers. Who are recognizing they have to court their Public from the moment they conceive of their project. If we imagine if our independent filmmaker goes to Kickstarter to get their initial seed funds to create a film, they're already crowdsourcing. They are already seeking money and support from their audience, in order to engage to begin the process. While Zombies is a site where people have been crowdsourcing the footage itself, and there are any number of places where the community is directly contributing the content, and working directly with the filmmaker to lower the cost of production in one way or another. Bayview films has developed a system of sorta house parties. 
	So when people finish their documentaries, Bayview films wants people to host a gathering in their house, invite their friends over, show the movie. And there's any number of other groups film spouts, one that we talk about in the book, that are interested in building a circulation. So all of these strategies depend on building awareness across an audience by giving them things they can share, with each other and building a relationship between a filmmaker, and the audience. That becomes the basis for the long-term support of production. Again, I don't wanna romanticize this, its still absolutely the case, that the independent filmmaker is struggling to survive. They lack the resources of big budget promotion, they're not able to compete very effectively in Hollywood in the multiplex.
	But we are seeing more independent documentaries, more independent films get out to more people, than any point in history. And more of them being funded than ever before, in part, because they've embraced some of the principles of spreadability that we're describing here. That that model seems to be working for a significant number of independent media makers. So let me stroll down a little bit on participation, for a moment, and think about ... So I said earlier that there's a history of participatory culture. So if we imagined we're in the moment of web 2.0, and the problem with web 2.0 is that imagine the history of the web is purely technological. 
	So I'm very interested, and what if we took a social and cultural history of the web? And went back to any system of network communications that allowed many to many communication in a relatively cheap and efficient way. So by that reckoning this is web -10 and web -10 was a group of high school age kids in the United States in the 1870's. Who create a set of circuits around toy printing presses, and they were taking toy printing presses, and they printed newsletters, and they spread them across the country. And they set up a system of exchange, and they use that system of exchange to debate. It goes back to the 1860's so they were debating the succession and abolition through this, they were debating women's suffrage through it, they were debating the reconstruction in civil rights. Whole history of people like this who are, basically late nineteenth century geeks. Created zines and traded them across borders and there were acts of communication, that drove, that kind of becomes a prototype for modern participatory culture. 
	These same group of geeks became early amateur radio operators in the teens and 20's and from there Hugo Gernsback recruited them to science fiction fandom and Hugo Gernsback the inventor of the walkie-talkie a major advocate of amateur radio, created the first science-fiction fan world. The Amateur Press Association which these guys created was the same organization that supported the trade of zines throughout most of the 20th century. Turns out when you lay type very carefully one piece at a time, you really need abbreviations. So they set up a system of abbreviations, and by about 1920 at least maybe earlier LOL, is one of the abbreviations created by the Amateur Press Association. 
	I think it's undeniable that there's a chain of Grassroots communication that goes back to the toy printing presses in the 19th century and probably earlier, that connects directly to the digital culture of the present time. It's a history of Grassroots networks seeking to communicate with each other across geographic distances, tied to communities of interest. Using whatever platform was most hospitable to them, at a given moment in time. So it's not web 2.0, its participatory culture using social media, to further a set of goals that have a much longer history behind it, and much more politics behind it. Here is Bertolt Brecht, writing in the 1920's about radio. It's really fascinating to read some of these quotes again. He wrote, "The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public light. A vast network of pipes" I guess he has that in common with a certain Alaskan Senator. "That is to say it would be, if it knew how to receive as well as transmit. How to let the listener speak as well as hear. How to bring 'em into a relationship instead of isolating him." 
	On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business, and organize its listeners as suppliers. So Brecht is describing, a notion of media that is deeply participatory. Well here we see in 1970 Hans Mangus Enzensberger lays out his idea of the constituents of the theory of media. And again it's describing this framework of participation. "For the first time in history the media are making possible, mass participation in a social and socialized productive process. The practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now had not preserved the name into their own. Its present form equipment like television or film does not serve communication, but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal and action between the transmitter and the receiver."
	He goes on to describe that what any future media that has its political and radical edge will be, shaped by the capacity to mobilize, the capacity to circulate. So again he's describing, something that's not quite within reach, but he can envision by 1970, is the idea of a fully participatory communication environment. In which a variety of groups not just capitalism, but any group, any voice in the society can access the tools of media production and distribution. That's what he's fighting for in his work. My mentor John Fiske, tells us something that's important to think about all this. John Fiske writing his last book Media Matters written at the beginning of the digital age he says, "The multiplication of communication and information technologies, extends the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle may take. And makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offer."
