The following two jobs—Web Director and Drupal Tech—have been posted by the SFRA. The deadline for both is August 15, 2008. Please feel free to copy these and send to interested people.

Job 1: Web Director (ongoing)

The Science Fiction Research Association (http://sfra.org/), a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and scholarship in the field of science fiction and fantasy in literature and media, is upgrading its Web site. SFRA seeks a Web Director, who will report to the SFRA Vice President. The Web Director will be in charge of the following tasks:

• Ensuring content is up to date and relevant.
• Soliciting content.
• Updating the software to keep it current.
• Ensuring that all parts of the Web site are standards compliant.
• Backing up the site once a month.
• Dealing with site-related correspondence.
• Maintaining e-mail addresses and forwards for SFRA officers and related personnel.
• Periodically assessing the Web site to see if further functionality needs to be added.
• Putting up content as needed, with a 2-day turnaround time from receipt of request from Board member.
• Writing monthly status reports, including reports of usage and hits, to the Vice President.

The following skills are required:

• Ability to direct the work of others and follow through.
• Knowledge of CSS and HTML.
• Ability to use FTP software to upload files.
• Ability to update template-driven Web pages by altering the PHP template’s code.
• Ability to install and skin out-of-the-box software.

The following skills are recommended:

• Knowledge of PHP and MySQL.
• Knowledge of shell systems.

This job is unpaid, and priority will be given to current SFRA members. The SFRA Web Director must be a member of SFRA. Please submit an e-mail outlining your qualifications to Lisa Yaszek, SFRA Vice President (lisa.yaszek AT lcc.gatech.edu), along with URLs of sites you maintain. The deadline is August 15, 2008.

Job 2: Drupal Tech (one-time job)

The Science Fiction Research Association (http://sfra.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and scholarship in the field of science fiction and fantasy in literature and media, is upgrading its Web site. We require an expert in Drupal who can install and configure the program; install the zen_classic theme and modify it to add our logo; and add in existing modules to provide the desired functionality. An example of a Drupal-based site that does what we want is here: http://wpacouncil.org/.

We require the following: membership management; mass e-mail capability to all paid members; online polls, including secure elections; e-commerce/ubercart membership fee payment linked to PayPal, with the ability to subscribe to optional publications; ability to parse and output membership information in a variety of ways, such as by geographical location, interest, and publications to receive; main blog for news and calls for papers; public informational SF wiki; private organizational wiki locked to a specific subset of users; and pages for organization-specific informational content.

In addition, we would like Open Conference Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs), a freeware conference-management utility, installed in a subdomain and skinned to match the Drupal site.

Interested developers should submit a bid to Lisa Yaszek, SFRA Vice President (lisa.yaszek AT lcc.gatech.edu), along with URLs of previously developed sites and contact information for several references. The deadline is August 15, 2008.

[0.0] SFRA 2008 was in Lawrence, Kansas, this year, and I was head of the academic programming. Sadly, I was kept so busy that I only managed to attend paper sessions and roundtables that I was on, but I enjoyed meeting all the people I’d corresponded with. My paper, entitled “SF Fan Wikis: Source, Reference, World,” was really the only fan-oriented paper at SFRA, although one of SFRA’s recent goals is to respond better to the needs of scholars in nonprint media. Meanwhile, here is a short recap of the high points of my talk.

1. Wikis and fans

[1.1] “SF Fan Wikis” discussed fans as one subset of the communities comprising Web 2.0—that is, an interactive web focused on participation and communities, as Tapcott and Williams note in their definition of the old Web versus Web 2.0 in Wikinomics (2008 rev. ed.). It’s important to realize that the reason fan studies is becoming such a hot topic is that interactivity on the Web is now far more mainstream, and is thus attracting more attention, particularly in terms of copyright violation. Much of the scholarly work done on fans is applicable to other groups who are now congregating online, and even if the sense of the word fan doesn’t quite fit my understanding of what they do, it’s clear that they’re engaging in ways that I’d describe as fannish.

[1.2] Much has been written on fans who publish fanfic in zines or on the Internet, and about fans who blog, particularly in the LiveJournal blogsphere. However, less work has been done on fans who engage with their source material via wikis. Wiki collaborative software permits group authorship, usually of a site that organizes factual information. Wikis are useful because they shield users from code but result in a nice product, and it’s easy to cross-reference and hotlink. In addition, wiki software tracks changes, so it’s possible to negotiate edits. Wikipedia is the most famous example of a repository of factual information, and it resonantes beyond its genre: encyclopedias, with its attendant rules about documentation, disinterested author stance, and lack of bias. So ubiquitous is Wikipedia that the look of a wiki immediately implies factual information, which makes parody sites, such as the Fandom Wank Wiki, all the more amusing by the mere juxtaposition of form and content.

