“Remember a Day”-A Star Blazers Retrospective

Edited by Robert G. Weiner and Robert Moses Peaslee

When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko first penned a short story about a young man named Peter Parker who gets bit by a radioactive spider and becomes the hero known as Spider-Man, little did they know they would be creating the most popular super-hero in history (next to Batman).  Like most “happy accidents,” the creation of Spider-Man almost did not happen.  It was initially a throw away a story in a magazine that was getting cancelled anyway.

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had hit upon a character that was different from all the others and one that everyone could relate to. Peter Parker (Spider-Man’s alter ego) was a teenager who had money/girl/family problems that he continued to struggle with even though he had  “amazing” powers. He was in high school and had to learn some hard lessons of life. When Parker first got his powers, he used them to make money and get fame. But when he failed to stop a burglar who would eventually kill his Uncle Ben in a robbery attempt, he learned that “with great power, comes great responsibility.” Since Stan Lee wrote those words in 1962, they have become the most quoted comic book words in history and have served as a cautionary note pertinent far beyond the boundaries of the comic or film frame.

Since 1962, there have been no less than 10 different titles featuring Spider-Man, 5 different animated series, a live action series, animated movies, a live action series in Japan, and 3 very successful movies grossing a total of $2.4 billion and breaking box office records

The editors are seeking articles of around 4-6,000 words discussing the phenomena of Spider-Man or its off-shoots related to the comics, films, animated series, games, television series, history etc.

Some possible topics to be addressed include (but are not limited to):

• The real meaning of “with great power comes great responsibility” and Uncle Ben’s life and influence on Peter Parker
• Dr. Octopus almost marrying Aunt May
• May Day Parker, Spider-Girl and the alternate universe
• Spider-Girl as a fan driven title
• J. Jonah Jameson and his hatred of Spider-Man
• Spider-Woman the first female off shoot
• The various Spider-Girls
• How did Amazing Fantasy 15 change the world?
• The Death of Aunt May
• The Clone Saga
• The various Spidey costumes: Black, Red/Blue/Maroon
• Venom and Carnage: Why did these particular villains become the most popular of all Spidey villains?
• Spider-Man’s role in Civil War
• The Gwen Stacy affair
• Spider-Man’s uneasy relationship with the police
• The Green Goblin (Norman Osborne) and his love/hate relationship with Peter Parker
• The various Goblins: Green Goblin1&2/Hobgoblin/Demigoblin (What ties them together? Differences?)
• The artistic style of Steve Ditko
• The roots of Spider-Man (The old pulp hero The Spider)
• The writing of Gerry Conway
• The art of John Romita Sr. and John Romita Jr. on Spider-Man
• The New Fantastic Four-Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Hulk, and Wolverine
• The relationship between Madame Web and Spider-Man
• Spider-Man’s role in the New Avengers
• The work of J. Michael Straczynski on the title
• How did Todd McFarlane change the Spider-Man world both through his art and writing?
• The first Marvel/DC crossover-Spider-Man meets Superman
• Why was the live action Spider-Man television series a big flop?
• Spider-Man 2099-A different kind of Spider-Man
• Comparisons between Nicholas Hammond and Tobey McGuire as Peter Parker
• What kind of creative licenses did the movies take that differ from the sequential art stories? How were they similar?
• Zombie Spider-Man
• Mary Jane comics and novels: teen romance in the Spider-Man world
• Spider-Man as an ideal children’s hero
• Spider-Man fan films and fiction
• Spider-Man as an ethical gauge for human behavior
• One of the first Super-Hero record albums: Spiderman: Rock Reflections of a Superhero
• The Scarlet Spider-who is he? What is his role in the Spidey universe?
• The Ultimate Spider-Man: What are the similarities and differences between the Ultimate version of the writing of Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Spider-Man
• Spidey Super Stories: An experiment in reading for children
• Spider-Man overseas?  Why do the Europeans love Spider-Man as much as the Americans? What is his universal appeal?
• Mattie Franklin (Spider-Woman 3) and her relationship to J. Jonah Jameson as a surrogate father
• Peter Parker’s sister?
• The Red Skull and the killing of Peter-Parker’s parents
• Spider-related groups and societies: Spider Society; Webcorps
• Kraven the Hunter and his desire to be like the Spider
• J.M. DeMatties and the death of Kraven the Hunter
• The Vulture: A senior citizen as a villain
• The relationship between Captain America and Spider-Man
• Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends an animated series featuring Firestar and Ice-Man
• The Spider-Man family of heroes
• John Jameson and the Man-Wolf
• The Transformers: Spidey meets a Hasbro trademark
• The upcoming Spider-Man movie reboot
• Spider-Man as a barometer of the various historical periods in which he appears.
• The psychoanalytic aspects of Spider-Man, Peter, Mary Jane, etc.
• Spider-Man, Marvel, and the structure of the entertainment industry
• Spider-Man as ideology or counter-ideology
• Spider-Man, -Woman fandom and audience practice
• Spider-Man online
• Spider-Man as an urban (or particularly a New York) dweller

Please send 200 word abstracts by November 1st 2010 to:

Rob Weiner
Rob[dot]weiner[at]ttu[dot]edu

Final papers will be due December 1st 2010. Please note the submission of an essay does NOT necessarily mean publication in the volume.  The editors are striving to put together as tight a collection as possible with many diverse viewpoints covering all aspects of Spider-Man’s career.

