iDMAa: The first question (the most basic one) is, looking back over the past ten years, what jumps out at you?

SRO: I think the main thing that stands out, that relates to content becoming digital rather than analog, is its ability to go across any kind of platform. It’s sort of everywhere, all the time. Any device. If you go back ten years (I’m not sure on my chronology here), but if you go back far enough, content tended to be medium specific. A movie was seen at a movie theatre, and it was a 35mm film. A TV show was seen on a television set. A phone was for telephone calls to people. An iPad didn’t exist. So now the fact that movies or television shows can be consumed in a movie theatre, on a TV screen, video on demand out of a Red Box machine that spits out DVDs, on an iPad, on your smart phone. That’s a huge change, and I suppose it’s the logical progression of time shifting of media that you get when you have the ability as a user to record and store something, which would have begun with Beta and VHS. Now all these years later, that’s come to its full fruition. So I’d say that’s probably the single most remarkable thing.

iDMAa: Is the biggest impact monetary? Cultural? You’re talking about this impact… where do you think the seismic center of that is?

SRO: I don’t think we know yet. It’s certainly having a huge effect on piracy and it seems like it’s having a huge effect on the recording industry but I don’t know that much about that. So far, it seems like piracy has…avoided visual content enough that it hasn’t financially wrecked the industry. I suppose another aspect of that (I’m not an expert on it) where you see a financial impact would be the ability to self-publish and distribute “printed” material, or written material. I have not read any of these Shades of Grey books but apparently the person who writes those kind of wrote fan fiction (http://henryjenkins.org/2006/09/ fan_fiction_as_critical_commen.html)… Twilight fan fiction that was distributed on the Internet. That led to huge… I think those three books are #1, 2, and 3 on The New York Times best seller list, and they have been for a long time. So it’s hard to imagine that happening more than ten years ago where fan fiction would be distributed in such a way… I guess you go back twenty years and it was all just mimeographed and…

iDMAa: Handed out at fan conventions for a couple bucks. …write a thing like that would hold the top three spots on The New York Times best seller list some couple years later is kind of remarkable to me and I think that would be attributable to the digital distribution of things —how easy that was and what a fan base somebody could develop for that. Writing your own semi-lewd versions of Twilight novels would be… piracy, too; it’s content piracy of copyrighted material. So it’s really interesting to me, that whole thing. So yeah, I think there is a huge economic impact that we don’t see yet. Culturally, as a university person, it seems like all students in all disciplines are producing content. Back when you and I were in college and most members of iDMAa (http://www.iDMAa.org) were in college that was a rare thing and very specialized. Equipment was incredibly expensive and… you and I participated in that and others did… but now at a place like Winona State, you’ll see English majors and Engineering majors and Nursing majors producing videos and making content like that. It’s ubiquitous! So that has cultural effects that I don’t think we all know what those will mean yet. I think the effects are hard to measure yet, but they seem to be profound.

iDMAa: It’s interesting… this is really a side note… but in writing the book about Transmedia, I’ve come back again and again to the relationship with audience and that dynamic seems to be the wellspring of change, the fact that creators and audiences relationship have evolved at a hyper speed in the last ten years.

SRO: That’s a really good point! Ten years ago, I would have thought in a very linear way and I would have predicted that increasingly content was going to be created for micro-audiences, which would be I guess what Twilight fan fiction is. If you’re writing that kind of stuff, it’s written by a very small number of people for a very small number of readers, yet they connect in really deep, profound ways… it’s deeply meaningful for them. I guess I would have predicted as that was rolling out that the possibility of there to be a commonly shared mega hit…something so big that we all would…The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises or something like that… I would have thought that that would be in decline. I would have got that wrong. I would have thought that the intimacy of specific content so tailored to me and who I am… I think back to this funny parody that they did in National Lampoon back in the late 1970s–early 80s, I can’t remember when exactly. There was an issue that was like the self-indulgence issue and they had a parody of a magazine…kind of a parody of 35 People magazine but the magazine was called Me. The magazine was just all about…had a subscription of one, and it only went to one reader. I remember the crossword puzzle in the magazine was things like “One Across—this is what Aunt Minnie lost last weekend at the lake. Two Down—this is Joe’s favorite burger when we go to A&W.” All of the answers were things only one person would know the answer to, so it was content that was created by somebody for themselves. It would seem ludicrous, right? That would be the ultimate micro-media.

iDMAa: We have that today… it’s called Facebook.

