Triumphant Return to the Blog: Palin and Wikipedia

So it seems that my "brief" break turned into the entire summer. This is probably normal in the academic calendar of blogging, and it was amplified to a large extent by my exam reading. Well, I'm happy to report that the written portion of my exams are complete, and with the return to school this week, I now have more of an obligation to be tapped in to the world outside my own head. Hopefully regular updates will ensue.

In that spirit, a return to the kinds and quality of scandal that media can generate (and to which media can respond) these days with a word on a story that broke yesterday about Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. No, I'm not referring to her pregnant teenage daughter. I'm referring to the quality of information that is circulating on the net about her. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday that a single Wikipedia user made massive edits to Palin's Wikipedia profile ... exactly one day before the announcement that she was chosen as McCain's running-mate. The user later revealed him/herself anonymously as a volunteer in the McCain campaign. Noam Cohen reports of this semi-scandal:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article should not come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to "define" yourself before your opponent "defines" you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy.

I find this situation incredibly problematic for a number of reasons. Theorists such as Henry Jenkins (in his book Convergence Culture, among other articles) have lauded Wikipedia as a potential source for the democratization of knowledge, the formation of a "knowledge community." Moreover, such genuine communities were unable to be formed without the technologies provided by Wikipedia's Web 2.0 interface, which allows all users to continually edit one another's work in order to create the best possible knowledge. The interface also provides several tools to track any changes made to individual entries over time, tools that some idealists ironically find to be overly authoritarian, potentially limiting the kinds of changes that can be made to knowledge over time.

And yet, this is an instance in which timing is clearly everything. The linked article above reports that another regular happened to be editing the entry at the same time, and was thus able to neutralize some of the more overtly partisan language in the first user's edits. Some might see this as a vindication of the kind of communal construction of knowledge that Jenkins rhapsodizes about, or, at least, as an instance of the kinds of small transformations in the interface that allow it to produce what Alan Liu describes (in a lecture given at Indiana University last Spring semester) as "good enough knowledge."

However, I see it as something of a cautionary tale that the way in which we frame discussions about Wikipedia and other "convergence" media has veered too far in the direction of posing epistemological questions without proper consideration of the larger political commitments embedded in the kinds and qualities of knowledge that we choose to valorize. Along with Rick Johnston, I have argued recently (in an article to be published in a forthcoming volume about South Park and culture) that a consistent fallback position in recent years for conservatives is an appeal to a perfect end justified by a knowledge that "feels" right: what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" has the consequence of generating a kind of affective knowledge that is deployed more often than not for culturally and politically conservative ends. The problem here is that so many of us forget that Colbert is not calling for a return to a crude rationalism: his focus is less on "facts" than on how such constructions are mediated in politics, the press, and popular culture in general. In other words, because of the focus on "fact" that inevitably becomes entwined with conversations about "good enough knowledge"--because of the focus on accuracy--we forget to examine how such knowledges--whether "good enough" or even "best"--are deployed culturally for specific political purposes.

This instance shows yet again the lesson the Left should have learned a long time ago: that the political Right is better equipped to deploy knowledge in an effective manner. Certainly, we know that a single user added thirty entirely positive edits to the post (and we know this, ironically, because of those very tools that at first glance seem to be most authoritarian and controlling), but the damage was already done: as the above article reports, there were 2.4 million views of Palin's entry the day her candidacy was announced, and the knowledge that those millions viewed was coded in a politically partisan manner.

While knowledge communities in web environments like Wikipedia may prove a potential forum for contesting the kinds of knowledge that count as "good enough," it also proves a forum over which the political implications of these contested knowledges are also fought. In some ways, this is a reminder of the kind of "control society" that Gilles Deleuze describes, in which the breakdown of a central authority over discourses results in the continual and instantaneous political control over knowledge from multiple vantage points. Rather than becoming "disciplined" into objective fact for specific ideological purposes, knowledge is affectively controlled in a constant ideological contestation. Such control society thus certainly poses the possibilities for the kinds of utopian promise Jenkins sees, but, as in this case, it also offers the possibilities for more indirect and anonymous control in the constant battle to curry ideological favor. There was some corrective in this case, but just imagine if the knowledge under question was something more important than the "definition" of Alaska's governor....

Uwe Boll, Anti-Fan Activism, and the Tensions of Convergence Culture

Uwe Boll has long been something of a joke among the cinema-going and gamer communities, not only because of the generally reviled quality of the films he makes (adaptations of often classic games criticized both by film connoisseurs and by video game afficionados), but also because of the manner in which he has continued to churn out films (see below).

But this joke is now taking an interesting turn. Several months ago, some Boll anti-fans put up a petition asking him to retire from making films. And now, in an interview with FEARNet, it seems that if he garners a million signatures, he might actually quit. StuffWeLike reports on this development:

So there you go. A chance to make cinema history. While we wonder if 1 million people have even seen a Uwe Boll movie, we will still hope that the petition (currently at 21,000+) gets a magical boost by the Will of God.

