"The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age"

Let's start with two recent stories, both involving Star Wars and the Internet, which illustrate some of the complexities of popular culture in the digital age.

In Spring 1998, a two page color-spread in Entertainment Weekly profiled aspiring digital filmmaker Kevin Rubio, whose 10 minute, $1,200 film, Troops, has attracted the interests of Hollywood insiders. Troops spoofs Star Wars by offering a Cops-like profile of

the stormtroopers who do the day-in, day-out work of policing Tatooine, settling domestic disputes, rounding up space hustlers, and trying to crush the Jedi Knights. In a sly wink towards Fargo, one of the stormtroopers speaks with a noticeable Minnesota accent. Rubio's film made imaginative and resourceful use of computer graphics work as good as found in most big budget

productions. As a result, he is fielding offers, from companies like Dreamworks, to finance his first feature film. Star Wars producer George Lucas has announced his own enthusiasm for the short. Posted on the web, Troops draws a phenomenal number of hits each day.

In fall 1997, the usenet discussion group devoted to Star Wars responded to increased traffic sparked by the re-release of the "digitally-enhanced" versions of the original films, creating a separate newsgroup where fans could post and critique original fiction set in the Star Wars universe. Such stories often involve rereading the Star Wars saga from the point of view of Darth Vader, the Emperor, the Stormtroopers, and the other imperial forces. In a rare action, the Usenet hierarchy vetoed the plan, not even allowing it to be presented for a formal vote, claiming that it promoted "illegal activities," i.e. that net discussions of fan fiction encouraged the violation of Lucasfilm's copyright. Interestingly, the same group had previously failed to block discussion groups devoted to the circulation of child pornography, information about making terrorist weapons, or the exchange of illegal drugs. Many believe that they made this decision based on a series of "cease and desist" letters issued by Lucasfilm attorneys aimed at shutting down Star Wars fan websites or blocking the circulation of fanzines. Through the years, Lucasfilm has been one of the most aggressive corporate groups in trying to halt fan cultural production. As early as 1981, Lucasfilm had issued legal notices and warnings to fans who published zines containing sexually explicit stories, while implicitly giving permission to publish non-erotic stories about the characters: "Since all of the Star Wars Saga is PG Rated, any story those publishers print should also be PG. Lucasfilm does not produce any X-rated Star Wars episodes, so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do?" Many fans felt that Lucasfilm was claiming the right to ideologically police their shared "fantasies." Much of the writing of fan erotica was pushed underground by this policy, though it continued to circulate informally. By the late 1990s, Lucasfilm had adopted a stringent policy against all forms of fan fiction that might compete with their own professionally written Star Wars novels.

Let's pause for a moment and consider what these two stories have in common. Both involve the circulation via digital media of original artworks that appropriate their core themes, images, and situations from Star Wars. In both cases, the same core idea is being explored. The creative artists are asking what Star Wars would look like from an Imperial perspective. In both cases, this appropriation is unauthorized, even if after the fact Lucas chose to give his personal blessings to Troops. Rubio explained in personal e-mail to me, ""Although my pocket book and my morality tend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, I would not try to make a profit off of this film out of respect for Mr. Lucas. Let's face it, he's the last guy on this earth that I want to piss off." Fans similarly "respect" Lucas and have no desire to infringe upon his copyright.

Let's consider how they differ. From a classical legal standpoint, Troops poses a greater direct threat to Lucasfilm's interests. It has high production values, which could

easily be confused with official Star Wars materials. It is produced by a professional who seeks entry into the entertainment industry, who wants to profit from his appropriation of Lucasfilm's intellectual property -- at least indirectly if not directly. The Star Wars fan fiction, on the other hand, is clearly of an amateur quality and is explicitly marked as such. Few people would be likely to mistake it for anything Lucasfilm produced. Its circulation on the net does not require any monetary exchange. Lucasfilm's official rationale for shutting down the fan sites, after all, is that if they turn a blind eye to fan's non-profit appropriations, they will lessen their ability to control the production and circulation of unauthorized commercially-produced materials. So why was a decision made to respond more aggressively to Star Wars fan fiction than to Troops?

This essay will explore a double standard in contemporary popular culture, one which complicate claims that the digital revolution is enabling grassroots cultural production and distribution. I will argue that the introduction of new communications media in the late 20^th century has built up expectations that we can participate actively in our culture and that reworking cultural materials has become a central part of the process of media consumption. On the other hand, the media industries have sought to structure our opportunities for interaction with media content in order to regulate the use of their intellectual property. The result is a popular culture which selectively embraces aspects of fan culture, even as corporate lawyers seek to shut down fan websites and discussion lists. For some time, research into fandom has been criticized for not adequately exploring issues of political economy, often with the implication that if we looked at issues of media ownership and production, we would see that fandom was simply an outgrowth of the marketing process and therefore not at all resistant to corporate control of culture. As we examine the political economy of fandom, nothing so simple emerges: fans are sometimes desired consumers for cultural products and certain marketing strategies do seem to court fannish responses. As I will suggest, many fan practices have been pulled towards the mainstream in the decade since I wrote Textual Poachers, leaving the books’ emphasis on fandom’s marginalization a quaint record of a past era. At the same time, these same corporations adopt strategies of responding to fan culture (especially on the web and the net) that strip consumers of any rights to participate within their own culture; threatening letters and phone calls are often radicalizing for fans who simply wanted to express their affiliations with a particular cultural product. The problem lies in our polarized vocabulary of co-optation and resistance; neither term adequately describes the unstable and often mercurial relations between media corporations and fan culture, which are sometimes welcoming and sometimes hostile. The opening quote by Rosemary Coombes reminds us what’s at stake in conflicts over who controls our core myths and symbols. Coombes insists that cultural democracy depends on our rights to "fix" and "challenge" the meanings of shared cultural materials. Judged by that standard, the cultural consequences of the "digital revolution" remain uncertain at best. This subsequent discussion will, thus, be uncertain, speculative, perhaps even self-contradicting as it tries to describe trends in popular culture that are still taking their definitive shape and whose consequences will not become fully apparent for some time to come.

CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

The trends I want to identify in this essay fall loosely under the heading of "cultural convergence," a term I have coined to reflect the fact that the technological convergences being discussed in the information and entertainment industries actually build upon a complex series of cultural and social shifts that are redefining how we relate to media and popular culture. Anyone who wants to see what convergence looks like should visit my house and watch my adolescent son, sprawled on the living room rug, watching a baseball game on our big-screen television, listening to techno on his CD-player, and writing e-mail to his friends. At the moment, the technologies aren't talking to each other. They're on different sides of the room. But, it doesn't really matter very much in cultural terms: consumers are already using different media and their contents in relation to each other. Sociologists are starting to refer to the "N Generation," the "Net Generation," or "Gen.Com", children who have come of age in relation to interactive technologies and digital media and who operate under the rather bold assumption that they can be active participants shaping, creating, critiquing and circulating popular culture.

"Cultural convergence" describes new ways audiences are relating to media content, their increased skills at reading across different media and their desires for a more participatory culture. If technological convergence ever amounts to anything more than a marketing gimmick, then it is going to be because we have become invested in the transformations media content undergoes as it circulates from one context into another. If we are going to be culturally invested in interactive television, it is because our culture has come to value our interactions with television and to perceive television content as a resource in our social interactions.