	So what he's saying is there was no moment where technology determined the outcome of our struggles over participation. That new media created a new battlefield, it creates for him new opportunities for struggle. So someone whose in MIT 20 years ago, everyone there said, "Oh. We'll just build this technology, and it'll set the people free." And it's like, "No, it's a struggle. It's a battle." Just right now we have these capacities to communicate through social media that put political power in the hands of everyday people. But there's any moment they can be taken away by a set of policies that constrain and constrict and modify the set of social relations we're creating through those networks. So the struggle is over to set the terms of our participation.
	The struggle is, who gets to decide, what media circulates, how it circulates, under which terms. So I'm very interested in some of my current work. I talk a little bit on spreadable media, but one of my next book projects, is really about what happens to activism in this age of spreadable content. And this image is a really striking one to me. This is a group of Palestinian's marching through the Occupy's territory. And they're dressed like the Na'vi from Avatar. It's from James Cameron's blockbuster film. So what do we make of this moment, which is pretty damn interesting? Well this group of people every week, did a march through the Occupy territory, they got shut down by the Israeli police. They shot a video, the video goes online, and a hundred people saw it. One day they decide to paint themselves blue, chant about the Sky people can't take our land, invoke a myth. That's very popular in the Western world, put it up on YouTube and millions of people saw it.
	The picture got printed in newspapers all over the world, it got enormous amount of visibility. This is a particular kind of activism that understands how things spread, how things circulate, and they tapped into a myth that was powerful enough to get them beyond the sort of blockage to prevent people from paying attention to the struggles that are taking place in the Middle East. Now we can say it's pretty strange to paint yourself blue, until we realize the history of protest, involved many many such examples of carnivalesque wearing a mast. So someone like Natalie Zemon Davis who's a social historian, tells us about early modern Europe again. People dressed up like the Mortars which was an actual group of people, but they also dressed up like Amazons. Here in the United States the Boston Tea Party was conducted by people who dressed up like Native Americans and dumped tea in the harbor. This process of appropriating other people's identities rather real or fictional, rather Moore or Amazon has a long history in protest. 
	And I would argue that what they're doing is simply tapping that same, tradition, but doing so in a world where mass media meets social media. And that they're able to surf the relationship between the two. We've been paying attention to the immigrant rights movement through some of the research I'm doing at USC. And were very interested in the DREAM Act. And this in particularly young people who become involved in the politics around the DREAM Act. My colleague Sasha Cassandra Shock who was at USC and is that now MIT, did a study of the early phases, of this campaign. We were sort of arguing that there was a generational shift, from a generation of traditional activists who imagine framing very centralized controlled messages and feeding them to the mass media. And we're feeling just frustrated about the inability to get comprehensive immigrant reform. And a younger group of people who were doing a DIY Grassroots participatory culture approach, where lots of people made stuff, lots of them went out in the world, and they spread. 
	What's interesting about these young people is that, in many cases the traditional Immigrants Rights Movement was divided by ethnicity. So that even Central Americans and Mexicans don't always work together well in the Los Angeles context around this. Leave aside tapping into South Asians from Bangladesh or Vietnamese or any number of other Iranians, or any number of other groups that are here often constitute a segment of undocumented people in the United States. That those groups don't work well together. Young people are figuring out a way to bridge that by using social media and YouTube. What they found is as the debate for the DREAM Act shifts from a national debate to state and local debates is they become very nimble and effective at responding to debates all over the country by trading insights, trading techniques with people who are in those other locations. So they have become an incredibly effective team, of people around using new media communications. 
	Now what's fascinating, we've interviewed about 30 or 40 of them for my research group, on the core kind of core activists. A high percentage of them don't own computers. A high percentage of these incredibly advanced digital advocates have to use public libraries, have to use school libraries, have to use equipment that's publicly owned because they don't have the money to pay for their own technology, they've been self-taught. They teach each other how to use this stuff. They're overcoming the participation gap, the digital divide that many of us have talked about, because they're so motivated to participate in this community and get their word out. Malcolm Gladwell wrote this thing a while ago about, sort of talking about Twitter activism, and he sort of argues, that twitter activism works because of soft central ties, weak social ties. And he argues that it would not be effective in any condition where there's high degree of risk. We had a lot of problems with Gladwell's formulation, starting with the idea of Twitter activism itself. And he sets it up in composition to the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's in this piece.
	Well I would argue a fairer parallel would be to talk about telephone activism in the 1960's.'Cause Twitter is a platform, its one tool of communication among many, and any modern movement is involved with. The DREAM activists are conducting politics across every available platform Twitter is just simply one of them. We know in the 1960's that the black churches probably connected and coordinated some of their efforts on the telephone, but it doesn't mean the telephone caused the Black Civil Rights Movement. It meant that that was one tool among many they used to connect with each other. What we're finding with the DREAM activists, is that they are putting themselves very much at risk. Part of the act of the DREAM activist has been, to go on camera and to say, "My name is Mohammed and I'm undocumented." 
