Contemporary Authors

• What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic - 1992 Columbia University Press, New York, NY
• Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. - 1992 Routledge, New York, NY
• Classical Hollywood Comedy. - 1994 Routledge, New York, NY
• Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek and Their Followers - 1995 London, England, Routledge
• From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. - 1998 MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• The Children's Culture Reader. - 1998 New York, NY, New York University Press.
• Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. - 2002 Duke University Press, Durham, NC
• Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. - 2003 MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Democracy and New Media. Media in Transition. - 2003 MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. - 2006 New York University Press, New York, NY
• The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture - 2006 New York University Press, New York, NY
• Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. - 2006 New York University Press, New York, NY
• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, - 2009 MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture - 2013 New York University Press, New York, NY
• Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the English Literature Classroom - 2013 Teachers College Press, New York, NY
• Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics - 2015 Polity Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom
• By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, Connected Youth and Digital Futures - 2016 New York University Press, New York, NY

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  Henry Jenkins is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  Henry Jenkins
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  For other people named Henry Jenkins, see Henry Jenkins (disambiguation).
  Henry Jenkins

  Jenkins speaking via online video to the audience at Festival SOS 4.8 in Murcia, Spain in 2014.
  Born
  Henry Jenkins III
  June 4, 1958 (age 59)
  Atlanta, Georgia, United States
  Education
  B.A., Political Science & Journalism, M.A., Communication Studies; Ph.D., Communication Arts
  Alma mater
  Georgia State University, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin–Madison
  Occupation
  University Professor
  Years active
  1992–present
  Employer
  University of Southern California
  Known for
  Theories of "transmedia storytelling" and "convergence culture"
  Title
  Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts
  Spouse(s)
  Cynthia
  Children
  1
  Henry Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.[1] He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education.[2] Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder[3] and co-director (with William Uricchio) of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.[4] In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.[5]
  Jenkins has authored over a dozen books including By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (2016), Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1989).
  Beyond his home country of the United States and the broader English-speaking world, the influence of Jenkins' work (especially his transmedia storytelling and participatory culture work) on media academics as well as practitioners has been notable, for example, across Europe[6] as well as in Brazil[7] and India.[8]

  Contents [hide]
  1
  Education and personal life
  2
  Research fields
  2.1
  Comparative Media
  2.1.1
  Vaudeville and Popular Cinema
  2.1.2
  Comics Studies
  2.1.3
  Video Game Studies
  2.1.3.1
  Debate on Video Game Violence
  2.1.4
  Transmedia
  2.2
  Participatory Culture
  2.2.1
  Fan Studies
  2.2.2
  New Media Literacies
  2.2.3
  Convergence Culture
  2.2.4
  Spreadable Media
  2.2.5
  Participatory Politics (Youth Civics and Activism)
  2.3
  Children's Culture
  3
  Critiques
  3.1
  Restricted user agency and corporatisation
  3.2
  Limited focus
  3.3
  Democratic contribution
  3.4
  "More participatory culture"
  4
  Books published
  5
  See also
  6
  References
  7
  External links