The media industries actively promote the fantasy of a more participatory culture, describing consumption through images of "empowerment." The myth of the "digital revolution" has been a primary aspect of the marketing of personal computers, going back to the "1984" ad campaign that paved the way for the introduction of the Apple computer into the home. As Ted Friedman has argued, this campaign stressed the grassroots and emanicipatory potential of the home computer as a contrast to previous stereotypes of the computer as a centralized and all-powerful technology for the office. The Apple computer was represented as a liberatory force that shattered the control of Big Brother and called into question the conformist logic of its competition. Macintosh continues to call on its consumer to "think different," linking its consumer goods to an alternative cultural logic. Such advertising seems to promise us that through our use of home computers will give us a new and more powerful relationship to corporate culture. The spread of net access has been shaped by science fictional representations of cyberculture as a resistant subculture, the embrace of digital technology by such "alternative culture" figures as Timothy Leary and John Perry Barlow, and the political and cultural fantasies promoted by publications such as Mondo 2000 and Wired. One can, of course, dismiss such images as the deceptions of corporate marketing, except they have also shaped how the on-line community perceives itself, how it thinks about its relationship to the technology, and the standards to which it is increasingly holding e-commerce accountable. There is a resistant political culture on the web that is deeply suspicious of "big brother" and translates itself into campaigns against "spamming," for Internet privacy, against monopolistic concentrations of wealth and power, and for more democratic access to cultural resources. As writers like Jon Katz note, consumers of computers have a nasty habit of becoming "netizens."

However while digital media attracts most of the attention these days, cultural convergence is larger than the "digital revolution," other technologies, such as the photocopier and the videotape recorder, have also fostered a more fluid or flexible relationship with popular culture. All of these technologies promise consumers greater control over the flow of entertainment and information into their lives.

We might break down the concept of cultural convergence into a series of basic operations consumers perform on television programs and other pop culture artifacts:

*Archiving -- The creation of a personal or shared library of materials for future reference and use. Videotape enables people to build extensive collections of episodes of their favorite series. This collecting impulse has allowed them to feel a much greater sense of mastery over media contents and has formed the basis for other cultural interactions.

*Annotation -- the creation of written commentary for the purpose of aiding your own access to the archived material or to help share meanings and interpretations with others. Annotations can be as crude as handwritten notes in a loose-leaf binder or as sophisticated as a digital data base. Some fan video-makers have an extraordinary memory that allows them to recall relevant shots from across a hundred or more episodes of a favorite series so they can draw upon them as resources in their own cultural production. The social basis of fandom, however, sparks a desire to record and share these annotations so that more experienced fans can help neophiles get their bearings.

*Emotional Investment ---the creation of personal meanings and associations based on previously constructed content, "making it your own." What motivates the process of collecting and annotating media content? I would argue that the impulse is driven by passion, by the recognition that there is something "special" in a particular work, that it helps to facilitate fantasies or convey meanings that are deeply personal to the consumer. We are moved to elaborate on these materials through a desire to share that intense emotional experience with others, to help them to see more clearly what we have located within the source material. Ironically enough, this process requires us to transform the source materials, to amplify features we see as especially significant or salient, while cutting away elements that displease us. In some cases, this cutting away process can be literal. Many Star Wars fans have told me they can’t wait to own The Phantom Menace on video so they can edit out all the Jar Jar Binks segments. In other cases, it can involve fast-forwarding through uninteresting bits or simply deciding that they are not central to our conception of the narrative. Emotional Investment, thus, depends both on mastery over and selective amnesia about the story content.

*Appropriation and Transformation -- The process of borrowing and reworking cultural materials as resources for the creation of new works. The practice of appropriation has become more and more widespread as the tools for copying and manipulating media images have become more accessible. An appropriate aesthetic dominates the late 20^th century. Consider just a few examples of Star Wars appropriations currently in circulation:

*An editorial cartoon, Starr Wars, spoofs the classic film poster, with the sinister head of Ken Starr hovering over the background as a heroic Bill Clinton thrusts his cigar aloft and Monica Lewinsky in a gossamer gown (and exposed black thong undies) clings to his muscle bound body.

*An advertisement for the new Austin Powers film mimics the trailers for Star Wars and then laughs at spectators who confused the two. The film’s slogan was "If you see only one movie this summer, see Star Wars. If you see two, see Austin Powers."

*A fan website publishes hundreds of stories set in the Sith Academy where Darth Maul learns "life lessons" such as how to drive aggressively or how to work in a fast food restaurant, often testing what he learns of an eternally hapless Obi-Wan Kenobi.

*The short film, Lucas in Love, circulates through the board rooms of Hollywood, a spoof of the Academy-Award winning Shakespeare in Love, showing young George as a nerdy film school student who conceptualizes the Star Wars films after a bungled romance.

*A gag in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut proposes the assassination of Jar Jar Binks, feeding upon mounting public ridicule that the character is a racist stereotype.

*A television program, Thumb Wars, stages the original Star Wars story using only thumbs which have been painted to look like the various characters.

*An amateur web-movie, StarClerks depicts stormtroopers working in a convenience store and delivering lines from Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

Some of these examples originate in fan culture, some in commercial culture, but from the point o f view of content, it matters very little. All of these media producers assume an audience that knows Star Wars well and will recognize subtle plays on its conventions or spoofing references to its characters. Many of them seek to pull Star War themes and characters into the realm of our everyday lives or to read them as part of the mythology of a hyper-mediated culture.

*Re-circulation -- the transmission of appropriated materials to a broader audience. Here again, digital media enable new relations to media content. In the past, the lack of appropriate channels of distribution stifled grassroots cultural production. Amateur media producers had limited means of sharing what they created with a broader community. The web, on the other hand, allows grassroots cultural producers a theoretically infinite public.

*Participation -- the core concept that individuals have a right to become actively involved in the creation and re-circulation of cultural materials. The commercial logic of modern mass media presumes an audience composed on spectators and consumers. The cultural logic of fandom (and of cultural convergence more broadly defined) perceives a much more slippery line between consumption and production, reading and writing, imagining a world where the core narratives are available as resources for telling our own stories.

*Virtual Community -- the set of social relations which emerge through participation within a mediated environment. In the 1960s, Alvin Toffler had predicted that the increased mobility of American culture would result in a gradual decrease in the amount of emotional energy we invested in social relations, which would be perceived as transient and superficial. Some are now arguing that net-based communities respond to this process of estrangement and atomization, providing the basis for continued investments in social life without depending upon our long-term commitment to any geographically defined community. In short, the web is grassroots without being local. This ideal of virtual community actually increases the centrality of popular culture because mass media content provides a shared framework for communication within communities which have few if any shared experiences or acquaintances. Our investment in fictional characters, in effect, gives us a common set of "relatives" or "friends" that become reference points within conversations. So, not surprisingly, a high percentage of on-line discussion groups center around film, television, popular music, comic books, and so on.

Fans have been early adapters of new media technologies and thus, their subculture has played an important role in defining the language, practices, ethics, and identity of on-line communities. Yet, these consumption practices extend beyond fandom. As these new technologies become more pervasive, these practices become more widespread. These new technologies demand a more participatory relationship to media content and as a result, the media industries are being forced to create opportunities for participation. Yet, they are steadfastly resisting any concept of "shared authorship" because it threatens their perceived intellectual property rights. For the media industries, technological convergence is all about expanding their control over cultural materials, not granting more control to consumers, but they will only be able to exploit the new market possibilities of convergence by building strong "brand loyalties" and motivating consumers to explore these expanding fictional universes.