I sort of wonder whether he'll actually do this. He did challenge critics to fight him in the boxing ring, and he put his money where his mouth was in that case. Of course, that was kind of lopsided: he had been an amateur boxer for years, and he fought a bunch of out-of-shape film critics. One wonders whether this kind of pride will extend to his entire career.

Even so, beyond the novelty (absurdity?) of the whole situation, it fascinates me on a number of levels. First, in terms of fan cultures and taste culture in general, this is merely another example of how aggressive our defenses of "good taste" can be. Certainly, this is something resembling fan activism, but it is a curious anti-fan activism in which people are actively calling for the end of what they perceive to violate their sense of good taste. A number of critics have shown over the years how hierarchies of taste are necessary among taste cultures (and fan cultures) in order to legitimize the authority of those who judge, to legitimize the very subjectivity of those within the culture against those who are outside of it.

But we tend to forget that these hierarchies are also something of a zero-sum game. While those tastes that exist outside the norm set by the taste culture are necessary to some extent in terms of the power dynamics involved, it doesn't mean that the taste culture doesn't still want to eliminate other tastes altogether. Barbara Herrnstein Smith comments in her fabulous book Contingencies of Value that the effort to evaluate requires both the assumption of a natural, objective understanding of what is "good" and an attendant assumption that those who cannot recognize such "quality" are necessarily pathological in some way. There's the assumption in some older criticism (think of the New Critics, but this goes back, according to Smith, to Hume and Kant as well), for instance, that people unable to appreciate great works of art were not only "deviant" but also somehow socially unfit: in other words, there's a kind of natural selection that weeds out those less sensitive to aesthetics. This doesn't merely apply to cultural elites, though:

The first [point] is that communities ... come in all sizes and that, insofar as the provincials, colonials, and other marginalized groups mentioned above--including the young--constitute social communities in themselves, they also tend to have prevailing structures of tastes and may be expected to control them in much the same ways as do more obviously "establishment" groups. (41)

In this context, (mostly) gamers are performing the same kind of pathologizing of bad taste as Hume and Kant. They are simply doing it on a larger scale and with more consequences: rather than waiting for Boll to be weeded out by a process of natural selection within the taste community, they are actively requesting that he remove himself from the kinds of social circles that would even possibly interact with them in the first place. This is activism of a highly reactionary order, one which doesn't only ignore the contingencies which define that value, hoping to naturalize and universalize these tastes. After all, this is something like a Final Solution for a particular taste culture, actively attempting to eliminate the Other that authorizes and threatens the authority of the taste culture as a whole.

The second point of interest for me is what this means in terms of how consumers are engaging with new forms of production and distribution. Boll's films are not only critiqued for their quality, but for their mode of production. After all (the argument seems to go), it's as though the guy has seen The Producers too many times: Boll uses a particular loophole in German tax law that is intended to stimulate investments in German-made films and thus boost the national film industry. Oddly enough, though, the tax law stipulates that films that make no profit become completely tax deductible. In other words, Boll corners the market on movies that he knows will tank in order to reap the benefits. He and his investors win. According to his many detractors, the German government and the movie-going public loses.

Boll in some ways serves as a manifestation of the weird ways in which capital circulates to produce things that nobody really wants in order to continue its own perpetuation. He is in this way not postmodern in the way that Jameson and others characterize "late capitalism" (seriously, does this mean that capitalism will be "ending" soon?!), but rather in a more Deleuzian sense of how capital operates as a purely productive force: productive of commodities, certainly, but more importantly productive of pure capital (out of nothing, seemingly) and of desire as a byproduct. This process is very rarely so nakedly displayed for consumers, and Boll's spectacular display of his own production/distribution methods has drawn sharp criticism. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes the ways in which this new transition in media culture is above all a convergence between producers who are producing capital and desire in new ways and consumers who now have more power and potential avenues through which to understand and engage with that capital and desire. Jenkins proposes a new political activism to be one possible consequence of this convergence, a possible avenue toward an "achievable utopia." I sort of wonder whether this is what he had in mind.

In case you're wondering: yes, I signed, not to assert anti-fan allegiance but rather as some feeble mark that I can make regarding the weird ways in which these new practices of capitalism in global convergence culture can be exploitative of the average consumer. For the record, there were 18,000 signatures when the interview was publicized, and, two days later, I became signature #100,505. So the numbers are skyrocketing. If you would like to jump on the bandwagon for whatever reason, you can sign the petition here.

***Update***

As the number of signatures on the anti-Boll petition approaches 165,000, Boll has responded by claiming that he's "the only fucking genius in the business."  See his video response here.  Or, if you feel kinda bad for the guy and want to show "support," sign the pro-Boll petition here.  I say "support" because the justification for saying that Boll should not be forced to quit in this petition is basically that his films are so detestably bad that they're worth a good laugh....