[1.3] The essence of the wiki is facts by consensus. This is discussed in Wikinomics (and the authors explain why this actually works), but it was more famously emphasized by Stephen Colbert, whose notions of truthiness (”knowledge ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual explanation, or facts”) and Wikiality (”together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”) emphasize the slippery nature of truth and the danger of agreeing on something when perhaps it has no basis in fact.

2. How fans use wikis

[2.1] I had hoped to find examples of fans using wikis to create fiction. I envisioned a fabulous shared world, with many authors contributing to a sprawling story that was meant to be read not vertically but horizontally, with hyperlinks taking you from one place to another in a meandering version of a choose your own adventure story, but without explicit cues to jump to a new page. However, I only found a single example of this: P/Virt. Even more disappointingly, the wiki was set up by a hopeful soul in December 2007 and then not populated. One of the people who attended my talk suggested that this might be because there isn’t sole authorship, so people aren’t credited for their work but subsumed into a collective, and thus they are less likely to contribute. To this I’ll add the fact that there aren’t too many hyperlinked stories anyway, so hyperlinking and horizontalness in storytelling may just not appeal.

[2.2] Far more common are fan wikis used to organize factual information. Good examples are the Battlestar Wiki, which gathers together information from both versions of the show; the Stargate Wiki, for which I volunteered under my fan name; and Memory Alpha, the best-known fan wiki in Star Trek fandom. (For those wondering whether an alpha implies a beta, yes: there is also a Memory Beta for licensed Star Trek products, such as games, novels, and comics.)

[2.3] Although the flattening of authority is a mark of wikis, with all contributors treated more or less equally in that all have posting and updating privileges unless they get themselves banned or unless the page is locked, status can still be conferred on posters by contributing excellent articles and usefully updating existing ones, with this information all tracked through the wiki software. Fans whose pages are rarely reverted are reliable posters. Fan wikis will never officially have true authority; only a producer associated with the program will have that. (Some TV shows are now setting up wikis for fans to contribute to; one particularly interesting one, because of the confusing lack of parallelism between truth and fiction, is dedicated to The Tudors.) However, for fan wikis, authority is generated by faithfulness to canon, thus permitting the main criterion for judging the content. A wiki contributor’s depth of canonical knowledge through close readings of the source text will be rewarded.

3. How do wikis fit into fan culture?

[3.1] I have identified three important ways that wikis fit into fan culture. First, of course, is the sheer usefulness of providing canonical information in an easy-to-navigate way. Fanfic writers will use wikis to fact check details of their story, from spellings to the color of someone’s eyes. Second is the privileged place accorded by the community to those who collect factual information about a source text: it’s useful information, and the community will reward it, primarily by visiting the wiki and increasing the hit count, but secondarily by linking to the wiki from their home page or crediting it in a story’s header. And third, providing this information better permits meta (thinking about thinking) to be generated by the community, so it provides a factual base for interpretation, although fan wiki entries themselves rarely engage in interpretation.

[3.2] Wikis have at their core the idea of fact. However, of all the fan wikis I looked at, Memory Alpha is the most interesting because it took this idea of fact and took it one step further, into the realm, I submit, of the creative:

[3.3] Memory Alpha’s primary point of view is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe—an archivist at Memory Alpha, the Federation library planet.

Star Trek universe articles should be written as if the described person, object, or event actually existed or occurred, exactly like in a normal encyclopedia, but with an omniscient writer. Think of Memory Alpha as an encyclopedia that exists in the Star Trek universe. [source]

[3.4] Contributors are thus invited into a future world, one looking back on the events of the Star Trek universe as though they really happened, taking on the point of view of a disinterested observer examining long-dead people and events and reporting on them. By taking this stance, Memory Alpha becomes a far-flung fictive text meant to be read not as a story but as a collection of facts that, taken together, create a world. Maybe instead of seeking fiction in wiki through creation of something wholly new, like in the P/Virt universe, we ought to seek fiction in all wikis through the creation of a set of bits of information presented factually, and as we sort through them, the mental construction of the world by contributors and by readers becomes the creative act.

The .pdf of the SFRA 2008 program may be obtained here. This file contains only the listing of events and papers.

The file will be up at sfra.org shortly.