TEXTUAL POACHERS REVISITED

A decade ago, when I published my first work on fans as "textual poachers," I was describing a subculture that was alien to a good percentage of the audience I was addressing. I wrote:

Non-fan readers had little basis for understanding this account of an active subculture which produces new artworks through appropriations from pre-existing media content. Fan culture had been pushed so far underground that it was only visible in distorted forms, through media stereotypes of crazed fans who needed to "get a life." Few enjoyed direct access to its rich, varied, and politically challenging modes of subculture production. Even would-be fans had trouble finding their way into the fold. Students who were studying the book had difficulty accessing fan materials and so often could not use it as the basis for their own projects.

Today, thanks to the Internet, fan sites are much more visible. One website, for example, provides regularly up-dated links to fan and fan fiction websites for more than 153 films, books and television shows, ranging from Airwolf to Zorro. The fandoms featured on this site involved not only science fiction or action adventure series but angsty teen-oriented melodramas such as My So-Called Life or Dawson’s Creek, sitcoms like Ellen and The Nanny, and even the works of canonical literary figures like Jane Austin and Alexander Dumas. Fan discussion lists are attracting many new fans into the community who would never have had access to fan fiction or other subcultural practices as long as fandom was predominantly an underground activity. In some cases, these discussion lists bring together widely divergent interpretive communities who are interested in the same series but can’t agree on which characters are most interesting, what episodes most important, or what themes lie at the core of the program universe. These groups could remain unknown to each other as long as they were geographically dispersed, but cyberspace is forcing them to interact with each other, sometimes with flamboyant results. Fan traditions are discussed on the front page of the New York Times. Aspects of fan practice are influencing commercial media in a much more direct fashion and as we will see, popular culture is becoming more responsive to fan’s aesthetic and thematic preferences.

In the process, however, fandom is posing some core questions about intellectual property. The fan authors are losing some of the security from legal prosecution they maintained as long as their works were distributed as the American equivalent of smazdat, sold under the counter at cons or through networks of interpersonal connections. Anything that Netscape or the New York Times could find can also be found by lawyers for Lucasfilm and Viacom. So, now,

"cease and desist" letters from corporate attorneys are flying right and left, signaling to anyone who cares to notice the risks in appropriating and repurposing cultural materials.

In Australia, Viacom has been experimenting with a new strong arm approach to fan culture. A representative of the corporation called together leaders of fan clubs from across the country and laid down new guidelines for their activities. These guidelines prohibited the showing of series episodes at club meetings unless those episodes had previously been made commercially available in that market. (This policy has serious consequences for Australian fans because they often get series episodes a year or two after the air in the United States and the underground circulation and exhibition of video tapes had enabled them to participate actively on on-line discussion lists about the series.) Similarly, these guidelines cracked down on the publication and distribution of fanzines, prohibited the use of Star Trek trademarked names in the publicity for the clubs and their conventions, and otherwise sought to push fan culture much further underground. Their ultimate goal was to destroy the informal infrastructure of fandom and to push fans towards participation in a corporately-controlled designed primarily for the marketing of spin-off products, not the fostering of a more participatory culture or an alternative social community. As the news of these actions spread through net discussion groups and fan mailing lists, they had a "chilling effect" on fan activities world-wide. Given the declining commercial viability of the Star Trek franchise, this policy amounts to corporate suicide. Star Trek fandom had been encouraged by producer Gene Roddenberry early in the series’ existence and was central in keeping the program in the air, later getting it into syndication, and later still demonstrating the base of support for the film series and subsequent television spin-off series. Having been drawn towards a more public stance by virtue of the extraordinary community building resources of the net, fans now were left exposed to such legal bullying . There is a real danger that the underground infrastructure that supported their activities through the years will be completely dismantled. The Usenet reaction against Star Wars fan fiction follows the same logic -- a push towards the centralization of fandom under corporate controlled organizations and a backlash against the participatory culture described in Textual Poachers.

For those who have not read Textual Poachers, let me offer a fairly schematic and simplified summary of its account of cultural production. Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folk tales, legends, myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property which assumes that cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors. In practice, of course, any act of cultural creation builds upon what has come before, borrowing genre conventions and cultural archetypes, if nothing else. The ability of corporations to control their "intellectual property" has had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves primarily as consumers of -- rather than participants within -- their culture. The mass production of culture has largely displaced the old folk culture, but we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized versions (or at best, corporately controlled efforts to rewrite and ‘update’ the myths of our popular heroes.) Our emotional and social investments in culture have not shifted, but new structures of ownership diminish our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that culture. Fans respond to this situation of an increasingly privatized culture by applying the traditional practices of a folk culture to mass culture, treating film or television as if it offered them raw materials for telling their own stories and resources for forging their own communities. Just as the American folk songs of the nineteenth century were often related to issues of work, the American folk culture of the twentieth century speaks to issues of leisure and consumption. Fan culture, thus, represents a participatory culture through which fans explore and question the ideologies of mass culture, speaking from a position sometimes inside and sometimes outside the cultural logic of commercial entertainment. The key difference between fan culture and traditional folk culture doesn't have to do with fan actions but with corporate reactions. Robin Hood, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Coyote, and Br'er Rabbit belonged to the folk. Kirk and Spock, Scully and Mulder, Luke and Lea, or Xena and Gabrielle belong to corporations.

Fan fiction repairs some of the damage caused by the privatization of culture, allowing these potentially rich cultural archetypes to speak to and for a much broader range of social and political visions than can be accommodated through what David Thorburn calls the "consensus narrative" of network television. According to Thorburn’s account, television is a central medium within our culture that negotiates between conflicting values and ideological visions in its attempts to court a "mainstream" and broad-based audience, avoiding ideas that are too controversial or innovative to gain wide acceptance. Television, as a consequence, does not tell all possible stories or address all possible audiences, even in an age of niche marketing. Fan fiction helps to broaden the potential interest in a series by pulling its content towards fantasies that are unlikely to gain widespread distribution, tailoring it to cultural niches under-represented within and under-served by the aired material. In theory, such efforts could increase the commercial value of media products by opening them to new audiences.

The net -- which emerged as a platform for collaboration within the scientific and engineering communities -- provides the ideal basis for the kinds of multi-authored and collaborative fantasies that are the core of fan cultural production. Members of a net community build upon each others' ideas and contributions, often literally incorporating other people's words into their new text. Fans respond to the mass produced texts of film and television in this same collaborative fashion. Consider, for example, this statement made by a fan:

Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths. What is most striking about the quote above is that the right to participate actively in the culture is assumed to be "the freedom we have allowed ourselves," not a privilege granted by a benevolent company.

The web is altering the balance of power between media producers and media consumers, enabling grassroots cultural production to reach a broader readership. Often, amateur websites look as professional as -- and are often more detailed and more accurate than -- the commercially-produced sites. In such a world, the category of the audience, as a mass of passive consumers for pre-produced materials, may give way to the category of cultural participants, which would include both professionals and amateurs. Some companies, such as the on-line bookstore, Amazon.com, recognize the benefits of incorporating consumers as potentially valuable collaborators; Amazon.com’s associates program allows individuals to link their websites to the Amazon site and to receive financial returns for anyone who follows those links and makes a purchase. Amazon also encourages readers to post their own evaluations of books -- positive or negative -- to the official website, thus creating a sense of consumer ownership over the company and empowering the book-buying public to respond to the products being offered them. However, Hollywood has tended towards a more distrustful response to consumer participation, uncertain about the new digital economy, and thus eager to regulate as fully as possible the flow of its stories and images.