Authors are also expected to follow the editor’s style guide and be willing to have their work edited.
Thank you

Robert Moses Peaslee
Department of Electronic Media and Communications Texas Tech University

Rob Weiner
Texas Tech University Library


***CFP received through the EASA Media Anthropology Network.***

It takes a team to have the work done...always!

So, here is finally the English translation of  the latest summary of my dissertation! This summary is the result of an attempt to make the heart of my Ph.D. project clearer and more accessible to all the people who are contributing, either directly or indirectly, to my research. This new synthesis was motivated by my realizing that my previous presentations were too abstract and technical for people who haven’t studied social sciences and more specifically media and communication from a socio-anthropological standpoint. I do find it normal that those whom I’m enrolling in my undertaking, whether they are helping me financially or taking part in my fieldwork, have a way to get a good idea of the work they are contributing to.  I believe it is even the minimum that I can do with respect to them. I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to keep this blog up to date, as I haven’t been very good in this so far, but I’ll do my best to at least report on the progress of my fieldwork.

Indeed, I’m in the second part of my dissertation, that is the practical research, involving collecting data and interviewing people.  I’m now therefore in the process of preparing interviews with people I have met within associations specialized in Japanese popular entertainment. Some of them have already told me that they would agree to talk to me over extensive interviews and I still need to ask some other people. I’m going for semi-directed interviews, so as to let some freedom to the interviewees to bring up topics that I might not have thought of, while still making sure that we address those that are of importance for my analysis.

Besides, I’m also preparing my last fieldwork in convention, which will take place at Japan Expo, the largest event of this kind in Europe. I’ll be going with a group of fans from one of the Geneva-based association (A-Yume) in order to collect in situ their impressions of this huge gathering and their experiences over these 4 days.  I’m also hoping to be able to talk with some of the representatives of a few DVD publishers, especially Kaze, who’ll be holding a stand at the convention. In this way, I would be able to kill two birds with one stone, and bring back some viewpoints from the publisher side.

Well, this means that I’m going to be extremely busy and won’t get bored a bit in these coming weeks. I’m still analyzing the comments collected over the Internet about anime DVDs and animes, both from French- and German-language websites. This is probably going to take me until mid-July. At the same time, I’m reading books concerning animation in general, animes in particular, the audiovisual entertainment industry and fandoms. I’m particularly going to dive into Marco Pelliterri’s book The Dazzle and the Dragon: Models, Strategies and Identities of Japanese Imagination – A European Perspective, of which I just received a copy this morning. I’ll definitely post a comment on this reading!

Front cover of Marco Pellitteri's latest book

It is with great pleasure that I advertise the recent release of the English translation of Marco Pellitteri‘s latest book: The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, strategies and identities of Japanese Imagination, edited by Tunué. Although I have only started reading the Italian original version (I have never really learned Italian, which means that I read it only very slowly), which was published two years ago, I have no hesitation giving this new book some publicity, because what I have read so far is very clear, insightful and well-documented.  In other words, the author knows what he is talking about! Marco Pellitteri is a good friend, whom I got to know 7 years ago, through the now defunct Yahoo! Anime Manga Research Group , and with whom I share an interest in understanding better, through an academic lens, the success of Japanese audiovisual entertainment in Europe.  When I accepted to meet in “real life” with him for the first time in Bologna (Italy), in 2004, in the context of a conference on “emotions in comics” (including manga), which he suggested to attend, I didn’t realize that I would encounter one of the best expert on the issue of the animes and mangas reception in Europe. Although his initial books and articles have focused on the phenomenon in Italy, rightfully not only because it is his homeland but also because it is the main European market for these products, he expanded his scope to include France and other European countries when he joined Professor Jean-Marie Bouissou, Senior Researcher at the Center for International Study and Research (CERI) in Paris, and founder of the Manga Network, of which Marco has become one of the most active members. This long course has resulted in the present 700-pages book on the history of the contact between Japanese audiovisual entertainment and European youths from the 1970′s until today.

The explicit aim of this book is to show how the reception of mangas, animes and video games by young consumers both impacted and was influenced by the sociopolitical discourses that were generated among the various actors of the public spheres in these countries by the massive marketing of this particular type of popular entertainment. The author identifies two phases for the establishment of these popular culture artifacts in the general audiovisual entertainment field in Europe. The first one running from the 1970′s to the mid-1990′s (the Dragon) and the second from the late 1990′s until now (the Dazzle), covering overall roughly 2-3 generations of audiences.

This book is prefaced by Yui Kiyomitsu, Professor of sociology at the University of Kobe, Japan, and specialist of Japanese modernization. It also includes an essay by Professor Jean-Marie Bouissou.

For more information, please consult the book’s page on its editor’s website, Tunue.

Manga grafiti, Paris, 2008

Manga-styled advertisement for magic card game, Paris, 2008

Manga grafiti, Bari, Sept. 2008

Manga grafiti found in Bari, south Italy, September 2008

Manga-styled graifit, Bari, South Italy, September 2008

A manga display in the window of a sport shop, Saas Fee, Switzerland

Travelling Languages
Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

10th Annual Conference of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) in Association with the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University.
3 – 5 December 2010, Leeds, United Kingdom
organised by Jane Wilkinson (University of Leeds) and Mike Robinson (Leeds Metropolitan University).