SRO: Yeah, it’s still there I guess! Still, and I guess I wouldn’t have learned my own lesson because really, what happens is all the stuff that was there before remains. There’s still film, you can still buy 35mm or Tri-X film for a 35mm, single shot film camera, if you want to. It’s not like that stuff completely dies, it all lasts. This summer, The Avengers was this huge mega-hit that most people saw or knew about so there’s still room for that even as content is being created for increasingly narrower audiences.

iDMAa: What you’re describing is the polarization… you never imagine… because there used to be a middle.

SRO: That’s true, but I don’t think it’s either… I think it’s “both/and.” I was very worried ten years ago about an utter fragmentation of American society… that there would be fewer and fewer shared experiences. You and I can remember being school kids and looking forward to every year on CBS when The Wizard Of Oz was on. There was no such thing as VHS… you were never going to see it in a movie theatre anymore. So there was one night in the year… you remember this, right?… there was one time a year when CBS would show The Wizard Of Oz, and EVERYBODY our age would watch it. It was a must-see thing. That’s forgotten… who does that anymore? I worried that as we move towards micro, audience-specific media that we wouldn’t have shared experiences anymore. But, I guess I was wrong about that. People will still flock to movie theatres collectively on a huge scale to see certain things. The world can still share in watching the Olympics. I guess the ratings are just stellar… they’re doing great. The whole world’s watching it! So we still, as human beings, have things we share, and then there’s other things that are produced for incredibly… this is probably more up your alley but these amateur wrestling videos… backyard wrestling… people jumping off of garage roofs and this kind of stuff. I would think pretty limited audience appeal to that but people who like it, really like it.

iDMAa: You say that and sometimes those things have a million hits on YouTube.

SRO: That’s you watching it 999,999 times!

iDMAa: Don’t talk about that please, that’s a little embarrassing. But that’s interesting… I would venture a thought about that which is, the thing about the Avengers for example is, you can hook into it a whole bunch of ways. The casual fan can just go see the movie. The more serious fans can see the movie, read the comic books, play the video game… so there’re sort of multiple levels and then they begin to extend the Avengers Universe. So if you like the Avengers, then you go back and watch the Thor movie, and so you participate… so that’s why it works. That’s why those big properties still exist…

SRO: I think you’re right, and they’ve found ways to kind of go across different platforms and have you experience it in different ways… sitting in a movie theatre, a little more passively, but like you said with a video game or with toys or merchandise, a little more actively. It’s interesting with things like that… again, back when you and I were in high school it’s hard to imagine a Marvel or a DC comic book having that kind of broad appeal. The kind of thing where parents would go with their kids or my mom would go see it… my mom was burning my comic books, not wanting to go see movies about them! So, what’s clever about those things is how they both… there’s that narrow audience that knows every last thing about who the Avengers are and the whole history of them or Batman… have got to be kept happy. The ComicCon crowd… who have got to be kept happy. On the other hand, there’s those casual viewers like my mom who doesn’t know much about this at all, and I think those things are pretty sophisticated actually in giving kind of enough exposition to the person who’s never even heard of the Avengers before that they could enjoy it, but also stuff for the fans… like in The Dark Knight Rises, the way they used Talia Al Ghul… fans have known who she was… and I was one of them… but I was actually surprised by that reveal. If you’re watching this and you haven’t seen The Dark Knight Rises, I apologize. That was a spoiler; rather you wanted… it was surprising! It got me. 36 I won’t do this spoiler, but that little reveal at the end about who a certain character had been all along. That was also fun, and that was there for the fans but I didn’t see it coming. I was like “Whoa! Cool!” you know? I didn’t see it. I think they’ve gotten sophisticated, and maybe that’s why things like that extend beyond the micro-audience or a very specific audience and they found a way to kind of broaden it out and be broadly appealing.

iDMAa: It’s not a shock that it’s people like Joss Whedon who are handling these things. I will go back to: TV folk are often very good at understanding universes, and big long-term storytelling in a way that isn’t necessarily part of film culture, though some people have done it exceptionally well. Christopher Nolan being an obvious…

SRO: Christopher Nolan’s awesome but that’s true you have to receive… you have to take a received mythology that you can’t blow up and you have to honor it. But, you can tweak it… you can do things with it that haven’t been done before. In fact, you have to… because if you just regurgitate then it’s not very captivating. And you have to tee it up so somebody else can do something with it, henceforth. So yeah, it’s a very sophisticated form of storytelling.

iDMAa: Is there something technologically over the past decade that really knocked your socks off, that you think was a pivotal change? Item? Something in your own life, something you perceived out in the world…?