On Times Online, a review by Michael Saler entitled The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture, book review of David Hajdu, The ten-cent plague: The great comic-book scare and how it changed America; and Michael Chabon, Maps and legends: Reading and writing along the borderlands.

Saler organizes his review around conceptions of high versus low culture. Of Chabon’s book, Saler notes:

Munificent artists can’t be contained within the arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the “serious” and the “entertaining”. Chabon doesn’t need to reach for his gun to dispatch such distinctions. He simply redefines them: “All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”.

Hear hear!

Introduction

On Saturday, March 22, Karen Hellekson and Craig Jacobsen were the hosts for a special lunchtime presentation held at ICFA-29 in Orlando, Florida, entitled “To the Axis Mundi: ICFA in the Pull of the Magic Kingdom.” The hour-long PowerPoint presentation was the first in an ongoing project we’re calling DWORPF: Disney World Ongoing Research Project in the Fantastic. We plan follow-up presentations in the future.

We visited the Magic Kingdom on Tuesday and took about 280 pictures between us. Even these were not enough. In addition to the images below, we found a few on the Internet, mostly of attractions that we were unable to photograph, such as the interior of sets, and of attractions that exist only virtually, such as little green CGI monsters. We were at the park from the time of its opening at 9 a.m. to the time of its closing at about 1 a.m., after which we had an entirely new kind of adventure: that of lost taxi driver desperately trying to pretend he knows where he’s going.

Note: There are many large images behind the cut. It may take a while for the full page to load.

Overview: Why we went

We went for enjoyment and research, but our main focus was to view the park through an academic lens. We found ourselves fascinated by things that were not the point of the attraction—for example, we enjoyed the decor of the little shops more than the objects being sold. In short, we viewed the Magic Kingdom as a cultural theme studies park for academics. We cultivated an ironic distance, which permitted us to reframe what we saw around us. In addition, neither of us has children, so most people’s reason for going is moot for us.

Our presentation was organized around four points: empty signifier, ontological flattening, and commodification, and to conclude, the Monsters, Inc., interactive attraction, which we see as the wave of the future.

Empty signifier

By “empty signifier,” we refer to an attraction that has had information removed from the signifier, leaving it a contextless husk.

Carousel of Progress

Carousel of Progress tableau showing the kitchen as the site of technological change

The Crystal Palace…

…as an eatery, a symbol of progress reduced to lunch

Brer Rabbit

Splashing into the briar patch

Rasta Mickey ears (sized for children, or Craig would be the proud owner of this item), with race elided

Retrofuture Tomorrowland entrance, uniting future and past time

Merchant of Venus entrance

Tomorrowland orrery

A peaceful nonspecific Indian village

Headhunters: culturally marked, stereotypical figures that do not mean anything other than a threat

A realistic elephant on the Jungle Cruise appears next to silly tableaux

Apes destroying an encampment during the Jungle Cruise

Shrunken Neds outside the Jungle Cruise attraction

A kid with a pistol prepares to lift the white man’s burden

Ontological Flattening

By “ontological flattening,” we mean the closing in of landscape and distance, where hierarchy is irrelevant, where subject and object conflate. We found the Jungle Cruise in Adventureland to be the best example of this. In this attraction, you take a ride on all the great rivers of the world, wending through Asia, Africa, and South America in a mere 9 minutes. The queue features 1930s-era props that evoke a sense of adventure commingled with dread, and jokes about dismemberment by big cats and death by disease abound.

The metal trees in Tomorrowland combine the realistic and the constructed

A realistically bucolic yet wholly constructed scene of wildlife on the train ride around the park…

…contrasts with real wildlife in the park, such as this bird

A steamboat plies the waters…

…with extra spray provided by judicious application of dried ice

Conflation of landscape: American Southwest right next to Indian totems (view is of back of totems)

Conflation of landscape: American Southwest right next to Indian totems (view is of front of totem, which is to the far right)

Steaming through the Southwest

Temple ruins in Cambodia during the Jungle Cruise in a serious tableau, right after passing through Africa and South America

Congo map in the Jungle Cruise queue, indicating contraction of geography and time

These Adventureland totems evoke a far-away place…

…and then squirt cooling water on a hot day

The Swiss Family Treehouse has the same level of reality as…

…the Hall of Presidents, where all presidents are in existence at the same time, as well as…

…this Liberty Bell reproduction, cast from the same mold as the real Liberty Bell and with a faux crack sketched on