More information here: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/german/ialic_conference_2010.htm

***

Europe and the Media – new developments in social theory and research

ESA RN 18 Communications and Media Research Interim meeting in Athens
29-30 October 2010

Media studies in Europe have mushroomed in the last decades. The globalization of communications and the enlargement of the European Union have forced media researchers to constantly broaden their horizons and reassess their approaches. Our next Network meeting is especially concerned with these changes.

Abstracts are invited for papers to be given at the next meeting of the Network on October 29/30 2010 in Athens. Papers are particularly invited where they address the theme of the meeting, and as a network of the European Sociological Association we remind colleagues that formulation of research in relation to sociological theory and concepts is especially welcome, as is empirical work which addresses comparative topics and the major concerns of European sociology. This will include work which deals with questions about identity (national, ethnic, European) and how that relates to media consumption, the development of new media in Europe, the political economy and social networking, European newspapers in the age of the internet, Google vs.

European publishers, European public sphere after the financial turmoil and the communication crisis, etc. We do not take ‘Europe’ as itself an unproblematic concept. New thinking on all these topics will be very welcome.

It is likely that a publication will arise of the best papers at the meeting.

The meeting will also afford time for general work reflecting the diversity of research activity among our members. The first criteria for selection will be excellence of research and general interest to network members. We are particularly interested in papers that take a comparative view on communication practices in Europe. We also encourage critical and interdisciplinary approaches aiming to create a dialogue between a broad diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches.

Presentations will be no more than 20 minutes, though fuller papers will be required for circulation. Work in progress is welcome, and authors should not feel inhibited from presenting work which is still being developed or is incomplete.

Abstracts, which should be no more than 200 words and include full contact details for the author(s), should be sent to Prof. Ludes and Prof. Panagiotopoulou by May 31:

Prof. Peter Ludes
Mass Communication/Integrated Social Sciences Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany
Phone: +49-421-200 3476, Fax: +49-421-2003303
http://www.jacobs-university.de/directory/02762/
http://www.keyvisuals.org
email: p.ludes[at]jacobs-university[dot]de

Prof. Roy Panagiotopoulou
Department of Communication and Media Studies University of Athens
5 Stadiou Street
105 62 Athens, Greece
Tel. +30 210 3689415, +30 210 3601917
e-mail: rpanag[at]media[dot]uoa[dot]gr

Practical Information

1.Timetable:
a. Program decisions will be made by July 1st and authors notified accordingly in July.
b. Full completed papers should be submitted by Sept. 15, so that they may be circulated to meeting participants. Authors should follow the presentation and format conventions of the ESA journal European Societies (see http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1461-6696&linktype=44)

2.Travel and Local Arrangements
a. Participants will be required to pay a nominal registration fee of €30.
This will include refreshments and the final dinner. The fee will be paid on site and official receipts will be issued.
b. Members will need to make their own travel arrangements.
c. Details of accommodation will be supplied at a later date. The need for convenient and low cost accommodation will be given proper consideration

All network members will be kept regularly updated on arrangements as they proceed. We look forward very much to meeting you in Athens.

Prof. Peter Golding, Loughborough (Honorary Chair) Prof. Peter Ludes, Jacobs University Bremen (Co-Chair), Prof. Roy Panagiotopoulou, Athens (Co-Chair), Jan Müller, Jacobs University Bremen (Board Member), Raluca Petre, Ovidius State University of Constanta, (Board Member), Prof. Peeter Vihalemm, University of Tartu (Board Member)

***

CITIZENSHIP
CRITICAL MAKING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

University of Toronto
November 12-13 2010
Center for the Study of the United States At the University of Toronto
http://diycitizenship.com/

A renewed emphasis on participatory forms of digitally-mediated production is transforming our social landscape. Making has become the dominant metaphor for a variety of digital and digitally-mediated practices. The web is exploding with independently produced digital content such as video diaries, conversations, stories, software, music, video games‹all of which are further transformed and morphed by “modders”, “hackers”, artists and activists who redeploy and repurpose corporately-produced content. Equally, communities of self-organized crafters, hackers, and enthusiasts are increasingly to be found online exchanging sewing and knitting patterns, technical guides, circuit layouts, detailed electronics tutorials and other forms of instruction and support. Many of these individuals and collaborators understand their work to be socially interventionist. Through practices of design, development, and exchange they challenge traditional divides between production and consumption and to redress the power differentials built into technologically-mediated societies.

“DIY Citizenship” invokes the participatory nature of these diverse “do-it-yourself” modes of engagement, community, networks, and tools‹all of which arguably replace traditional with remediated notions of citizenship.

The term “critical making” refers to the increasing role-making plays in critical forms of social reflection and engagement.

This interactive conference seeks to extend conversations about new modes of engaged DIY citizenship and politics evidenced by the exponential increase of DIY media, “user-generators”, “prosumers”, “hacktivists”, tactical media interventionists, and other maker identities. We invite scholars, activists, artists, designers, programmers and others interested in the social and participatory dimensions of digitally-mediated practices, to engage in dialogue across disciplinary and professional divides. All methodological and theoretical approaches are welcomed. Submissions may include paper proposals, works of art and/or design, short video or audio segments, performances, video games, digital media, or other genres and forms. Potential topics include: the relation between social media and the Œmaking¹ of new forms of citizenship engagement‹thus, for example, making movements; making community; making news; making play; making bodies; making health; making public; making education; making networks.