  Education and personal life[edit]
  Jenkins graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism. He then earned his M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[9] He and his wife Cynthia Jenkins were housemasters of the Senior House dorm at MIT before leaving MIT for the University of Southern California in May 2009.[10] They have one son, Henry Jenkins IV.[11]
  Research fields[edit]
  Jenkins' academic work has covered a variety of research areas, which can categorized as follows:
  Comparative Media[edit]
  Jenkins' media studies scholarship has focussed on several specific forms of media - vaudeville theater, popular cinema, television, comics, and video games - as well as an aesthetic and strategic paradigm, transmedia, which is a framework for designing and communicating stories across many different forms of media. In general, Jenkins' interest in media has concentrated on popular culture forms. In 1999, Jenkins founded the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT as an interdisciplinary and applied humanities course which aimed "to integrate the study of contemporary media (film, television, digital systems) with a broad historical understanding of older forms of human expression.... and aims as well for a comparative synthesis that is responsive to the distinctive emerging media culture of the 21st century."[12] The same ethos can be found in Jenkins' research across various forms of media.
  Vaudeville and Popular Cinema[edit]
  Jenkins' interest in vaudeville theater and popular cinema was an early focus of his research career - his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin explored how the comedy performances of American vaudeville influenced comedy in 1930s sound films, such as those of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Eddie Cantor.[13] The dissertation became the basis of his 1992 book What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. A key argument of Jenkins' scholarship here was that vaudeville placed a strong emphasis on virtuoso performance and emotional impact which contrasted sharply with the focus of classical Hollywood cinema on character motivation and storytelling. Jenkins' approach was partly inspired by cultural commentators who believed that early cinema was unfairly treated by skeptical commentators of its era because it was a rising new popular culture medium. It was also influenced by scholars of film aesthetics such as David Bordwell. This approach would later help shape Jenkins' scholarly appreciation of video games as another rising popular culture medium attracting much criticism.[14]
  Comics Studies[edit]
  Jenkins, long a fan of comics, is also a scholar of the medium and it continues to be one of the key topics of his academic writing and speaking.[15] Jenkins' interest in comics ranges from superhero comics to alternative comics. His academic publications includes work on comics by Brian Michael Bendis, David W. Mack, Art Spiegelman, Basil Wolverton, Dean Motter, amongst others.[16] In December 2015, it was reported by Microsoft Research New England's Social Media Collective (where Jenkins was a visiting scholar at the time), that Jenkins was working on new book focussed on comics.[17]
  Video Game Studies[edit]
  Jenkins' research into video games was influenced by his prior interest in the debates around emerging popular culture media forms as well as his parallel interest in children's culture. Referring to Gilbert Seldes’ Seven Lively Arts (1924) which championed the aesthetic merits of popular arts often frowned on by critics who embraced high art to the exclusion of popular art, Jenkins dubbed video games "The New Lively Art" and argued that it was a crucial medium for the growing rise of digital interactive culture.[14]
  Jenkins brings an humanist interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on, for instance, cultural studies and literary studies. Examples of video game topics he has written extensively about include the gendering of video game spaces and play experiences,[18] the effects of interactivity on learning and the development of educational video games (this work led to the creation of the Microsoft Games-To-Teach initiative at MIT Comparative Media Studies in 2001 which in 2003 became the Education Arcade initiative, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin.[19][20]); and game design as a narrative architecture discipline.[21]
  Debate on Video Game Violence[edit]
  Jenkins' role in the video game violence debate has attracted particular public attention. He has been an advocate of a cultural studies approach to understanding media depictions of violence, arguing that "There is no such thing as media violence — at least not in the ways that we are used to talking about it — as something which can be easily identified, counted, and studied in the laboratory. Media violence is not something that exists outside of a specific cultural and social context.".[22] Jenkins has also called for a culturally focused pedagogical response to these issues.[23]
  Jenkins' views criticizing theories (such as Jack Thompson's argument) that video games depicting violence cause people to commit real-world violence have also been described in mainstream video game publications such as Next Generation, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer magazines.[24]
  Transmedia[edit]
  One of Jenkins' most well-known concepts has been his "transmedia storytelling", coined in 2003[25] which has become influential not just within academia but also in media arts and advertising/marketing circles and beyond.[26][27][28]
  Jenkins has defined transmedia storytelling as so:
  Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.[29]
  Transmedia storytelling, Jenkins writes, is "the art of world-making", "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others";[30] and crucially, these different stories or story fragments can be spread across many different media platforms encouraging users engaged in the story experience to explore a broader media ecosystem in order to piece together a fuller and deeper understanding of the narrative.
  Building on his studies of media fans and participatory culture, Jenkins has emphasized that transmedia storytelling strategies are well-suited for harnessing the collective intelligence of media users.[31] Jenkins has also emphasized that transmedia is not a new phenomena - ancient examples can be found in religion, for example[32] - but the capabilities of new internet and digital technologies for participatory and collective audience engagement across many different media platforms have made the approach more powerful and relevant.
  The principles of transmedia storytelling have also been applied to other areas, including transmedia education and transmedia branding, for instance through initiatives led by Jenkins at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.[33][34]
  Participatory Culture[edit]