This statue of the Little Mermaid, Ariel, is presented on the same level as…

…this statue of Cinderella, which is presented as…

…a story that is simultaneously both antique and Disney, with both given the same weight

The Space Mountain Cargo Control Center features modern flat-panel displays juxtaposed against a retrofuture robot (formerly, if Craig’s memory serves, a regular man) wearing a baseball cap

Commodification

We found the commodification at the Magic Kingdom intriguing. Most items were geared to children and would not appeal to (or fit) adults. Disney-owned properties, such as Lilo & Stitch, were ubiquitous. Many attractions exited into a related shop. We liked the way all the shops were uniquely decorated. Although the kiosks and shops around most attractions were related to the attraction, we found pirate gear everywhere, the result of commodification of the popular Pirates of the Caribbean films, which are based on a Disney attraction. The stock in shops was usually limited and targeted around a theme; a larger selection was available near the park’s entrance, on Main Street. Similarly, the Magic Kingdom uses extreme specialization for food service: kiosks sell only a single food item (French fries, turkey legs, waffles and funnel cakes), which helps keeps the lines moving.

“How to wash your hands” plaques in the bathrooms, sponsored by Sparkle paper towels, commodify the going-to-the-bathroom experience

Rank upon rank of guns, tying into the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction

Pink snakeskin cowboy hats for girls have a pirate theme (note that the eye patch on the skull is a Mickey)

Star Tours gear is still on sale (Goofy as Darth Vader!), although this is no longer an attraction

Commodification of the self and of the child: a little girl with a princess makeover, complete with hair, makeup, tiara, and dress

Karen outside the ladies room, with the sign tailored to the Tomorrowland theme; Tomorrowland was originally a future-utopia progress-based attraction, but it has been replaced with media tie-ins

Shop display with a metanarrative of the park itself: the Magic Kingdom in a bubble, like a snow globe, untouchable by the outside real world

Monsters, Inc.

Mike Wazowski, your Monsters, Inc., host and star of the Disney-owned film

The Monsters, Inc., attraction, which opened in April 2007, features digital puppetry and is part of Disney’s Living Character initiative. We had a while before the park was going to close, and we decided to go through it because there was no line. It ended up being the most interesting attraction. Monsters, Inc., is a 2001 Disney-owned film.

The Laugh Floor; to the right is the yellow canister that the audience must fill with gigglewatts of laughter to provide power for the monsters’ city—a new mode of power that replaces the hideous screams of terror formerly used to power Monstropolis, and a continuation of the narrative of the film

The attraction is an interactive experience, where cartoons on a big screen interact with audience members. Audience members are targeted by a pinpoint spotlight, and a crew member hurries over to hold a mike up while herself remaining completely hidden. The chosen audience member is shown on the large middle screen. Also on the screen, computer-generated cartoon characters move and speak. We saw Mac and Jeeves, a two-headed monster; different names are used for different comedians’ voices. It was clear that they could see us and that was happening was done on the fly; it was not precisely scripted, like every other event in the Magic Kingdom. The oohs and the aahs were generated by the interactivity and the seamless way live action meshed with the CGI. It has a definite “how do they do that?” flavor that definitely impressed an audience all too used to animatronics.

During the long wait to get into the attraction, we were held in a room and entertained with a cartoon story told on monitors. During this long wait, I noticed that we were under video surveillance. We theorize that some of the jokes used were decided on during this wait. One joke involved two people wearing the same T-shirt, for example. We think that there is a limited palette of jokes or scenarios that are chosen during surveillance by the team, with only some of it done on the fly. Spontaneous responses from audience members tap into a repertoire of jokes and references where jokes can be slotted in as needed. Interactive moments interspersed with canned moments, where we watched prerecorded things on big monitors. In addition, big signs in the waiting area invited audience members to text jokes, and three of these were read. We don’t know if these were three from our audience or whether they used old ones.

Monsters, Inc., like the Carousel of Progress that began our tale, is a Tomorrowland attraction. Disney abandoned the tenet of progress and the future 15 years ago. Now, the focus is not the story of progress that the Carousel tells, but rather the technology used to tell individual stories related to Disney properties. Monsters, Inc., draws attention to itself as being different, and its interest lies in precisely its contrast with the other attractions, which look static, even irrelevant. However, some older attractions are still really good: we enjoyed the Haunted Mansion, an attraction that premiered at Disney Land in 1969, even though it’s been basically unchanged (it has been slightly freshened over the years) and we both saw it as children.