Plenary speakers include:

Anne Balsamo, Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, co-founder of Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies.

Suzanne de Castell, Professor (media, educational technologies) Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University, Vancouver: educational media theory, research, design and development, Founded Canadian Game Studies Association <http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/cgsa/> , co-editor of LoadingŠ

Ron Deibert, Professor (Political Science), University of Toronto, Director of the Citizen Lab <http://www.citizenlab.org/> ; a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative <http://opennet.net/> and Information Warfare Monitor <http://www.infowar-monitor.net/> projects; co-founder and VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon Inc <http://www.psiphon.ca/> .

Paul Dourish, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, co-conspirator in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction, and author of Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Blogger, henryjenkins.org <http://henryjenkins.org> . Author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Currently doing research for MacArthur Foundation on youth, new media, and the public sphere.

Jennifer Jenson, Professor of Pedagogy and Technology, York University,

Toronto: video game designer, co-editor of Loading The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association <http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/>

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko¹s projects which explore socio-technical change have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the MASSMoCA, the Whitney, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. Jeremijenko is the director of the environmental health clinic at NYU, assistant professor in Art, and affiliated with the Computer Science Dept.

Steve Mann, professor of Applied Engineering, and Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto, proliferate inventor including wearable computing, hydraulophone, and concept of ‘sousveillance’: “the effects a surveillance device has on others”

Trebor Scholz, Professor of Culture and Media Study, The New School, NewYork: media activist and artist, founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity <http://www.distributedcreativity.org/>

Conference organizers: Prof. Megan Boler, University of Toronto; Prof. Matt Ratto, University of Toronto.

Please submit a 250-word proposal or description of work/presentation and a one-page artist or scholarly CV to submissions[at]diycitizenship[dot]com by May 20, 2010. Please include up to five images of work to be shown/discussed or a web URL if appropriate. Notifications will take place by June 15, 2010. For more information, contact info[at]diycitizenship[dot]com or visit our website at www.diycitizenship.com.

Presenters will be invited to submit completed papers for an edited collection with a university press and/or a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Special Issue (volume 4, number 2, 2011) of “Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa” (Ethnography and Qualitative Research)

Edited By:  Stefano De Paoli & Maurizio Teli

Online groups, also called “virtual worlds”, “virtual communities”, or “digital collectives”, are those social groups whose members’ interactions are mediated primarily by the Internet. Participation in these groups has a variety of purposes and takes place via a variety of technological platforms. These include, for instance, platforms for social networking (such as Facebook, Second Life and social networks in general), platforms that have a productive purpose for participants (such as projects for the development of Free and Open Source Software), or platforms whose goal is to provide entertainment or a pastime for users (for instance Multiplayer Online Games such as the Massive Multiplayer Online Games or Online Poker).

Nowadays, the social relevance of this phenomenon has become quite clear in several areas. For example, social networks like Facebook or MySpace now count millions of users that interact online, with a variety of goals, practices and tools (Beer, 2008). The proliferation of sociotechnical phenomena such as Wikipedia, Creative Commons and Free and Open Source Software has changed some of the traditional assumptions about organizational hierarchies and paid labour (Kelty, 2008). Or again, Online Games’ virtual economies are tied to real economies, in ways that challenge traditional assumptions about property (Castronova, 2005).

Social, cultural, economic, and technological dimensions are, therefore, closely intertwined in the phenomenon of Online Groups. In this special issue (volume 4, number 2, 2011) of “Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa” (Ethnography and Qualitative Research) we are looking for contributions with a strong empirical bias that can tackle this hybrid complexity and that specifically offer reflections and practical experiences for a discussion on the theoretical and methodological dimensions of the phenomenon. This involves reflecting on one or more of the following topics:

Firstly, some reflections might focus on the theoretical dimension. Often the literature, in both the social sciences and economics, for example Benkler’s (2006) or von Hippel’s (2004) works, has associated the birth and proliferation of online groups with a process of democratization and the construction of a new democratic balance of power and knowledge. (Consider the case of Free and Open Source Software or the advent of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content.) However, this literature is often linked with individualistic approaches, the methodological dimension of which does not focus on the “fine grain” of social practices and on the power relationships these practices might imply. One of the goals of this special issue is therefore to stimulate a debate on how ethnographic or qualitative research in general can help to balance this optimistic view, in which “online” is seen as a place of pure democracy.

Secondly, the research on online group interactions requires a discussion of and reflection on the assumptions of traditional qualitative and ethnographic research. Indeed, the researcher herself is required to take part in online interactions and to use the Internet to conduct the research. This consideration illustrates that there is an inherent reflexive element: the researcher studies a phenomenon that she is also contributing to identify. It is therefore important for researchers to reflect on the use in research of the same technologies and platforms used for online interactions. This includes, for instance, tools for collecting qualitative data, for analyzing data and also for the communication/dissemination of research results. Examples could be: the use of blogs or wikis as tools to keep and organize field notes or even to build a relationship with participants in the online groups themselves; the use of online resources (such as software tools) that can be used for data collection and analysis, for example extensions for the Firefox browser or web-based CAQDAS software; and the use of blogs, wikis and other platforms to disseminate research results, in this way contributing to the construction of online interactions.