Fandom and Industry: The Educational Model of Culture

Nancy Baym over at Online Fandom recently discussed a quotation in which Dr. Who executive producer Russell T. Davies argues that American sci-fi producers "are way too engaged with their fandom. They all need to step back." What's interesting is the commentary that follows. Suppressing the initial knee-jerk reaction against such a statement (one that I shared, actually), Baym begins to explain that producers' over-engagement in fans' discourse (and vice versa) really benefits neither party. For instance, on the part of fans who are overly invested in the forums provided for them by producers, they become merely a subsidiary of the industry itself.

One of the key points I find myself coming back to repeatedly is the importance of letting fandoms have their independence — providing enough information, goodies, and attention to nurture it, but letting it belong always to the fans who create it. When fandom is a subsidiary of the production company it sets everything up for power struggles, for self-censorship, for legal-enforcement dilemmas, for feelings of accountability and betrayal that are beyond the bounds of duty on both sides. Fans need their own spaces to do their own things.

This is something like the party line in fan studies these days. More surprising is how this formulation gets reversed:

Fandoms can’t operate as though they belong to and are supervised by artists and producers. By the same token, artists can’t operate under continuous supervision (even internally imposed) of the most active fans any more than I, as a teacher, can forget about the students who aren’t as into my classes or the content of what I know and believe needs teaching and just teach what they want to hear to the ones who love me most. I’d be negligent and odds are my classes wouldn’t be as good. The fans who get into fandom may be more important than other fans in terms of the promotion, spearheading, and enthusiasm they provide. They may provide the most trenchant critiques and hence are usually worth listening to. But they are still a small segment of the audience, and producers need to think audience as much as they think fandoms. But even more than that — producers and artists need to operate first and foremost under the guidance and supervision of their own muses. It’s their creative process, just as fandom is ours.

There are two points of interest here. The first is the suggestion that artistic productions will somehow deteriorate over time if the producers are overly concerned with the needs and desires of their biggest fans. It intuitively recaps the time-worn logic that fans don't always know what's best for the objects of which they are fans. But the statement also counter-intuitively reframes this in terms of a mass audience: producers can only recreate the magic of their television series (or whatever) if they try to appeal to the larger audience that they were initially targeting. This seems to reverse the logic that so many people assume (in an equally knee-jerk manner as my initial reaction to the quotation above) when they discuss mass audiences: this old logic asserts that appealing to the mass audience means appealing to the lowest common denominator, something that ultimately ruins the cultural object. (This latter is always couched in some equally ugly and elitist assumptions that anything bound within a commercial logic is necessarily invalid as art, an assumption that many scholars, including myself, have devoted their careers to debunking.)

And this reversal of the usual logic of the marketplace leads me to the next startling point about Baym's analysis: the pedagogical analogy that she draws to illustrate fan-industry relationships. The classroom image is an incredibly loaded one, as she seems to be drawing upon the image of pedagogy as medicine for a majority of students and as candy to a devoted few. This necessarily creates a kind of power dynamic in which the teacher is deciding what is "best" for students, using the validations and critiques of the best and the brightest as a kind of support for these choices as they turn against the resistant students. It's not a dynamic that I necessarily disagree with (it's something with which I have become all too familiar as an instructor in certain classes in the past): it's just an interesting dynamic to apply to fan-industry relationships. Where does one isolate the power in this kind of dynamic: certainly the instructor has the most power, and this is reinforced by the "good" students who encourage the teacher to push further into territory that may not be entirely comfortable for "resistant" students, who will then attempt to subvert the instructor's authority in various ways. What happens when we apply this model to fandom? To me it gives almost too much power to the producers, but it does chart an important distinction between the super-fans who clearly have a hand in how the object turns out and the casual viewers who get boned in the end.

Even more evocative to me than the power relationships is what happens when we take the analogy literally and suggest that cultural objects really are instructive in very real and powerful ways and that fans and casual viewers alike are merely students in the cultural classroom. Not a huge leap to suggest that culture teaches us particular attitudes, strategies for social living, and identities to perform: Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe have discussed this manner of "cultural pedagogy" in the introduction to their edited volume Kinderculture (a must-read for anyone interested in issues of cultural politics that are imparted to youths through mass culture). However, if we add these bizarre power dynamics into the mix, one is left with the impression (if we follow the example set in this analogy) that the "bad" students or casual viewers end up learning more in a cultural sense than those "good" students or rabid fans: they are challenged more by the culture surrounding them. And since, as many before me have said, there's no way outside of the game of culture, they learn better to adapt to the rules of the game. Does this suggest a paradox about power in culture: that those who seem most at the disadvantage in the ways of cultural politics are actually in the best position to resist?