Fandom represents one of the important strands of a larger cultural movement activists are calling "DIY" or "Do It Yourself" culture. Theorists, such as R.U. Sirius, claim the "digital revolution" is fostering grassroots cultural production:

Ultimately, anybody will be able to have their own multimedia broadcasting operation on the Web. Anytime, any day, we’ll be able to watch John and Midge down the street eating dinner or Lisa and Frank and Joe in the house on the corner having sex.....A substantial minority of people are moving from self-identifying as consumers of media to producers of media. The Web is their playpen.

Understood in this light, media fandom fits within a larger history of attempts to establish a more participatory media culture. The development of toy printing presses in the 19^th century encouraged amateur publishing, especially among teens and young adults. There is some anecdotal evidence that primitive pamphlets (the historical ancestors of today’s zines) were smuggled across the enemy lines during the Civil War to continue friendships and conversations that had originated through these amateur press associations. The amateur radio movement of the 1910s and 1920s envisioned a society where there were as many radio transmitters as there were receivers and fought a lengthy legal battle to try to survive in the wake of commercial broadcasting. The "people’s radio" movement in the 1960s sought to broaden who had access to broadcasting by offering air-time to groups normally excluded from the commercial mainstream, including programming by and for women, racial minorities, prisoners, and gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. A similar movement explored the community building potential of local access cable as the basis for creating an alternative news and information network; this system was used most effectively to rally opposition to the Gulf War at a time when protests had little visibility on the mainstream news media. The introduction of cheap photocopying and desk-top publishing sparked the so-called "zine revolution."

Producers of digital cinema, such as Kevin Rubio, are also part of this larger DIY movement. Marc Davis has coined the term, "Garage cinema," to describe a culture where many more groups will be able to produce and circulate their own media in the same spirit that "garage music" enabled the punk rock and grunge movements. As Davis writes:

Just as desktop publishing gave consumers the power of the printing press on their desks (but it took the Internet to make everyone a publisher since without it the distribution channel was lacking) and digital audio samplers gave birth to a whole new genre and population of music makers, computational video technology will enable these and new communities to make video a part of their daily communications...It is what scratch, slash, rap, home video, and ‘a TV, two VCRs, and a cable’ will become... America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Rodney King videotape, and video Karoake bars. These are just foretastes of the much more fundamental cultural and technological shift the growth of Garage Cinema will bring about."

Davis’s reference here to America’s Funniest Home Videos (which airs home videos primarily in a context of mockery and ridicule) suggests the limitations of a model of participatory culture founded on the idea of empowering tools. Dominant media institutions are certainly able to absorb certain forms of audience participation more fully than other kinds. Technological shifts are paving the way for a more participatory media culture, but our ability to participate at the heart of our culture -- rather than on its fringes -- depends upon economic, political, and legal factors more than purely technological ones. As long as the conversation remains primarily on the level of technological innovation, a certain fatalism surrounds our discussion of the "digital revolution." Most discussions of technological change offer us an either-or choice between a technophilic or a luddite response, suggesting that the nature and direction of the changes are beyond our control, an "inevitable" byproduct of properties of the technology. Instead, we need the room to debate the directions our culture is taking and what tools we need to achieve democratically defined goals. Will these new media technologies result in "fundamental cultural...shifts" or simply new strategies of marketing and commodification? If our focus remains on the hardware, it will be easy for these impulses for change to be turned into products that can be sold to us.

POACHERS AND CULTURE JAMMERS

Surely, one of the first questions we want to ask is what it means to participate in our culture. One can identify two dominant responses to this question -- the culture jammers position and the poachers position. The culture jammers position, on the surface, seems the most radical. It builds upon the long-standing assumptions within critical theory that the dominant media operate as institutions of control that dupe consumers into buying into a corrupt consumer economy and blind them to meaningful political alternatives. Culture jamming simply seems like a more playful flavor of the Frankfort School critique. Culture jammers define themselves as cultural outsiders who seek "liberation" from the intrusion of mass media into their lives. The culture jammers embrace a politics of disruption and destabilization, defacing billboards, developing "anti-commercials", spoofing ads, all with the goal of encouraging us to opt out of media consumption. Their politics and tactics are so reactive (and ultimately puritanical) that they leave us little vision of what an alternative popular culture would look like.

The poachers position, on the other hand, starts with a core respect for consumer’s attachments to popular culture; its model is dialogic rather than disruptive; it assumes a collective right to participate within our culture and to meaningfully engage with the core myths of the modern era. Poachers see their cultural efforts as collaborations with rather than acts of resistance against the culture industry. Poachers, in short, start from the assumption that they have a right to be cultural insiders and thus resist attempts, whether by media producers or by cultural critics, to marginalize them. In short, culture jammers want to "jam" the dominant channels of communication, while poachers want to appropriate their contents for their own ends.

We can see the contrast between these two positions by looking at two 1998 films which have appropriated themes from grassroots media politics -- The Truman Show and Pleasantville. We can chart the differences between the two films as follows:

PLEASANTVILLE THE TRUMAN SHOW

Textual Poaching Culture Jamming

Popular Culture Mass Culture

Investment Alienation

Participation Victimization

Mastery Voyeurism

Transformation Resistance

Growth "Dumbing Down"

The Truman Show adopts the culture jammer’s mass culture critique. Television viewers are depicted primarily as passive voyeurs, content to observe the unfolding of Truman’s life rather than to take any meaningful efforts to change their own. The media producer is depicted as an all-powerful God-like entity orbiting the earth in a satellite, a master of emotional manipulation who can launch a flood of tears by simply pumping up the soundtrack and who can control public opinion as skillfully and as fully as he shapes the reality the film’s naive protagonist inhabits. The only rational response to such a world is to try to disrupt it, to try to smuggle subversive signs and messages onto the set, to try to organize guerrilla movements to "free Truman" from his mediated cell and to liberate the audience from the power of these deceptive images. The film’s conclusion fuels a fantasy of escaping from mediated reality into a more "authentic" life. No where does the film suggest that a newly conscious Truman might shape the contents of the media to his own ends or use his celebrity status to express an alternative political perspective. The film is ultimately nihilistic, because its depiction of the mass audience as media dupes leaves little or no prospect for collective democratic action. The Truman Show sees the media as a weapon of social control but not as a tool for cultural transformation.