We sketched the implications of the Living Character initiative: instead of totally controllable attractions, there will be interactive ones, and with it comes a need for talented employees (such as comedians) who can handle the complex tasks required to entertain audiences widely mixed in age, including lots of children. We plan to follow up on this initiative. Disney plans a Muppet attraction featuring Dr. Benson Honeydew and his assistant, Beaker.

Epilogue

While we were walking through the park, I noticed what could only be stasis or cryonics pods. Craig foolishly thought that they were lights. I had to talk him around.

Stasis pods

If you look closely, can you see Walt himself inside one of them? Or is the story of Walt freezing himself simply an urban myth?

At ICFA-29, I presented a paper entitled “Fandom Wank and History.” Here’s its abstract. The same basic information has been accepted for publication in an edited volume about community and online tools. I plan to expand the essay greatly by adding in a discussion of The Ms.Scribe Story to illustrate how blog-based historical texts are generated with the benefit of time and hindsight.

Abstract: Fandom Wank and history

Historical discourse is firmly situated in the realm of the trace: a document, be it a bill of sale or the registry of a wedding, provides unmistakable proof that an event occurred, and historians study such traces to construct a narrative document based (one hopes) in fact. As the realm of res gestae (things done), history’s rhetorical activity is one of telling the truth. However, the Internet muddies this historical trace by permitting deliberate rewriting and obfuscation: blog posts can be rewritten; Web sites can be taken down; online comments can be edited.

One site that dramatically illustrates the possibility of this activity in the realm of fandom is Fandom Wank, a blog-based online community that exists solely to describe—and mock—fandom blowups. Descriptions of altered traces abound: offending entries edited, entire blogs deleted, entries locked or deleted, comments disabled. Yet next to these descriptions of altered traces may sit proof of the original text: damning screen shots, IP address traces, links to archived Web pages. The wank I used to illustrate my paper, chosen because it was recent, because it has sensational elements, and because it illustrated all my points, is called How NOT to Date a Celebrity.

Fandom Wank foregrounds the activity of fans who use blogs to collaboratively write a kind of history of an event as it happens by tracking elements of the trace even as the trace is being erased and literally rewritten, thus constructing a new form of historical writing, with its own rules of acceptable proof of the trace. I argue that fan blogs discussing current events in fan culture are actually historical writings that are imbued with community-specific meaning. The point of such an activity is to create a collaborative text that brings together relevant traces, documentation, and testimony in an effort to construct a persuasive document.

What copyright is Transformative Works and Cultures using?

TWC is copyrighting under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

In brief, everyone is free to reprint or remix, with attribution, without obtaining specific permission, as long as the original publication info is attributed and/or hotlinked back. We chose a noncommercial license because we think that enough people are making money off fan labor. If people are going to do so, we figure at least they ought to tell us, so we can tell the author.

Practically speaking, what does that copyright mean for the authors who publish in TWC?

It means that anybody can post full text of the articles, with attribution, as long as they don’t make money. Authors may therefore repost the entire content to their blog or Web site after TWC has been published. Likewise, random people can repost full text without restriction. As long as they attribute it properly, it’s all good.

If people want to make money off the text, perhaps by anthologizing the essay in an edited volume, then they must ask. This includes the author, because once an article appears in TWC, TWC owns the copyright.

We plan to grant permission to anyone who requests reprint, regardless of who they are (the author or not), without asking for money. We basically just want to know, so we can inform the author. If the author does not want the article reprinted, we are obliged to disregard the author’s wishes and permit the publication to go forward, as per our stated reprint policy (”Such permission is routinely granted for free”). We do this in the spirit of open access.

Why is TWC retaining copyright, not the author?

The journal retaining copyright is standard in academic journal publishing. Everyone in the industry understands it. We’re thus in line with general practice. Production editors at presses seeking reprint permission will automatically come to TWC, not the author. Requesting payment for reprints is one way that academic journals make money. However, TWC, because it is associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization, and because we want to retain the spirit of open access, will never ask for money to reprint articles.

Our main reason is a purely practical one: TWC retains copyright to protect its ability to grant reprint permission in case the author disappears.

Further, we are committed to open access. If we released copyright to the author, the author could choose to abrogate that by refusing to grant reprint permission. This is not in line with TWC’s mission and goals, which are focused on the free dissemination of ideas.

What about reproduction of copyrighted or trademarked material in TWC?

As part of the essays we will print, TWC will publish screencaps, manips, original art based on copyrighted or trademarked characters, short vids, and other artworks based on copyrighted material.