SRO: Looking at it from a decade standpoint… it’s hard for me to remember quite where we were a decade ago, when iDMAa was starting… I guess the thing that’s been the most remarkable technological advance in that time is the verisimilitude of digital content, of CGI. Not quite remembering what Pixar movie might have been released ten years ago, but looking back at what digital animation/ CGI was capable of in its early stages… I’ll go back further than ten years… Tin Toy (http://www.pixar.com/ short_films/Theatrical-Shorts/Tin-Toy) or Knick Knack (http://www.pixar.com/short_films/Theatrical-Shorts/ Knick-Knack) or some of those early Pixar short films. Then, today, the ability to create artificial human beings who can be seamlessly edited in with live actors so that you’re not really sure when you’re looking at a live actor or where this is a CGI representation of that same actor doing something… that’s a pretty amazing technological thing. I suppose it has some actors a little worried. I didn’t see King Kong in 1932 or whenever it came out, but watching King Kong on a low-res small black & white television in the 1960’s, I could tell when that really was Faye Ray, and there was a Barbie doll in King Kong’s hand. That was pretty easy to tell even then, and now it’s pretty darn hard to tell… and I don’t know if in 20 years from now it’s going to be easy to tell, but I don’t think so. I think they’ve reached a level where you’re manipulating images pixel by pixel and it’s pretty easy to create things that have all the appearance of life, but aren’t. Technologically, I think that’s huge and then I think in terms of distribution, just the ability to move stuff so quickly and with such quality over… here we are chatting on Skype. There wasn’t Skype ten years ago, that I remember… prototyped… and the fact that essentially as a kid, what would have been Jetson’s technology. George Jetson sitting there and then a video screen would come down and what was his name… I can’t remember who George Jetson’s boss is but he may pop up on that video screen.

iDMAa: Mr. Spacely! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_The_Jetsons_characters#Mr._Spacely) Because it was Spacely’s Sprockets…

SRO: Spacely’s Sprockets! So now the fact that we do this routinely, and it’s easy, and it’s free… that’s pretty amazing too. So the ability… in addition to that content creation, there’s that content distribution… how easy it is to make things, and share things in real time would be a second remarkable innovation that would have been hard to foresee. When I was a kid I would have expected at this point that we’d all have flying cars and that there’d be colonies on Mars and things like that. That didn’t happen… but something else really remarkable happened that was unforeseen.

iDMAa: I would argue to throw a piece into it, which is the fact that it’s free. To have foreseen what would have value and what wouldn’t have value, and I don’t mean in a good or a bad way, I just mean monetarily. That’s an astonishing thought, that certain things would have monetary value and certain things would literally have no monetary value.

SRO: Right, they’re free… yeah, I think that’s true. Just this past summer the technology that’s been amazing to me, although it’s only peripherally a media technology, is I got one of these little… my toy for the summer was a Drone, 37 and it’s about this big and it has four propellers, but, it has a high definition video camera in it. You control it with an iPad, and it wasn’t that expensive it was like $250 or something. The thing can go up like 30 meters high, wind allowing, and the battery that is has in there lasts about 15 minutes and you can fly it out over a canyon or out over a lake and it can spin and it can change altitude. With those little radio controlled planes, you always had to be flying them, and this thing, if you just take your hands off the iPad, it just hovers. It’s got a downward facing camera and a forward facing camera and you push a button on the iPad and it just records video… in high definition… 200 bucks. That’s pretty amazing to me, but that’s sort of… it’s a camera, it’s a video camera that you can kind of position wherever you want.

iDMAa: Actually, that’s an important bit… you just touched on something which is the sort of ubiquitous nature of cameras in our culture, which hadn’t existed fifteen years ago. Ten years ago… right?