Pleasantville received far less attention at the time of its release, but actually offers a more complex account of media politics, one more consistent with the poachers position. Its protagonist, Budd, has spent his entire life watching reruns of the same 1950s sitcom on cable television and has developed an extraordinary mastery of program related trivia. A mysterious television repairman (played by rerun icon Don Knotts) quizzes him on his knowledge, before scheming to transmit Bud and his sister directly into the program universe. Bud’s knowledge of the previous episodes allows him to immediately assimilate himself into this black and white world, but it is impossible to enter into the fiction without in subtle ways altering its very fabric. Seeing the characters as "emotionally real" means that they possess depths and contradictions that remained invisible to viewers of a fairly formulaic sitcom. As the story continues, these fans rewrite the series narratives, helping the characters to find new emotional depths within themselves (the local soda jerk’s artistic aspirations and the mother’s unsatisfied sexual longings), questioning the series’ core ideological premises (like whether being "pleasant" is really the highest social good), and altering character relationships to open up new narrative possibilities. In an imaginative use of digital effects, each character transformation is registered as a shift from black and white towards color. The unaltered characters become more and more extreme as they seek to protect their conventional lifestyles from the threat posed by the "coloreds." One of the film’s most powerful moments comes when the father returns from the office and announces, as sitcom conventions dictate, "Hi, Honey. I’m home." His wife has deserted him and he wanders pathetically around the house repeating the line over and over, uncertain why it does not generate the anticipated response. As more and more characters break free from their prescripted behaviors, program conventions are encoded through rules and regulations passed at town meetings and are enforced through the power of police authorities. But, nothing can prevent the gradual process of change once fans and consumers gain the ability to intervene in the flow of the fictional narrative.

The two films can be read as offering alternative reactions to cultural convergence: will we be exploited by or empowered by the new media technologies being introduced into our lives? Will we seek to escape the grip of commercial exploitation (the culture jammers position) or will we choose to more actively participate within mass media and by doing so, transform its character (the poachers position)?

THE ECONOMICS OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

If the cultural logic of fandom no longer feels outside the mainstream, perhaps it is because of a series of economic and technological shifts that have made the idea of interactive media and participatory culture more central to the marketing strategies of media industries and to the everyday lives of cultural consumers. As has been widely documented, a period of deregulation of the media industries has resulted in a dramatic consolidation of economic and cultural power into the hands of a small number of multinational media conglomerates. These new horizontally-integrated corporations (such as Viacom or Warner Brothers Communications Inc.) make production decisions on the basis of "synergies." That is, they seek content that can move fluidly across various media. Initially, this practice meant the ability to construct ancillary markets for a successful film or television program. Increasingly, however, it becomes difficult to determine which markets are ancillary and which are core to the success of a media narrative. Marsha Kinder has proposed the term, "entertainment supersystem," to refer to the series of intertextual references and promotions spawned by any successful product. The industry increasingly refers to Star Trek or Star Wars as "franchises," using a term that makes clear the commercial stakes in these transactions. This new "franchise" system actively encourages viewer to pursue their interests in media content across various transmission channels, to be alert to the potential for new experiences offered by film, television, comic books, computer games, websites, paperback novels, and other related materials. Increasingly, success in one media leads to success in a number of different media. The concept of technological convergence follows directly from this economic logic. Technological convergence is attractive to the media industries because it will open multiple entry points into the consumption process and at the same time, enable consumers to more quickly locate new manifestations of a popular narrative. One may be able to move swiftly from watching a television drama to ordering the soundtrack, purchasing videos, or buying products that have been effectively "placed" within the narrative universe. One technology currently being discussed would enable consumers to identify the various articles of clothing worn by characters worn in an episode from their favorite soap opera and order them on-line.

However, without discounting the importance of these economic and institutional factors in motivating the movement towards media convergence, one needs to also stress, as cultural scholars have for several decades now, that buying is one thing and consuming is something quite different. That is to say, the purchase of a particular product, while economically advantageous to the media industry, does not insure the purchase of the ideological values or cultural mythology the industry seeks to sell along with that product. To say that fans are first and foremost consumers is not the same thing as to argue that they are simply an extension of the marketing apparatus.

We may see this distinction clearly if we think about action figures. From an economic perspective, action figures embody the market logic that seeks to commodify media content and sell in to consumers in a variety of different forms. In "The Shortcake Strategy," Tom Englehardt depicts action figures and program-related toys as a corruption of the traditional relations between storytellers and their child audiences, as media producers sacrifice the integrity of their narratives in order to work in references to the latest media tie-in products. From a cultural perspective, however, the action figures allow children to play with characters drawn from media narratives and to use them to tell a much broader array of stories. In doing so, children are certainly not bound to simply reproduce the original content (as any parent can tell you). Erica Rand’s description of children’s "queer" play with Barbie only gives a taste of the kinds of media manipulations that occur in children’s program-related play. Through this process that starts at infancy, children develop a habit of participation and appropriation that will significantly fuel their adult relations to media content. The circulation of cultural content across multiple media thus expands the potential points for audience intervention.

Not surprisingly, the generation that has grown up with the ubiquitous presence of action figures has developed a whole school of digital cinema that centers around the animation of action figures as fictional characters. For example, Evan Richard Mather, a twenty-something landscape architect, has built an on-line following for his short digital films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars or Kung-Fu Kenobi’s Big Adventure, which animate Kenner Star Wars action figures to both enact scenes from the original films and develop original narratives which draw heavily on quotations from other media sources. Kung Fu Kenobi’s Big Adventure, for example, exactly mimics the visual style and content of certain sequence from Pulp Fiction, borrows its music from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, spoofs the clichés of kung fu movies, and manages to throw in some pointed references to Citizen Kane and other classic movies. Mather uses Legos to construct sets and Photoshop to manipulate his materials to create more compelling visual effects. Mather’s films, though carefully scripted and storyboarded, have the free-wheeling spontaneity of the child’s play that no doubt inspired them.

This same nostalgia for childhood play has inspired several cult television series, such as MTV’s Celebrity Death Match which also use action figures or their equivalents as raw materials. Nickelodeon’s Action League Now, for example, has a regular cast of characters consisting of mismatched dolls and mutilated action figures. In some cases, their faces have been melted or mangled through inappropriate play. One protagonist has no clothes. They come in various size scales, suggesting the collision of different narrative universes that characterizes children’s action figure play. Recurring gags involve the smashing of brittle characters or dogs gnawing on and mutilating the protagonists, situations all too common in domestic play. Such works suggest that a contemporary generation of professional and amateur filmmakers learned their core storytelling skills through their manipulation of media spin-off products.

The point of this argument is not to claim that children’s play with action figures is somehow ideologically subversive. It isn’t. Or at least it isn’t necessarily subversive. It can, in fact, be quite reactionary at times. Children use play to explore the materials of their culture, sometimes questioning and sometimes reinforcing adult norms and values. Nor is my claim that the ills of consumer capitalism vanish if we can demonstrate that media tie-in products have unintended cultural consequences. All I am suggesting is that such toys are more than commodities and that they are having some impact on the ways that our children think about and interact with media content, that they are paving the way for a more participatory mode of media consumption. They are sparking certain forms of grassroots creativity and cultural production, which are in turn influencing the aesthetics of contemporary popular culture. The goal of the culture industry is not to deny such grassroots creativity but to reward it by manufacturing cultural products that build upon fan competencies and at the same time, to police it and to redirect towards official organizations or structured forms of interactions that do not directly threaten their perceived intellectual property interests. Over the next two sections, I will identify some of the technologies that are giving rise to the new appropriative aesthetic and then will consider how this aesthetic is influencing mainstream cultural production. In my conclusion, I will return to the larger implications of these practices and to the question of whether such technologies are paving the way for a more participatory style of popular culture.

CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES AND MEDIA CONSUMPTION

If, earlier, I was critical of discussions of the "digital revolution" that seem to assume that retooling the hardware will insure "profound cultural...shifts", it should also be clear that the explosion of new media technologies does play a role in reshaping our understanding of what it means to consume media content. Changing the tools doesn’t insure that change will occur but it does make change possible. New technologies enable new forms of appropriation and transformation, new forms of cultural production and distribution, and new opportunities for grassroots creativity. Consider some of the other technologies that are contributing to the current phase of cultural convergence:

Video and Computer Games remain the form of interactive fiction that has had the broadest impact on popular culture, despite all the critical attention paid to hypertext. In recent years, the game industry has made more money than the Hollywood film industry and has reached into the lives of 90 percent of American boys and 30 percent of American girls. The game industry’s frequent reliance upon content derived from other media has encouraged us to think of those fictional narratives as environments we can explore and interact with. The interactivity offered by such games remains crude and it is difficult, if not impossible, to use game technologies to construct stories that test the ideological limits of the films and television series that inspired them. Often, because their constructions of these fictional narratives are so impoverished, they amount to a reduction of the possibilities for meaningful interaction offered by the primary works upon which they are based. However, playing such games does develop a habit of mind that links consumption with participation.

The Video-Cassette Recorder (VCR) has changed our relationship of the flow of images into our homes giving us access to a much broader array of media narratives than could be on offer by even the most diversified cable system. The VCR also allows us to freeze or fast forward through the images, thus empowering us to scrutinize and mobilize them in ways never intended by their original producers. At one extreme, this potential gave rise to fan video-makers who construct new narratives from fragments that have been appropriated from commercial media texts and recontextualized to suggest alternative meanings and associations. At the other extreme, television producers have been able to take for granted our potential access to earlier episodes and depend on the infrastructure of videotape libraries and website annotations to facilitate more complex story arcs and more elaborate appeals to program history. Programs like The X Files or Babylon 5 count on their cult audiences’ ability to revisit relevant moments in early episodes as a basis for fully understanding and appreciating subsequent plot developments.

The CD-Player has sparked new interest in record collecting and in turn, led to new configurations of popular music. For example, critics have ascribed the neo-swing revival to the increased availability of once obscure "roots" music recordings on CD. As record companies moved to exploit their backlog of musical properties, they placed a much wider array of popular music in circulation and thus sparked new audiences who experienced older musical forms as a novelty. Musicians and music fans were able to reconnect with the pre-Rock era Swing tradition and to try to generate new styles of musical performance that reflect a post-punk consciousness. As this movement emerged in San Francisco and elsewhere, swing enthusiasts raided vintage clothing stores to buy wing-tip shoes, hand painted ties, and zoot suits so they could dress appropriately for the emerging subcultural scene. In doing so, they were often mimicking and exaggerating styles of speech, dress, and dance which they had first encountered watching 1940s era movies on video or reading pulp hard-boiled detective novels. Groups like Squirrel Nut Zippers, Royal Crown Revue, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are pushing once "square" forms of music onto MTV and onto the top 40 charts. The cultural influence of this movement has been spread both by its representation in Hollywood films, such as Swingers, and its appropriation as the background for a growing number of advertising campaigns. A subcultural movement which has appropriated its identity from the discard bin is now being re-appropriated back into the mainstream as the culture industry becomes ever more responsive to niche tastes.

Digital sampling plays a central role in the aesthetic of many contemporary forms of popular music including techno and hip hop. Sampling foregrounds the ways that the appropriation and recontextualization of pre-existing content can become a means of personal and subcultural expression. People who are trained to listen to the subtle reworking of sounds in a techno song will come to recognize the value of appropriation in other cultural spheres. The introduction of low-end technology has put the creative use of digital sampling into the hands of the general public. The line between commercial and subcultural appropriation seems particularly murky as far as popular music is concerned. As I was writing one of the earliest drafts of this essay, my son barged into the study and played for me a techno work that his friend from the local high school had mixed from various bits of dialogue from Star Trek: The Next Generation and then posted on the web. Are we to understand this mix as another fan cultural production or as part of the semi-commercial realm of techno music? Does it matter whether the person making unauthorized use of these cultural materials is a high school student posting them on the web or a commercial artist, like Puff Daddy, who has a major record contract? The technological toys available to these high school students enable them to reach a level of polish easily mistakable for the professional product, paving the way for big budget splash on a garage band budget.

Portable technologies (cell phones, Walkman, laptops) facilitate the integration of media into all aspects of our daily lives and create unusual juxtapositions of cultural materials that alter our perceptions of our environment. John Woo makes expressive use of these new technologies in Face/Off: a mobster places a pair of head-phones over the ears of a young boy to shelter him from the gunfire and hysteria that will soon engulf them; the boy curls up on the floor and listens to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," which Woo uses in his soundtrack to shift the tone of the subsequent shoot-out sequence. The suggestion is that our ability to construct our own soundtracks may reshape our reactions to the world around us. Avant-garde artists are already experimenting with ways that palm pilots or tourist headphones can be used to construct alternative forms of narrative experiences that exploit these ironic or defamiliarizing juxtapositions.

The Home Theater (Big screen Television, Surround-Sound speakers) introduces the more intense visual and sonic style of contemporary cinema into domestic space. One can imagine several consequences of the push to upgrade the quality of our home entertainment systems to reflect improvements in projection and sound technologies: on the one hand, the home becomes a more fantastical space (as our living room is filled with the sounds and images of car chases or light saber battles) but at the same time, these larger-than-life fantasies are domesticated. We see them as more familiar, part of our everyday environment, and subject to our control.

The Photocopier originated as a tool of the workplace but has increasingly become a major resource for grassroots cultural production. Amateur publishing has always moved to exploit available technologies, whether the toy printing presses of the 19^th century or the mimeo machines of the 20^th century, but the photocopier has made the reproduction of amateur publications fast, cheap, and reliable. Amateur publications of all kinds -- from political tracts to fan fiction zines, from the punk rock scene to the sexual underground -- have played a decisive role in creating a new counter public sphere. Much more work needs to be done to explore how the zine revolution paved the way for public interest in the creation of their own webpages and how so-called webzines, some of which have achieved commercial success, modeled themselves after earlier photocopied publications.

public debate that surrounded the Rodney King video represents only the most well-publicized example of how the camcorder is being used as a tool of media activism. The camcorder is also becoming a tool for personal expression. For the protagonist of television’s Dawson’s Creek, the camcorder represents the equivalent of a personal diary or notebook for recording and reworking his experiences and reflecting up his most intimate relationships. Dawson Leary stands in for a whole generation of high school students who have embraced the "video style."

visual equivalent of musical sampling, allowing the dramatic recontextualization of media content. Basic icons of our culture can be reworked or recombined at will, so that Rambo and Groucho Marx join FDR and Churchill at Yalta, Marilyn Monroe drapes her arms around Abraham Lincoln, Tomb Raider’s Laura Croft is striped naked for web erotica, and Bill Gates is depicted as one of Star Trek’s Borg busy "assimilating" everything in the universe. Such tools are encouraging a revitalization of the long-standing aesthetic tradition of collage.

This list, of course, scarcely scratches the surface of contemporary media that are altering our relations to the materials and mythologies of popular culture. Individually and collectively, these technologies are teaching us new ways of interacting with media content and making the process of appropriation, transformation, and transmission of cultural material more broadly accessible. Fans have been and will continue to be early adapters of these technologies. Their subcultural practices make them hungry for ways to engage more deeply with the characters and situations of popular films and television series; their grassroots community gives them a public that is eager to receive and evaluate their cultural productions. But, the net and the web are enabling people to form their own communities for cultural production and circulation, and as these various technologies become less and less expensive, they will allow more and more people to participate in such cultural exchanges.