As TWC’s Web site notes in the section on Online Submissions,

We believe images, including images altered by an artist to create a derivative artwork, and song lyrics may appear in TWC under fair use under U.S. copyright law. Such images and lyrics are fair use because:
1. They are lower in resolution and quality than the original.
2. They do not limit the copyright owners’ distribution rights.
3. They are being used in the context of academic analysis in a manner that contributes meaningfully to our culture.
4. They represent only a tiny fraction of the whole artwork.
5. They are hosted by the OTW’s servers, and the OTW is a nonprofit organization.

This reading of fair use means that we will permit reproduction of images that most other scholarly journals would never consider. We hope that this will inspire authors who have resisted writing such works because they knew they would basically be unpublishable.

If authors wish to reprint untransformed copyrighted texts that are not artworks, such as bar graphs or charts that were originally published in another academic journal, the author is responsible, as is standard in the industry, for contacting the journal to obtain permission, paying any fees, and providing the TWC editors with copies of the relevant paperwork.

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal blog here. Feel free to comment in either space.

Remember

An analysis of Torchwood 2.05 “Adam”

Contains major spoilers!

1. Analysis of memory and forgetting

[1.1] In Torchwood 2.05 “Adam,” the Torchwood team has a new colleague: Adam. He’s their new best friend: Jack’s confidant (he recruited Adam 3 years ago!), Tosh’s lover (it’s the 1-year anniversary of their first kiss!), all-around great guy. He’s even in a clip or two in the show’s opening credits. But despite all their memories of times shared, our heroes have only known him for 2 days. Adam is an alien who only has reality when others have memory of him. He feeds that memory into people by touch, and by so doing, he constitutes his own existence.

[1.2] Torchwood 2.05 “Adam” is interesting to me because of the ways it explores the fascinating historical idea of the trace. In addition, it explores the idea that memories comprise the person, and if one alters, so the other necessarily must. The character of the aptly named Adam takes this one step further: memories literally create a person, and without them, he is literally nothing. He would disappear, his existence restricted, doomed to drift in the Vortex. To exist, he must construct false memories in others, thereby creating a false reality in a house of cards that, as we learn, can’t be sustained for long.

[1.3] Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, notes that there are three kinds of trace: the kind of trace associated with our brains, which can be analyzed by brain scans and neuroscientific analysis; the trace of affect, or the inscription of something onto the soul; and the more usual documentary trace, which comprises written records, archives, and writing. In “Adam,” all three kinds of trace are in evidence, with the last kind, documentary trace, resulting in Adam’s discovery and downfall.

2. Literal brain trace

[2.1] Adam is the agent of the first kind of trace, that of the literal trace in the brain. His very touch affects the brain, feeding in memories that contextualize his presence: playing basketball together, sharing a cup of coffee, laughing—simple day-to-day stuff that embeds him in their reality. It’s unclear whether his touch also imbues his victim with an emotional context. I think it more likely that the memories he weaves evoke the victim into creating the associated emotion. But the end effect is the same: the Torchwood team love him. They think he’s a great guy, one of them, a real pal. However, his touch may have untoward side effects. When he incorporates himself into Gwen’s memory, she loses all memory of her fiance, Rhys. In fact, when she goes home, she takes him for an intruder and holds him at gunpoint. She thinks he is stalking her, and the documentary traces of their life together—photos of the two of them together decorating their shared apartment—she takes to be Photoshopped fakes created by a deluded madman. Even the engagement ring she wears and Jack’s insistence that Rhys is her fiance do not convince her because she does not recognize him, and she feels no emotional resonance when she sees him. Jack attempts to remind her by recording Rhys describing memories of the two of them together, but for Gwen, it’s all dim, long ago, barely remembered.

[2.2] Similarly, Adam’s alterations of the Torchwood team’s brains affects their personalities. Although Adam has only been with them for two days, the changes in the characters are marked. Normally prim Tosh’s sweater is daringly low cut, and she moves with an air of self-possession and confidence she normally lacks. Her memories tell her that she is dating Adam and that the two of them are in love. Dashing Owen, now wearing geeky glasses and a dull cardigan, is shy and rule-bound, and in a nice reversal from canon, he moons after Tosh instead of vice versa, quite unlike his normal ladies’ man self. By incorporating himself into their memories, Adam has changed their personalities.