SRO: Absolutely, and this thing… it’s not exactly a Steadicam but you could… for somebody producing home movies, this works like a boom crane. You can do stuff with this thing… you can do Hitchcock-like shots where it’s flying through or over things that you could never… there’s that tracking shot in I Am Cuba, that very strange Russian movie about Cuba that Martin Scorsese restored… well there’s some shots in there that are technically unbelievable, where cameras are floating through windows and going through floor plans and then out another window and over a crowd and… it’s fun to watch because of the technical complexity of what you’re seeing. But this $200 drone, you know… it just flies through a window and out the other side and over a cliff… who would have thought somebody could produce the kind of sophisticated camera shots that Orson Wells could only dream of.

iDMAa: I Am Hibbard. We could do I Am Hibbard… but actually, you bring up an interesting point, which is I spend time explaining to my children about analog and digital and that very fact that “Don’t you understand kids when you see this car blow up that a car actually blew up, it wasn’t a digital… why you should find this interesting is this was a movie where they actually made things happen in the physical world, which is different and should be of interest, not that it is, but it should be…

SRO: Of course, to our children, nothing we say is of interest. “Yeah dad, leave me alone!”

iDMAa: What will the next generation… obviously you are now a college president so you think about your little dumplings all the time…what do you think they bring as a generation to college…to the world? What is it about this group of students that you think is important and/or interesting and/or worrisome?

SRO: Well, as students they… and I suppose this might be true of them as workers… I think they’re very bright and they’re very quick, but in my generation, I probably would have been at an extreme, and you would have been too. Most iDMAa members would have been at an extreme in having a need for narrative, a need for storytelling, a need to be entertained. Yet, I was capable of sitting through lectures that would be 90 minutes in duration…Two hours in duration…I’d take notes, it didn’t bore me, it struck me as interesting! I think there are very few students now who don’t expect there to be some entertaining or participatory aspect to their learning. Now, in iDMAa that’s a little easier because a lot of what we’re doing is very participatory and it inherently interests the students who come our way anyway. Looking at it from an institution-wide perspective, this is tough on some of the faculty and some of the disciplines who themselves, of course, learned by lecture and note-taking, and testing later, and who are struggling a little bit to adapt to a group of students who aren’t really interested in sitting and listening to a ninety-minute lecture anymore. I think from the perspective of running a university, it’s challenging to keep students engaged. The other thing too, I guess, is more and more students are coming here. The good news is, we’re serving more and more students than ever as a proportion of the U.S. population but they come with all kinds of different cultural understandings and expectations too and I don’t think we’re reaching out to all of them very well.

iDMAa: Is that an evolutionary step in the academy that would require a generation dying off? Or are we capable of sort of… is the academy this sort of evolutionary change you’re calling for?

SRO: It’ll happen… it happens evolutionarily because those same students are graduating and going into grad programs and getting M.F.A.s and Ph.D.s and then becoming our junior faculty… you’re hiring them and I’m hiring 38 them. They’re going to have a very different idea about what that course is supposed to be, and that’s not confined just to the media-related courses or communication or the arts, that would be true in history or philosophy or any of the core liberal arts disciplines. One thing I’ve enjoyed, actually, is some of the more senior faculty at every place I’ve ever worked. I’m thinking now of (inaudible) … working on getting name and his work on taste and how taste relates to social class. There are folks who are among the senior faculty who would still, to this day, think that the only stuff worth spending any time on is Shakespeare, Moliere, Beethoven, and Bach… and Plato. Any content created in the last fifty years is of no note. When you look at the junior faculty (in history, philosophy and other disciplines), I don’t think they care so much about what kind of classicism we’re dealing with. It’s sort of “What can we learn from it?” So for the junior faculty, even in a philosophy program, you might see Plato on the syllabus, you might see Aristotle on the syllabus, but then you might see a comic book about Bertrand Russell on the syllabus… or for that matter, Harvey Pekar! So we’re moving… the Dark Knight would probably be a pretty good movie to deal with in a philosophy class. So I think there’s a generational shift and it’s just going to happen. So that idea that in universities in colleges what we are our taste-makers, and that taste is a signifier of social class and therefore you should only like certain things and dislike certain things. I think that’s all breaking down and I think junior faculty, probably like you and me, are very comfortable going between James Joyce and Spiderman. I’d rather have a student have something intelligent to say about Batman than simply “like” but have nothing intelligent to say about Die Fledermaus.

iDMAa: Just to give a shout out to the man… my epiphany about this came in graduate school with Stuart Kaminsky (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/ arts/14kaminsky.html).

SRO: Yes, absolutely! You and I both… were we in any of his classes together? But we both were his acolytes. We learned a lot from Stuart Kaminsky. A dear man, passed away now… but I would consider some of his books on genre as some of the most formative stuff I ever read. Brilliant guy. And he wasn’t afraid to go there.

iDMAa: He’s the one who told me it was ok to write a paper on professional wrestling on TV, because he…I had the instinct but he already had the intellectual understanding of why it was important and interesting.