	That act of coming out as undocumented, it carries enormous political force for these young activists. Who are putting at that moment forward, it puts themselves at risk of deportation. What's interesting is they don't go silently into the night. That they have, every one of them who's been deported, not everyone. Many of those who are being deported are Tweeting, they're filming their acts of deportation, they're filming confrontation with Immigration Officials, and they're putting it out to the world. So if they're being deported it is not silently. So many of you know that the Obama Administration has deported more undocumented people than the Bush administration did. We know that in part because these young people have been calling them out on that. And have been confronting the Obama spokesman almost everywhere they speak to the Hispanic and to Latino communities particularly. And they're putting pressure on Obama, and Obama's had to back down on some of its policies because of their ability to mobilize. 
	So it's not about not putting themselves at risk, quite the opposite, they've taken on an enormous risk by being as public as they are. But they have also been able to organize effectively across geographic distances and coordinating activity with people they may never meet face-to-face. DREAM activist is the perfect counter to Gladwells critique of Twitter activism because I think it really is a place that which meets his criteria of strong social ties of willingness to take risks, and so forth. As they do so, they're looking for anything and everything that gets their message out, and one of the things I loved, one of the things I've stumbled across recently that I really like about the DREAM activist is they've been really laying claim to Superman.
	So some of you saw the conservative talk radio sphere really got upset last summer, because it was a story where Superman renounces American citizenship, and claimed to be a Citizen of the World. Well the DREAM activist said, "Well when did exactly did Superman become American citizen? This guy crossed into this country illegally. He's literally an undocumented alien. He landed in Kansas, he was raised in secret. He hid his true identities, he doesn't dare publicly wear the clothes of his ethnicity. And he's in hiding. But he nevertheless goes out and tries to save the world and make America a better place." So they've laid claim to Superman as the perfect icon of the undocumented youth in America today. And by tapping ... just like the Palestinians tapped Avatar they're tapping Superman as a metaphor to get people to pay attention, to think differently about the cause that they're involved in. And meanwhile I'm looking at the Harry Potter Alliance, which is an organization of 100,000 young people in 62 chapters around the world who are involved in Human Rights Activism in the name of Harry Potter. 
	They say, if you read Harry Potter it's a story of a time of great turmoil. The government is trying to cover it up, the concentrated media is lying to the people. Increasingly the school is repressing the voices of students, and young people gather in silence and secrecy and organize a resistance group that goes out and changes the world. And the twenty-something year old organizer Andrew Slack who's a trained community organizer, also deep Harry Potter fan says, "Ask the young people, all right what's evil in our world and how should we change it?" If we had the capacity to change the world too, how do we go about it? And it's done through a decentralized organization a networked organization, that mobilizes pop cultural icons in cause of cultural acupuncture, is his metaphor. The idea that you can ... He says, "We're trying to get people to pay attention to dark fur, and no one wanted to cover dark fur, but every few months a new Harry Potter product came out, and they wanted to cover anything tied to Harry Potter. So why not use Harry Potter to get people to pay attention to dark fur?
	Their involved with having house competitions to organize in support of gay marriage, they've done environmental politics, they've raised five cargoes of planes full of supplies to Haiti. Their current campaign is trying to get Warner Brothers to create hot chocolate contracts, with fair trade countries not countries that exploit child labor. And that's their big battle right now, and you may hear more about it 'cause that's coming to head right now. But they're using YouTube, they're using social networks and so forth, to put ideas into circulation. And you mobilizing the imagery of pop culture and the infrastructure, participatory culture to change the way people think about issues. And to do things that have real impact, and part of what's interesting about ... When you talk about any of this stuff people say, "Well it's the usual suspects." 
	Well we know a fair amount about what makes young people involved in the political process, and some of what we know is, they're more likely to be involved if their parents have been activists. They're more likely to be involved if they're involved in extracurricular activities particularly those with civic focus. They're more likely to be involved if they've done volunteerism while they're in high school. And they're more likely to be involved if they've taken a civics course that talks about current events. This is a well-known formula in political science. What we're finding is, most of the people who are involved in these new activist groups don't fit that profile. They have been culturally involved, they're involved in the arts, they're involved in fandom, they're involved in gaming, but they didn't fit the traditional stuff. 