Finally, ethnographic and qualitative online research requires specific reflections on the ethical aspects of the research. For instance, the availability of archived material in a space that is neither public nor private, according to classical categories in the ethics of research, and whose authors are not always reachable, poses challenging problems. Indeed, often the user communications and interactions are public, in the sense that they are easily accessible by almost anyone through an Internet connection. This type of “sharing in a limited context” by users raises ethical questions for researchers, as the users’ original purpose was not to provide “data” for researchers (Bakardjeva and Feenberg, 2001). Therefore, an approach that takes the situation into account should be used when discussing the status of public/private information in relation to Internet conversations and interactions (Teli, Pisanu, Hakken, 2007).

In conclusion, we invite empirically grounded research papers that address one or more of the dimensions outlined above, but which may also expand them and include other aspects. Contributions might include (but are not restricted to):

• The ethnography and qualitative research of online groups: social networks, online games, Wikipedia, etc.

• The construction of groups: the role of the researcher and qualitative research

• Ethnographic and qualitative approaches to power and to online data

• Power and knowledge: digital archives, avatars

• Your experiences with using online technologies for the collection and analysis of qualitative data

• The ethics of qualitative research on online groups

References

Beer, D. (2008). Social network(ing) sites…revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 13 Issue 2, Pages 516 – 529

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press von Hippel, E. (2004). Democratizing innovation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Kelty, C. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic Worlds-The Business and Culture of Online Games, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

Bakardjeva, M. and Feenberg, A. (2001). Involving the virtual subject. Ethics and Information Technology, 2, 233-240.

Teli, M., Pisanu, F., and Hakken, D. (2007). The Internet as a Library-of-People: For a Cyberethnography of Online Groups [65 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung /

Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8 (3), Art. 33, http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/283/621

Important Dates:

15 May 2010: Abstract of maximum 500 words. We will accept any abstract we consider interesting for the aims of this special issue. The selection of the articles to be published will then be done on the basis of the Full Papers.

Full Paper Submission: 15 September 2010

Review Results: 15 December 2010

Final Paper (maximum ten thousands words), camera-ready: 15 March 2011

Abstracts and Articles may be submitted in English or Italian. Articles must be submitted via email to the editors (see address below) in the Journal’s approved house style.

Please read the Guidelines for Submission first! They are at

http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/etnografia/norme.pdf

You can access information about the house style at http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/etnografia/norme.pdf

Please note that submissions not in the house style will automatically be returned to authors for formatting. The journal is peer-reviewed and authors are expected to take reviewers’ reports into consideration when finalizing their papers for publication.

Queries: Stefano.depaoli [at] nuim [dot] ie and Maurizio [at] maurizioteli [dot] eu

About the Journal:

Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa (Ethnography and Qualitative Research) is a peer-review journal that hosts high-quality, original ethnographic and qualitative research, combining careful empirical observation with sound theoretical reflection. The journal has a wide and diverse audience, and the paper accepted and published are directed toward such an audience, not only toward the readers of the specific research field of the writers.

The journal covers traditional areas of ethnographic inquiry, such as urban ethnography, deviance, work and occupational communities, immigration and ethnic relations, but also promotes the ethnographic analysis of scientific practices and knowledge, information and surveillance systems, religion, politics, the media, sport and the arts. ERQ is not committed to any specific theoretical approach, and is open to papers influenced by different theoretical traditions, provided they are based on accurate field research. It is published in Italian, but the web version is bilingual (Italian/English). Some articles are also published in French.

ERQ is edited by Pier Paolo Giglioli, Alessandro Dal Lago, Giolo Fele and Marco Marzano. Some of the most well known Italian scholars involved in ethnography sit on the Editorial Board, which is complemented by a prestigious International Advisory Board.

Journal Web Site: http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/scheda_rivista.php?issn=1973-3194

About the Editors of the Special Issue:

Stefano De Paoli is a post-doctoral researcher at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, where he is conducting research on the Future of the Internet. Stefano has worked in Science and Technology Studies since 2004, focusing on an investigation of software licences. Recently, his research interest has been Massive Multiplayer Online Games, with a focus on cheating.

More on Stefano at http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml

Maurizio Teli is a researcher at the Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali and collaborator at the University of Trento, Italy. He is conducting research on the relationships between online technologies and the construction of everyday societal facts. He has worked on Science, Technology and Society, as well as in Organization Studies and Internet Research, since 2004, mainly investigating the political reality constructed by software developers’ practices. Recently, he has been working on the “My Ideal City” project (EU Grant Agreement n° 230554), questioning how three-dimensional virtual environments can be used in the dissemination of alternative realities.