SRO: But other attitudes are still out there. You and I didn’t encounter a lot of that kind of elitism…taste elitism in our program, which is great. But golly, just three months ago (not here at this institution) at another institution I was having a conversation with a professor of film and we were talking about film and television…I don’t remember what exactly and I brought up The Wire. She said “Oh, that’s popular culture”…in a condescending way! Like well that’s not film, that’s TV…and I said “Ok, now have you seen The Wire?” It’s television, sure, but it’s long form narrative and it actually has some pretty interesting insights into the modern social condition but for her…you can still find some old school English professors who would be of the camp “Book: good, visual media: bad.” She would be in a transitional camp of “Movies: good, TV: bad,” and it didn’t matter what it was that was on television. In her mind (I suppose this is kind of McLuhan -esque in a kind of a way) but in her mind, it didn’t matter whether it was Jersey Shore or The Wire, it was all just the same thing. It was all the same stuff, the same way for how people who like the book, all movies are the same stuff. Mein Kampf was a book; you can’t just elevate books up and say they’re all superior to any visual form. There’s no horrible visual equivalent yet, and hopefully never will be, of Mein Kampf.

iDMAa: Some of the greatest works of film were based on crap novels… that was part of what was amazing about transformation. It was by the nature… you take a C–level detective fiction novel and turn it into fabulous filmmaking.

SRO: You talking about Maltese Falcon or something?

iDMAa: Yeah any number of… there’s a zillion of those. That’s the whole thing. What is the most valuable lesson that you’ve learned in the past ten years?

SRO: Well, since this is an iDMAa thing, I’m gonna give you an iDMAa answer. This is kind of a historical reflection and most of the questions have been about the media and digitalization and stuff, but I’m gonna reflect a little bit on iDMAa. What I would say is, the origins of this, for folks who have been part of iDMAa, was this gift from the Lily endowment back ten-twelve years ago. We were trying to figure out what it was that would really be a cool thing to do with it. We got $20,000,000 from the Lily endowment and for about 24 hours that was fun, exciting…then at about the 25th hour, there was a line of people out the 39 door with all these ideas about what we should spend that money on including people who thought “Well, how about $10,000,000 for my research on how rainwater affects bamboo growth in a remote province of China.” We just kind of scratched our heads and said, “What’s that got to do with anything?” There was a guy who came in and said, “You know what would be really transformative, what would really be a use of the money that would make a difference?” because otherwise we could just sit here on a mountaintop like hermits…but it was Ray Steel. Ray said, “What we should do is form a national organization, or an international organization, where like-minded people could come together and talk about these issues.” At the time it kind of seemed like a good idea, and I kind of thought maybe it would be a one-off thing… we get a group together (you probably remember, you were one of them) at Ball State in that conference room and then that kind of became, “Let’s get together for a meeting,” and then, “Let’s form an organization,” and then here it is ten years later and the group is still getting together. It’s grown, it’s going off in new directions and so that was a real lesson learned to me. Sometimes a really small thing like that… but when it involves connecting people who have a shared interest and an interest that wasn’t being served. Each of us came from different disciplines but somehow we weren’t finding a home… we felt like outsiders in our own world and iDMAa was this group of outsiders… but who all had that shared interest, in how digital media and arts were changing things. So, I guess that’s it. For me, ten years later, here we are having a conversation about those ten years and the fact that it’s still strong and folks are still getting together. To me, that’s a huge lesson learned and something kind of remarkable. That’s about iDMAa, I just wanted to make sure we talked about its own history.

iDMAa: I think the best thing about it is, in our world, they keep moving the goal post, which makes it fabulous… I love that.

SRO: These are a group of people who like the goal post moved, and I suppose we’re different than… maybe some other folks in other disciplines in higher education, who really want the goal post to stay put. We’re a group of folks who actually don’t just move with the goal post, we want to move! Keep moving them! And surprise us! And that’s part of the fun. So yeah, that’s been really gratifying to see that, and I wouldn’t have necessarily predicted that.

Article Authors

Scott Robert Olson

Dr. Scott Robert Olson is President of Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. He has published two books, 30 book chapters, and 22 journal articles in publications in the United States, Canada, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, and India. He has delivered over 100 papers at conferences in Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Taiwan, and the United States. Through a $20 million gift from the Lilly Endowment, Dr. Olson helped create the Center for Media Design and the Global Media Network at Ball State University, which won a national award from the American Council on Education. He won an Emmy Award and a Cine Golden Eagle Award in 2004 as executive producer of a documentary film about digital learning. His Ph.D. is from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He grew up in suburban Minneapolis.