THE APPROPRIATIVE AESTHETIC IN POPULAR CULTURE

Another reason that the cultural logic of fandom seems less strange to people today is that core aspects of fan aesthetics and politics have been appropriated by the culture industries

themselves. The principles of cultural convergence are perhaps most visible at present in the work of popular artists like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Mike Judge, Matt Groening, and Kevin Williamson, whose films and television series deal with the process of forming

one's own mythology using images borrowed from the mass media One of the protagonists of Pulp Fiction, for example, decides at the end that he wants to "wander the earth" like Kane in television’s Kung Fu. Reservoir Dogs opens with a five minute discussion of the erotic connotations of Madonna’s "Like A Virgin," defining the characters first and foremost through their relationships to popular culture. Characters in Chasing Amy engage in animated debates and speculations about the sexuality of the various teens in the Archie comics, while Dazed and Confused opens with the scene of high school students trying to recall as many different episodes of Gilligan’s Island as they can, before one of the women offers a devastating critique of how the series builds upon the iconography of male pornography.

Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream depicts a world where digital phones, camcorders and VCRs are second nature and where not being able to answer a trivia question can cost you your life. Scream depends upon the competencies of viewers who have seen countless previous slasher films before, operating like the cinematic equivalent of Babe Ruth pointing to where his next home run is going to fly. Williamson reveals the cliché, comments on it, discusses it, and then puts it to use and proves that it can still be damned effective even when we know it is coming. The protagonist of Williamson’s television series, Dawson’s Creek, has decorated his room with posters for Steven Spielberg films, routinely discusses and critiques classic and contemporary films with the other characters on the series, and draws inspiration from them for the creation of his own videos. Often, the episodes bear the titles of "brat pack" films and borrow narrative situations from the works of such 1980s "auteurs" as John Hughes.

These works depend upon complex references and quotations from previous work. Consider a typical episode of The Simpsons. When Marge’s frustrations over being trapped in her housewife role causes her to start shedding big blue hairballs, she hires a nanny to give her some relief. The episode evolves into a scene by scene parody of Mary Poppins, though the magical umbrella-totting nanny, Sherry Bobbins, hastily denies any resemblance to the Disney character: "I am an original creation like Ricky Rouse and Monald Muck." The episode features a succession of spoofs of songs and situations from the original film rendered appropriate to the dysfunctional realm of the series. For example, Bobbins gives Bart and Lisa advice on how to clean their room, "If there’s a task that must be done, don’t turn your tail and run. Don’t pout. Don’t sob. Just do a half-assed job." Yet, the appropriations of popular culture in this episode hardly stop there: Gerald Ford makes a special guest appearance on Krusty’s Kartoon Klassics (a series awkward known as "KKK"); a young Charles Bronson, in a black and white segment, appears on the Andy Griffith Show and to the horror of Barney Fife, proceeds to shoot Otis and "Fix" Emmit; Quentin Tarantino directs a special Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, "Reservoir Cats," which does a brutal, dead-on spoof of the torture sequence from Reservoir Dogs and ends with the cartoon mouse decapitating an overly-talkative Tarantino. The comedy of The Simpsons consistently assumes our competency as experienced consumers of popular culture to read one media text against another.

Tarantino’s whole aesthetic seems to have emerged from his formative experiences working at a video store. In such an environment, older and newer films are more or less equally accessible; some movie is always playing on the monitor and providing a background for everyday interactions. The environment encourages a somewhat scrambled but aesthetically productive relationship to film history. Tarantino and his other contemporaries make films that attract the interests of other video store habitués much as earlier generations of filmmakers -- the French New Wave or the American Movie Brats -- made movies for other cineastes. This video store aesthetic mixes and matches elements from different genres, different artistic movements, different periods with absolute abandon. The cineastes tended to focus their homages onto a single filmmaker or genre, as in the case of the various appropriations and transformations of Hitchcock by such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Brian DiPalma. Perhaps the ultimate example of this process of cinematic appropriation is Gus Van Sant’s much publicized attempt to remake Psycho, with shot by shot accuracy, using Hitchcock’s original shooting script and production schedule, but with a younger contemporary cast and filming in color rather than black and white. The video store filmmakers, on the other hand, draw on more eclectic sources, seeing quotation as both a means of characterization and as an underlying formal principle in their work. Tarantino’s tendency towards quotation runs riot in the famous Jack Flash restaurant sequence in Pulp Fiction, where all of the service personnel are impersonating iconic figures of the 1950s and the menu uses different comedy teams to designate different shake flavors. As the John Travolta character explains, "It’s like a wax museum with a pulse," a phrase which might describe Tarantino’s whole approach to film-making. Even his casting decisions, such as the use of Medium Cool’s Robert Forrester and blaxploitation star Pam Greers in Jackie Brown, constitute quotations and appropriations from earlier film classics. The video store filmmakers change everything they touch but at the same time, the fact that they have evoked an earlier text means that it is drawn back into more active cultural circulation, where it may attract new fan interests. These films and programs provide the basis for subcultural appropriations, becoming the models for a "cool" new "fan boy" style that lives both inside and in opposition to the culture industries. Jackie Brown, for example, sparked Blaxploitation film revivals all of the country so that slackers could study what they needed to know in order to make sense of Tarantino's latest work.

As corporations are learning to exploit more fully the properties associated with cultural convergence, they are starting to profit from audience interests in the potential for archiving, retrieving, transforming and rewriting materials of popular culture. The entertainment industry is shifting from exploiting the grassroots fan culture by putting Star Wars logos on everything to exploiting it by generating products that operate more fully within a fan aesthetic and more systematically reward the community's cultural competencies. D.C. Comics’s Elseworlds series, for example, reflects a long-standing fan interest in rewriting the history of fictional characters and placing them in alternative generic contexts. As the publisher explains, "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places -- some that have existed, or might have existed. And others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The resulting stories make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow." The concept of "alternative universes" has been basic to fan fiction for decades, but now we are seeing commercially generated fan fiction, sometimes blurring the boundaries between different fictional texts. For example, Superman’s Metropolis creates a provocative blend of American comic book mythology and German expressionism, as Superman becomes the heart that binds together the head and the hands in this subtle reworking of Fritz Lang’s silent classic. Leatherwing finds the Batman transformed into an 18^th century pirate sailing the Spanish main and doing battle with his archrivals, The Laughing Man (The Joker) and Captana Felina (The Cat Woman). In another story, Scar of the Bat, set in a film noir realm, The Batman joins forces with The Untouchable’s Elliot Ness, while Masques fuses the stories of the Batman and the Phantom of the Opera.In each case, the visual style, the narrational voice, the conceptions of the character are reworked to reflect these alternative generic traditions and in the process, readers develop a new conception of the original DC heroes. These comic books require a more sophisticated reader who does not read these stories literally, who understands that they represent a play with narrative possibilities and an alternative version of the familiar characters, and who knows enough about both superhero comics and those other aesthetic traditions to appreciate the creative tensions produced through their fusions.