More on Maurizio at http://www.maurizioteli.eu

When Masaru Ibuka went to the US, in the early 1950′s  to negotiate with AT&T Western Electric Division the conditions under which Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K (translated in English as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, founded in 1947 by Morita and Ibuka) would be able to produce its own transistors in Japan, he was extremely dismayed by the apparent enormous gap in the technological and societal advancement between the US and Japan. When he went on traveling to Europe, most notably in Germany, which had also been devastated by war, he was even more mortified to realize how much behind Japan was (or at least, he seemed to have perceived things that way. Whether that was actually true is another story). According to the authors, his perception was reinforced by the Western common sense at the time, which  deemed that Japan had been so severely damaged by the war that it would never be able to be reborn from its ashes. During these travels, Ibuka realized one important thing that would have a significant impact on the future of his company: English was the new lingua franca and its mastering would be essential for the survival of their new business. When he went back to Japan, Morita and him set out to changing their company’s name into Sony.  It wasn’t done in one day, but what is significant here is what is in the name. Sony is a contraction between two words: sonus, which means ‘sound’ in Latin, and sonny boy, an American slang expression referring to particularly adventurous boys, which had become integrated into the japanese common speech. Besides being a much more cheerful and enticing brand name than ‘Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K’,  it sounds like an English word, but isn’t one, it can be pronounced easily by anyone from any language, despite the fact that it doesn’t exist in any other languages.

In this sense, Sony particularly embodies the concept of mukokuseki that is used by Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), as a way to picture the process by which Japanese-ness is erased, at least on the surface, from products designed in Japan but intended for worldwide marketing.  Indeed, attempting to identify the origin of Sony, without knowing anything about the company and its history, is actually impossible. ‘Sony’ has an English sonority, but isn’t an English word, nor is it a word in any other languages.  It therefore  is place-less, coming from nowhere in particular, but seems to fit in any setting that was touched by Western modernity.  Although one can’t attribute to Sony the sole credit for all the technologies that it produced, it still played an important and prominent role in their emergence and adoption by societies all over the world. Koichi Iwabuchi shows in his work the role played by the neutrality usually attributed to technical objects, in the worldwide success of hardware made in Japan, and often integrated into Western-produced daily equipment, like televisions, computers, telephones, radio, microwaves, etc.  It is really only in the 1990′s that ‘Japanese-ness’ has began to be considered trendy, a phenomenon that some have attributed to the growing cultural influence or ‘soft-power’ of Japan.

This issue of technological lack of any odor (mukokuseki literally means ‘odorless’) is at the heart of my dissertation, as DVD‘s constitute a technology, which by essence, seems to come from nowhere and to fit anywhere. The fact that the film and TV majors  imposed on DVD manufacturers a partition of the world into 6 technical different and incompatible format zones, only makes it even harder to identify the origin of this delivery technology.  The odorless-ness of the DVD combines with the apparent odorless-ness of many animes  to make products which seem to have no particular origin but  a vague place called ‘The World’.  This process has been in part illustrated by Anne Allison in her book Millennial Monsters, Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006), in which she shows how the  Pokémon franchise has been successfully exported to the US, and from there to Europe, as a fictional universe  entrenched in a modernity made familiar to Western audiences by the erasing of any national markers and a constant emphasis on seemingly neutral elements such as nature (Pokémons are animals, although of the fantastic type) and science-fiction technology.  Pokémon and other franchises like its derivative in the virtual worlds, Digimon, but also Yu-Gi-Oh, Naruto, One Piece, etc. were thus able to circulate through the worldwide roads of the entertainment industry, across national barriers, because they were in the end a mix of odorless references of which people are all aware in varying degrees.  In her view, all these narrative fictions tap into a common pool of myths, stories and ideals that have come to form a sort of globalized imagination shared by people exposed to similar experiences of what is considered modernity.  The general idea one gets from these observations is that of standardized products, coalescing multiple but place-less neutralized markers into a patchwork, whose superficial patterns is rearranged for each market, so as to adapt globalization to local contingencies, that is to national general audiences, which are often still seen in terms of socio-demographic terms.  This materializes, for example, in the way all Japanese scripts get erased from images of animes or covered over by the local language signs, or, through the redrawing of some scenes to replace chopsticks and bowls with forks and plates. The fact that only series portraying such commonly known characters as ninjas (Naruto), samurais (Bleach) or pirates (One Piece) or featuring seemingly neutral settings as the virtual computer world (Digimon), or science fiction stories such as Dragon Ball or Yu-Gi-Oh, find their way through the mainstream global roads of circulation is another illustration of this phenomenon.

However, at the same time, the audiovisual entertainment industry has been confronted with an accelerated fragmentation of audiences and consumers markets, as contents and the means to access them have multiplied. The tension between standardization and customization exists since the beginning of industrial productions (at the turn between the 18th and the 19th century) and has never been resolved, as Edgar Morin clearly stated in his work L’esprit du Temps, published in 1962.  But in the last 30 years, with the increasing autonomy of the modern human being, expected to make his own decision for his life and to take alone the full responsibility for its consequences, the tension has increased as new media institutions and technologies have emerged to fit these individualized needs. At the same time, however, the common sense wants it that no matter how autonomous and individualistic a person is, that person remains a human being, sharing some common needs and desires with the rest of humanity. In marketing terms, the human mass is made of billions of individuals who can be regrouped into sub-categories of shared characteristics, usually defined on the basis of national and socio-demographic criteria. The holy grail of marketers then, is to find the magical product that will be able to fit all these categories at the same time, that is to re-unite them into one single humanity. The Walkman is a result of this logic, trying to fit personal needs with a standardized machine, which pretty much looks and works the same in all the countries where it is distributed. But so is the increasingly general adoption of the binary code, seen as the language most appropriate for an always more globalized world, since it is based on mathematics and numbers, themselves considered to be the most universal system of representations. The resort to digitization in the media and communication industry was then supposed to bring all these contradictory trends together, as it would make it possible to reduce all communication means (sound, images, writing, videos) into one binary code. Such dematerialized packages of 1 and 0, dissociated from their traditional physical platforms and media, would then be transportable through a variety of interconnected digital vehicles and roads: transmission through electronic network (ADSL/DSL/optic fiber), wireless broadcasting (mobile telephony, Wi-fi), and delivery technologies (optical discs, hard drives). This, however, has resulted in a situation where the industry henceforth has to cater not only to multiple niche audiences, but also to myriads of end-users profiles, with varying degrees of technical knowledge and financial means to keep up with the crazy obsolescence pace set up by hardware manufacturers. Welcome in the digital nightmare! As Henry Jenkins showed in his work on how old and new media collide (2006), all the industrial actors are now frenetically searching for the magic formula that will lead them to the holy grail, that is the perfect product able to re-unite all these scattered markets of consumers and users.