	It's about taking their cultural energy and turning it to politics. And that's the process that we're trying to understand in the research, I'm working on right now. Which we're doing with the MacArthur foundation. So, all of this is taking place, and I'm always criticized as being a utopian. And I wanna be clear that spreadability can be used very very effectively for lots of groups for lots of reasons. But it also comes with a lot of risks. And one of the biggest ones has been, the kind of porousness of the information, environment, and the ability of hateful and misinformation to get into circulation and cause mischief. And we see it ... The porousness is pretty clear when sermons in a black church, become publicly available and become a key issue in the last presidential election. The passing on of misinformation takes place around things like the ongoing questions of Obama's birth certificate or, whether he's Muslim or not. 
	These sort of stories and rumors and innuendos that have really clouded the political process right now. And what we're seeing is some pretty hateful uses of pop culture iconography, also to sort of call out as part of this communication process I'm describing. And the Joker Obama is just one example of something that was generated on a fortune that jumped into the political sphere, became a tool of the tea party and so forth. It's part of the same process we're describing. And part of the problem with all of this is that people are not taking ownership of the information that they are throwing out to the world. And we can point to any number of times in the last political cycles, that some massive piece of misinformation gets in the mouth of a major national political figure. 
	Nikki Haley in South Carolina claimed 95% of unemployed people in South Carolina can't pass a drug test. Turns out the number is actually 5%. And she said, "Well someone told me that." Or we can think about Michele Bachmann's claims about vaccinations causing mental retardation where she said, "Well I thought it'd be interesting to say. I thought it was a discussion worth having." And it's happened to Democratic politicians too. That is we're seeing, people are making outrageous claims, counting on the remain in circulation endlessly, making it very difficult to bonk the truth claims of them because they're spread across the entire culture. Keep recirculating and take no ownership or responsibility when they're found to be lying or found to be misinformed. We give them benefit of doubt, maybe they didn't know, maybe they're just misinformed.
	But the lack of ownership of the responsibility of putting reliable information into circulation is one of the central ethical questions of an age of spreadable media. I'm gonna end with two brief stories, it'll illustrate this. I promise there's an end in sight. I know I've been going a little long. One is to think about the exchange the global movements around Arab Spring. Again I don't think they're Twitter revolutions. I think the best evidence shows us that very little of the on the ground organizing in many of these things were done, using social media. They were by in large organized by other channels.
	Where social media has played a really powerful role is getting direct messages out, from people in the streets to people around the world, without having to go through mass media, without having to go through government communication channels when they're opposed to the government. Now what they tapped is a diasporic network that's tied to other social connections people have through social networks. That ability to call out the attention of the rest of the world when something is taking place in the Arab world, and to push mainstream media to cover it, has been the real success of this. But this is a sort of snapshot of that that I particularly liked. 
	This is a sign that was snapped in the streets of Cairo, and the sign says, "Egypt supports Wisconsin. One world one pain." And this is while Wisconsin's is battling Walker's attacks on organized labor. But the people in Cairo are following what's happening in Madison and vice versa, and they're communicating through social media. And I find that a really interesting snapshot of what's going on. My last examples from Twilight, so I'm going from the sublime to the ridiculous maybe. But there's been an interesting set of exchanges around Twilight. This is a set of films that have been in production for a number of years, and oops and I lost my quote. I clearly am working with the wrong version of this thing but will continue to persevere. 
	So on the one hand there was an article published by the art director of Twilight that wrote about ... That Hollywood was reading, that wrote about the degree to which, fans were showing up on the sites of the production, snapping photographs, and then having debates even as they're just beginning to scout out locations. About whether that house looks right, whether that's what the school should look like, what kind of car the character should be driving. And leave every decision of the production process was being made public by an apparatus of fan surveillance, and the ability to spread this stuff out and to engage in conversations. 
	And the art director sort of is speculating that this is the future of production. That there will be no secret production anymore. There's no closed circle that creates movies. The movie production will have to open up more, in order to allow the fact that fans are deeply invested in the property and are gonna be watching what's going on. And they're gonna be scrutinized at every step of the process. So then someone stoled footage from the actual Twilight film, and put it out on the internet. And the production people reached out and said, "Please stop circulating this film, we beg of you don't circulate this stuff." 
	And it becomes an open debate in the fan community about whether it's legitimate or are not to circulate this footage once it's out there. So I think those are two snapshots of the kind of culture around media production that we're going increasingly live within. And then the ethical debates we have about what is acceptable and what's not acceptable, modes of production. What will be the kinds of inputs the public expects in decisions that matter to them. Whether the significant decisions of what kind of government they live under, or the relatively trivial decisions about what the house of their favorite movie character looks like. But this desire to contribute to the decision-making is attention we're gonna live in, and old mechanisms of honing secrets in place of locking down content, are going to be breaking down, as more and more people have the capacity to move media easily from place to place. And that's the opportunity, and the crisis that's represented by spreadable media. So on that note I will end.