[2.3] Adam tries to convince Jack that he has somehow brought their true selves to the fore: “You didn’t remember who you were. I helped you. Look at Owen, all his cynicism gone. He’s a different man now—selfless, happy. And Toshiko too. She’s never been this confident.” Adam believes that rather than fundamentally changing them, he has brought them back to their real selves—he believes that he has helped them “remember.” This implies a truthful sort of existence beyond memory, a fundamental self that transcends the trace. Yet can such a thing exist? Adam is merely posturing, I think, buying time for himself by trying to convince Jack that things are better this way. Still, the undeniable connection between alteration of memory and alternation of character imply that memory’s alteration can be far-reaching, a cascade of cause and effect created by the mind as it sorts through available information in order to construct a worldview.

3. The trace of affect

[3.1] The second kind of trace is the trace of affect, and the character who articulates this change is Jack. Ianto keeps a handwritten diary, and when he examines it, he realizes that everyone is in it except Adam. When he confronts Adam, Adam retaliates by attacking Ianto and feeding terrifying memories into Ianto’s brain—new memories are of Ianto stalking and killing three women. Overcome with remorse, Ianto confesses to Jack, who is unable to reconcile this new information with the impression in his soul that Ianto is incapable of being a serial killer. Even after a lie detector test proves Ianto guilty, Jack refuses to believe it: “No. This is not you. Something’s changed you. You are not a murderer.”

[3.2] Similarly, whereas Gwen loses all memory of Rhys as a side effect of Adam’s insertions, Jack sees his long-dead father and brother everywhere he goes: his little brother, Gray, in a holding cell, then again on a street corner; his father in a street. A traumatic memory associated with emotion has broken free, and once again, he’s the boy who was unable to save his family when the invaders came (Jack says, “I let go of his [Gray's] hand. It was the worst day of my life. It’s the last thing I want to remember.”). Adam holds this crucial memory hostage in a last-ditch attempt to retain corporeality even as Jack’s fruitless search for his long-dead brother illuminates his character. He will always try to save Gray, over and over again, we understand. It’s what Jack does.

4. Documentary trace

[4.1] The third kind of trace, that of documentary evidence, is Adam’s undoing. Ianto’s diary is just the beginning. When Jack searches the Hub’s CCTV records, he finds a visual record of Adam locked in combat with Ianto, feeding in the negative memories. “Remember it,” Adam’s voice repeats over and over. “Remember it.” Of course it’s not remembering; it’s completely false. Still, the human mind has been altered and it becomes reality, with worldviews changed to match, memory given undeniable primacy.

[4.2] Jack’s gut feeling, his memory of affect, led him to seek documentary evidence, which in turn supported his gut feeling. He knows that Adam is not one of them because the computer records of Adam Smith’s existence have only recently been updated, because he has records of Adam attacking Ianto, because Adam has only been on 2 days’ worth of CCTV, because Gwen forgot Rhys. But the impetus of all this is Jack’s affect. He tells Adam, “All I know is that when I think of my team, I see you there but I don’t feel anything for you—no pride, no warmth.”

5. Forgetting

[5.1] The cure for memory is forgetting, of course. Jack tells the team, “Our memories define us. Adam changed those memories, changed who were are. Now I have to help you all go back. Find a memory that defines you. Rediscover who you are.” He asks them to think of something that makes them who they are, and then he hands them each an amnesia pill, which will wipe out the last 48 hours. This, we understand, will be Adam’s downfall. With no one to remember him, with no trace left, he will cease to exist. Each character is defined by something: Owen by rage at his family, Tosh by the comfort of math, Gwen by Rhys, Ianto by his lost love. The last person to take a pill is Jack himself, after Adam makes a last-ditch attempt to use memory to pull in Jack and permit Adam existence.

[5.2] When they all awake, Jack has ensured that all three kinds of trace of Adam are gone. The memory pill wiped out the brain’s literal memories, and with it went affective relationships. All the evidentiary trace has been erased as well: CCTV records, relevant computer files, all wiped. The only thing that’s left is the alien box that they presumably opened, thus releasing Adam. When Jack opens it, only sand is inside. Perhaps it’s a sign that Adam has been reduced to constituent parts. Perhaps it’s a link to Jack’s memories of his past and his long-lost family. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for time and memory, sand slipping through the fingers.

The book I coedited with Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, was selected as a title for review at RCCS for the month of March. Check it out here. Kristina and I had the opportunity to respond to the reviewer’s comments, and our response is there as well.