CONSEQUENCES OF CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

From one perspective, cultural convergence results in a more complex and compelling popular culture. As a fan, I am finding myself more fascinated and better satisfied by the popular works available to me than ever before. I look upon texts ranging from the comic book Astro City to the science fiction novels of Neil Stephenson, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dark City not as examples of postmodern "in-difference," but as rich, multi-layered works that reward my own cultural competencies. Postmodernist theory has largely been a dead-end for thinking about such cultural forms, since it has often confused the collapse of a "master narrative" (or in many of these cases, of a definitive version) with the "implosion" of all possible meaning. Postmodernist critics also often confuse pop art’s high culture disdain towards its kitsch inspirations with the more affectionate attitudes towards cultural materials adopted by the "video store" filmmakers or the fan community. Pop artists, such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Haring, did draw on the surface gloss and sheen of popular culture for their inspiration, often with little or no understanding of the significance of the icons they had borrowed. Tarantino, Groening, Williamson, and the other popular artists discussed above adopt a very different stance. Their practices of quotation and appropriation are not simply plays with "surfaces" or "empty signifiers." If their artworks are meaningful or pleasurable, it is because the borrowed elements carry meanings and associations with them from their previous histories of use and because they acquire new layers of meanings by being introduced into new contexts. The Elseworlds comics series, for example, does not erase the differences between Superman and Metropolis, but rather reminds us of the meaningful gap -- and potentially defamiliarizing intersections -- between these two cultural realms. Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’s graphic novel, U.S., depicts Uncle Sam as a drunk, disorderly, and disoriented old man, who wanders the street in badly stained clothing, mouthing random slogans drawn from various periods of American history. He has flashbacks of traumatic moments when his youthful democratic ideals had given way to corruption and aggression; he has imaginary encounters with the mythic embodiments of other national traditions, conducting conversations with Britannia or the Russian bear. At points, the graphic novel seems to be composed of nothing but a collage of quoted lines and images, yet each of these lines and images are meaningful to anyone who knows their original contexts and collectively, the work makes a powerful statement about America’s current crisis of national identity, its fumbling attempts to redefine its mission in the post Cold War era. Such works do not require readers to "stop making sense." Rather, they depend upon the ability of readers to make new meanings of familiar materials.

From another perspective, the result is a more powerful cultural industry which co-opts fan politics and defuses potential threats to corporate control over intellectual property. We should be attentive to what gets assimilated and what gets discarded as corporations market to subcultural communities. Consider, for example, the ways that Mystery Science 2000 defuses many of the progressive elements Jeff Sconce identified in the more grassroots trash cinema movement. Trash cinema fans posed direct challenges to dominant cultural hierarchies, celebrating works that failed to meet the aesthetic norms of the well-built Hollywood films and embracing their forgotten auteurs, such as Ed Woods, as examples of how the studio system crushed individual creativity and inventiveness. At the same time, the trash cinema movement, adopting camp practices from the queer community, directed its ironic gaze upon sexual and gender stereotypes running through the films and thus used its fascination with bad film-making to express a fundamental dissatisfaction with dominant cultural values and institutions. Mystery Science 2000 turns this on its head, reinforcing cultural hierarchies by treating old films as beneath contempt (regardless of their status as genre classics or as artistic failures) and often using misogynistic and homophobic jokes to appeal to a frat boy mentality totally alien to the original camp roots of this movement. Here, one can say that the culture industry has absorbed the appropriative aesthetic and even the rhetoric of audience resistance only to defuse it of any real radical force.

This paradoxical understanding of cultural appropriation is on display in Pixar’s Toy Story, a film that builds upon our nostalgic familiarity with postwar children’s culture. The core story centers around a key cultural shift -- the moment of sputnik, when science fiction stories displaced westerns at the center of American popular culture -- one which would not be familiar to anyone under the age of 40. For children, the film often sparks their first real interest in cowboys toys, since the western is a genre that has not been readily available to children for some years. The film ascribes new personalities to such familiar icons as Mr. Potato Head or plastic toy soldiers. When Mattel refused to allow them to use Barbie in the film, they simply created a thinly veiled substitute and leaked the story to the press. We all knew Bo Peep was supposed to be Barbie, even if the resemblance was only superficial. So, Toy Story is constructed out of parts appropriated from childhood culture and playfully juxtaposes characters from different generic traditions to suggest the flexibility and fluidity of young imaginations. Yet, consider how the film represents children who play with the toys in ways that run counter to their intended purpose. The boy next door, who mixes and matches parts of toys to create original characters, is treated as a ghoulish monster, while the spaceman falls into an identity crisis when a young girl dresses him in women’s clothing and sits him down as a participant in her tea party. If the film seems to acknowledge the cultural creativity of children’s play, it wants to police which forms of appropriations are acceptable and which go too far against the grain of the original. Pixar gets to play with all the toys any way it wants, while consumer manipulations of these same materials are somehow threatening. One get the distinct impression that we aren’t playing by the same rules here!

The cultural industries are trying to spark commercial interests in interactive media, while regulating and restricting the forms of interactions people can have with their cultural materials. They want to tap into fandom as a powerful niche market, while denying fans the power to shape the popular culture being produced. As the Don Knotts character grumbles at the protagonist of Pleasantville, when the boy’s revision of the fictional universe threatens to unhinge the program’s entire mythology, "You think this is your own God Damn coloring book!"

Clearly, the producers aren’t prepared to turn over the crayons to the consumer. Contrary to R.U. Sirius’s claims, the web may not yet be our "playpen," not if the corporations won’t let us have access to the best toys. I think that's what's at stake when Hollywood seeks to incorporate Troops's Kevin Rubio into its own ranks, while using its lawyers to shut down grassroots fan activities that can not be so readily assimilated. Rubio, as an employee of Dreamworks or whichever corporation ultimately secures his talents, will be a professional poacher, who can generate new forms of commercial media that reflect the popular audience's more complex and participatory engagement with popular culture. But the Star Wars fans who wanted to post their stories on the Internet remain outside the clubhouse, unable to either circulate their own stories or to have their ideas incorporated into official Lucasfilm product.

In such a climate, even the best popular culture still leaves its fans unsatisfied and as before, what fuels fan cultural productivity is the potent mix of fascination and frustration. If the programs did not fascinate fans, they would not be motivated to draw upon them as raw materials for their own cultural productions. If these programs did not frustrate fans, their desires would be satisfied by the original producers and there would be no cause to take up their own pens to build upon the program universe. Thus, despite the growing explicitness of Xena's much touted lesbian subtext, the web is full of original fan fiction which pushes the erotic relations between Gabrielle and Xena much further than the producers will ever go.

The web contains enormous potentials for the creation of a more diverse and democratic popular culture -- one which allows much broader opportunities for grassroots participation. We can point to many examples of the power of net communities to work around the centralizing authority of traditional gatekeepers. This is what makes the digital revolution a cultural revolution. But, we should not allow the utopian promise of cyberspace to blind us to the real

struggles that must be fought if we are going to secure a place for all of us to participate in popular culture. We are going to be watching increasingly bloody fights about intellectual property rights in digital media over the coming decade and those fights are going to determine -- in part -- the cultural logic that will structure the 21st century. The question of whether Star Wars fans can or can not post erotic stories about Hans and Luke may seem, at first glance, a relatively trivial matter, but its repercussions could be enormous. Those of us -- as citizens and academics -- who want to believe that the net has a transformative potential in our culture, society, and politics, should be lending our voices to the fans who are on the front lines exploring how this media will be used in relations to the entrenched power of the culture industries.