It is from this context of reinforced tension between the global and the local, the standardized and the customized, the public at large and niche publics, that the DVD emerged. As any technology rooted in digitization, it is supposed to be part of the solution that will bring together all the consumers of the world around one artifact, capable of satisfying to a certain degree various cultural tastes and technological preferences.  However, not so surprisingly, DVD’s have rather tended to reinforce the public fragmentation since the marketing of its contents followed the same rules as for previous video platforms (use of the same genre categories and same rating hierarchy),  while at the same time targeting various types of users. In this view, one understands better how the DVD has been able sustain the emergence of publics of animes throughout the world, who view these animated series as typically Japanese productions, reflecting not only Japan’s modernity but also its projection out into the world.  These publics, like many niche public, are claiming a specific identity and relationships to media contents in general. Theirs is based on a sort of  understanding that Japan is part of the modern world as much as massive media content producers like the US, some Latin American and European countries, but also that it can contributes to our globalizing modernity with its own cultural particularities. The DVDs and other digital platforms (most notably video games, but also the Web) are thus supposed to provide a gate to the fictional worlds created by the Japanese audiovisual entertainment industry.  In this view, the assumed neutrality and even place-less-ness of the technological elements that make up these optical discs play a significant role. Entrenched in the universal binary code, the Digital Versatile Disc (a.k.a. Digital Video Disc) gives an odorless access to a variety of contents in different forms and formats. Because the technical, even material aspect, seems to disappear completely behind the apparent ease with which one can manipulate a DVD, paradoxically, it can make the exotic features of the content more remarkable. Of course, this depends on the editing work performed by the DVD publishing houses.  Because, gates aren’t enough to give access to another world. One often needs a guide, and in the case of the DVD,  this guide is provided by the publishers’ authoring work, that is the creation of the DVD interface, characterized by a specific content organization in chapters and menus, and the presentation of various types of contents as well as the supply of several language and audiovisual technical formats.

And this consideration reminds us that technology isn’t as neutral as one would like it to be. In other words, the constitution of the various anime publics depends in part on their adoption of the DVD as a gate to animes and on their responses to the authoring work by the publishers, who often release successively different editions of the same series. This is exactly what I’m trying to explore in my dissertation. My idea is, as I have stated in the last summary of my project, to identify the potential appearance of what I would call ‘videocinephilia’, that is practices merging cultural habits inherited from a variety of pre-existing practices related to home video entertainment and cinephilia, in response to wider sociotechnical changes that are affecting people’s relationships to media institutions, audiovisual productions and technologies, such as the multiple screens with which we are surrounding ourselves.  It is for this reason that I have attempted to reconstitute the genealogies of the multiple sociotechnological logics, the cultural meanings as the authors of the book say, that have led to the commercial launch and light-speed adoption of the DVD. These logics can be identified through the variety of discourses that accompanied the production and distribution of this digital delivery technology and with which people express their own experiences with it, as well as their expectations with respect to it. My hypothesis is that the DVD itself embodies the expectations of a wide variety of publics, which I attempt to summarize under the neologism videocinephilia, but which I’ll probably describe along a sort of continuum of various characteristics concerning their tastes in audiovisual entertainment and their associated technical preferences.  For example, one of the first person whom I’ll interview for my fieldwork definitely appears as what I would call an absolute videocinephile, as he is both very picky about what animes he chooses to collect and the qualities of the delivery technology. In other words, he only buys what appears to be a mix of the best series and best DVD edition. He does the same when it comes to video games.  Others, with whom I have struck conversations over the Web, seem to place a lot more emphasis on the price-quality ratio of the DVD in function of the series they wish to follow, but not always to collect. And at the other end of the spectrum are those who only want to keep track of the series as it unfolds, to follow it as simultaneously as possible with the Japanese audiences, but not to collect its episodes. These are apparently the most prone to watch them online, illegally if they don’t have any other choices. This kind of entertainment is practiced as part of their daily flow or routine, not something to be kept for later replay as a sort of audiovisual background or memory.  From this, I also hope to derive some implications for the relationships that people entertain with the Japanese audiovisual entertainment industry as an actor of globalization. Indeed, the way people use the various technologies of access to animes highlights their more or less strong self-claim to be part of an international audience or public, to participate in the creation of what Arjun Appadurai calls mediated sodalities (1996), that is a sort of virtual transnational social place outside time and space,  where scattered people get the impression that they are somewhat neighbors, that is intimate internationalism (B. Klinger, in J. Bennett & T. Brown, 2008: 25).