Here is the blurb from the RCCS:

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)
publishes a set of book reviews and author responses:
http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp. books of the month for march 2008
include:

Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture
Editor: Michael D. Ayers
Publisher: Peter Lang, 2006
Review 1: Lori Landay
Review 2: Shintaro Miyazaki
Review 3: Marc W.D. Tyrrell
Editor Response: Michael D. Ayers

Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships
Authors: Monica Whitty, Adrian Carr
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Review 1: Rhiannon Bury
Review 2: Michele Hammers

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays
Editors: Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse
Publisher: McFarland & Co., 2006
Review 1: Lan Xuan Le
Author Response: Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse

The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Christy Dena
Author Response: Anne Friedberg

enjoy. there’s more where that came from.

—david silver

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal blog here. Please feel free to comment in either space.

[1.1] On January 31, Flowtv.com published an essay I wrote entitled From Irrelevance to On-Demand: Changing Models of Dissemination, which Flow summarizes as, “Innovative Internet distribution models in music and television strike back against Big Media hegemony.” It’s an analysis of the irrelevance of current modes of distribution of media, and I provide two grand experiments that attempt to use the Internet to bypass these modes, one in music and one in live-action TV: Radiohead’s online, pay-what-you-want release of their album In Rainbows, and the production of Web-only TV show Sanctuary.

[1.2] No sooner does this essay come out, of course, than it’s obsolete: In Rainbows is no longer available for download from the artists, and Sanctuary has parleyed the success of its Webisodes and its viral fan base into a 13-ep deal with SciFi.com, which will involve reshooting the entire show. SciFi.com, in Sanctuary Comes to Sci-Fi, emphasizes the virtual sets. Executive vice president of original programming Mark Stern notes, “This stylistic approach to virtual sets has proven hugely popular on the big screen, and we have been looking for a chance to use it on a television series.” 300 and Sin City, which were both filmed with extensive CGI, were precursors that tested the genre and proved it viable.

[1.3] Whereas SciFi.com emphasizes the technological advance of green screen shooting, a blog entry entitled Green Means Go at the official Sanctuary site emphasizes the fans: “A big reason why this television deal was secured, was on the strength of our popularity online. Sanctuary, the TV show, would not have happened without the immense popularity of Sanctuary the web series and we have you, the fans, to thank for that.”

[1.4] At Gateworld.net, in part 1 of a two-part interview, Sanctuary star and producer Amanda Tapping emphasizes that the Web presence will still be important to the project, with content and fan interactivity there not seen on TV. However, the project’s big limitation was, unsurprisingly, money:

[1.5] I think our intention was to try and launch a completely Internet series, but the model doesn’t work yet to monetize it. The business model just doesn’t work. It’s too easy to pirate everything on the Internet, which we encouraged initially because we thought “At least it gets the word out there.” But it’s too hard financially to make a completely Internet series work of this scale, with this kind of budget.

[1.6] These grand experiments need to be done, of course, in order to test the limits of dissemination and to see how far consumers of content (let’s call them fans) will go. The answer, at least for now, seems to be, they won’t go so far as to shell out money. As Comscore found, only 38% of In Rainbows downloaders chose to pay, and as Tapping implies, piracy made it hard to make money, even though it had the side benefit of becoming part of the viral fan experience, which in turn led to the TV deal.

[1.7] As a fan-consumer, I feel like I pay plenty for content, but what I’m actually paying for is dissemination: I pay high-speed Internet fees, and I pay for cable TV. I don’t pay for TiVo, but in that regard, I find that I am unique among my peers. When you add all this up, hundreds of dollars a month are being spent on accessing content that you don’t get to keep. It feels like I’m paying enough; I don’t want to also have to pay a couple bucks to download something that I can’t watch on my TV and that is poor quality.

[1.8] More needs to be done with cross-platform infrastructure before fan-consumers will shell out. If I could cancel cable (and you could cancel TiVo) and just stick with high-speed Internet, I ought to have enough money to pay a couple bucks for the few TV shows that I actually want to watch and keep, if I could download them to a magic box that would stream the show to my TV without requiring the intermediary step of burning a disk with the item or converting it to another format. If content were available for free to stream, I’d be more willing to do that if I could beam it upstairs to the TV. Although wireless transmitters are available, they’re hardly mainstream, and most are designed for music, not TV.

[1.9] I’m watching Big Media’s take on all this with interest. When someone (Apple? an open source project?) comes up with a TiVo-like mainstream transmitter, and when someone else comes up with some kind of encoding format that works easily across platforms, Big Media may have to change its ways. Until then, it looks like Sanctuary and In Rainbows showed us a way that isn’t going to be the way. Nice try, guys, and don’t give up!