This ONA is called Time of Eve and from what I have seen in the first episode made available on Crunchyroll, it tells the story of the relationship between a high school student and his home android, in a near future when robots have become common and androids are being progressively integrated in people’s daily lives. The basic tenet consists yet again in the questioning of human nature and the man-machine bonds. The first thing I noticed is that the episode is unusually short, no more than 15 minutes, when the average length for an anime series, is between 25 and 30 minutes. The second thing I notice is that scenes seem to be shot so as to fit into a small screen, privileging an intimate view into this fictional world. Of course, the subject topic lends itself to this kind of perspective and maybe it isn’t a coincidence that it was selected for an ONA. Indeed, numerous observations and studies have concluded that the smaller the screen, the more intimate the content. And online video screen are usually small and have a lower resolution. Of course, it is always possible to switch to full-screen mode, but most of the time, this results in a pixelized and fuzzy image. My first impression then is that there is here an attempt to create fictional worlds specifically for distribution over the Web, but based on old audiovisual forms and formats, here animation and series. Even thought it seems that some publishers are on the row to get the rights for a DVD edition of this series,  it was made for the Web and a public of people who are both anime fans and frequent Web users. In other words, it was created to be viewed on a computer screen or a TV screen connected to the Web. There are actually good chances that those who’ll get the DVD will watch it using the DVD player of their computer, displaying it on a monitor that is usually smaller than a regular TV screen and has a smaller resolution. In both case, you’ve got a viewer whose position is “lean forwards”, not “lean backwards” as when sitting in front of the television, with a remote control in the hand. Crunchyroll even offers the possibility to switch between subtitles and to choose between streaming or downloading. This could be then more than a mere transposition of home viewing practices from the TV set in the living room to the computer monitor in (well, any) other rooms of the home. It might be actually a manifestation of a transition from home viewing to anywhere-viewing (for lack of better expression…I’m a bit out of inspiration, right now…). Indeed, such ONA can perfectly fit into a smart phone screen or any other screen outside the home

It would also fit into an evolution that has started in Japan with a trend initiated by  the practice of keitai shousetsu or cell phone novels. These are serialized novels, often written as exchange of short dialogues between fictional phone users, whose overtone is focused on intimate issue of feelings, relations, psychological tensions, etc. Their constraints are mostly dictated by the technical context of the cell phone (small screens, restricted space of texts, costs of text messages, etc.) and the way people use it, including the specific written lexicon that was created to maximize meaning in as few words as possible so as to be as cost-effective as possible. These novels have been immensely successful, opening up a whole world of perspectives for young writers (mostly teenages or young women hardly out of teenagehood) and newbies in the writing field, most of whom would probably have been rejected by most standard publishers. In the same vein, an increasing number of mangakas have also began to bypass official manga magazines by publishing their work directly online on community Websites. With the recent decline in readership of traditional paper-mangas and explosion of anime piracy both in Japan and around the world, the Japanese popular entertainment industry isn’t doing too well. The decision to produce ONA could lay down the first pavement of new marketing models, in which the Web is more fully integrated.

EDIT [02.17.2010]

Following the comment below by Alex, from the Department of Alchemy, I checked out his article on the anime Time of Eve and I realized that it doesn’t just stand out by its means of distribution (online first, then, DVD), but also of production. It seems that Yasuhiro Yoshiura, the author of this min-series (only 6 episodes to this day), did keep in mind not only a Japanese audience, but also foreign, worldwide anime public.  This bit of information is essential, because it means that the Studio Rikka didn’t not only take into account new technological means to increase one’s efficiency to reach a far and wide number of people, but also the sociocultural implications of this move. From what Alex says, Time of Eve was initially streamed on Yahoo!Japan for free, before being released with English subtitles on Crunchyroll. There, it sparked discussions on the forum devoted to the series and the production team did take into account the participants’ critics, while working on the series. This seems to me quite unprecedented, because usually anime producers will work with essentially a Japanese audience in mind and will allow for some modifications when their products are licensed for international distribution. That is also the main approach taken by Hollywood or other big national producers when they distribute their work worldwide.

However, the line adopted by Yoshiura and his colleagues represents a further step into more personal relationships with audiences split and spread across a variety of geographical locations, but sharing a sort of common social space on the Websites where this anime is streamed. This is another kind of audience than the one originally addressed by an anime industry mostly determined by the broadcasting model of television. As said above, the computer user has a “lean forwards”, almost office-like position, as opposed to the “sit back” and relax on the coach encouraged by the television + remote control apparatus. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that people watching anime online have a more active attitude than those watching it on TV (we now know that TV watchers are more active than their apparent “coach potatoes” position might suggest), but they are more encouraged to do “work”, that is to keep interacting with the interface. For example, by opening multiple browser windows, one for the anime being streamed, another to search for specific elements of the anime, and maybe another, with a forum about the anime on which people will discuss it as it is being streamed. I know that people already do that when they play DVDs on their computer. This means that producers of ONA are dealing with an audience that develop a different kind of focus on the content and relationship with it, one that puts electronic technology such as the computer, the browser and the internet connection and their affiliated promotional myths at the center of the mediation process between the producers and the receiving user-spectators.