  Participatory culture has been an encompassing concern of much of Jenkins' scholarly work which has focussed on developing media theory and practice principles by which media users are primarily understood as active and creative participants rather than merely as passive consumers and simplistically receptive audiences. This participatory engagement is seen as increasingly important given the enhanced interactive and networked communication capabilities of digital and internet technologies.[35] Jenkins has described the creative social phenomena arising from as participatory culture and is considered one of the main academics specializing in this topic - see, for instance, his 2015 book Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics co-authored with Mimi Ito and danah boyd. Jenkins has highlighted the work of media scholar John Fiske as a major influence, particularly in this area of participatory culture.[36]
  Jenkins has defined participatory culture as one...
  "1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
  2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
  3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
  4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
  5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued."[37]
  Jenkins has also highlighted these key forms of participatory culture:
  "Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media (such as Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
  Expressions — producing new creative forms (such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
  Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
  Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)."[38]
  In addition, Jenkins and his collaborators have also identified a range of media literacy skills needed to be effective members of these participatory culture forms[38] - see the New Media Literacies section below.
  Fan Studies[edit]
  Jenkins' work on fan culture arises from his scholarly interests in popular culture and media as well as reflection on his own experiences as a media fan. This also shaped his interest and understanding of participatory culture. Jenkins has described himself as an "aca-fan", a term that first gained currency in the early 1990s [39] that he is credited with helping to popularize more widely (together with Matt Hills' concept of the "fan-academic" in his 2002 work Fan Cultures) to describe an academic who consciously identifies and writes as a fan.[40] Jenkins' 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is regarded as a seminal and foundational work on fan culture which helped establish its legitimacy as a serious topic for academic inquiry, not just in television studies but beyond.[41][42][43] Jenkins' research in Textual Poachers showed how fans construct their own culture by appropriating and remixing—"poaching"—content from mass culture. Through this "poaching", the fans carried out such creative cultural activities as rethinking personal identity issues such as gender and sexuality; writing stories to shift focus onto a media "storyworld's" secondary characters; producing content to expand of the timelines of a storyworld; or filling in missing scenes in the storyworld's official narratives order to better satisfy the fan community.
  New Media Literacies[edit]
  Building on his work on participatory culture, Jenkins helped lead Project New Media Literacies (NML), one part of a 5-year $50 million research initiative on digital learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation which announced it in 2006.[44] NML's aim was to develop instructional materials designed to help prepare young people to meaningfully participate in the new media environment. As Jenkins explained it: "The NML conceptual framework includes an understanding of challenges, new media literacies, and participatory forms. This framework guides thinking about how to provide adults and youth with the opportunity to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies, and to explore the transformations and possibilities afforded by these technologies to reshape education."[45] Jenkins introduces a range of social skills and cultural competencies that are fundamental for meaningful participation in a participatory culture. The new media literacies areas given particular definitions by this project (as listed here) include: appropriation (education), collective intelligence, distributed cognition, judgment, negotiation, networking, performance, simulation, transmedia navigation, participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics problem.
  Convergence Culture[edit]
  Since his work on fan studies, which led to his 1992 book Textual Poachers, Jenkins' research across various topics can be understood as a continuum with an overall theme. This research theme addresses how groups and communities in online & digital media era participatory culture exercise their own agency. Such agency is exercised by tapping into and combining numerous different media sources and channels, in both officially approved and unapproved ways; when fans or users work as communities to leverage their combined expertise, a collective intelligence process is generated. One of Jenkins' key arguments is that given these cultural phenomena, media convergence is best understood by both media scholars and practitioners as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. The key work in Jenkins' development of this argument was his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. As described in this book, convergence culture arises from digital era post-broadcast media landscape where audiences are fragmented by the proliferation of channels and platforms while media users are more empowered than ever before to participate and collaborate - across various channels and platforms - in content creation and dissemination through their access to online networks and digital interactivity.
  To help apply the insights of the convergence culture paradigm to industry, he founded the Convergence Culture Consortium - later renamed the Futures of Entertainment Consortium - research initiative in 2005[46] when he was director of Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. Starting in 2006, the Consortium launched the annual Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT for a combined academic and industry audience. In 2010, a sister annual hybrid academia-industry conference, Transmedia Hollywood (renamed Transforming Hollywood in 2014) hosted by USC and UCLA was launched.[47][48][49]
  Spreadable Media[edit]
  Building on his work on convergence culture as well as being a direct outgrowth of the conversations between industry and academia fostered by the Convergence Culture Consortium, Jenkins developed the concept of spreadable media as an alternative to viral media and memes for use by both media scholars and practitioners. (This led to his 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green). The idea of viral media or memes uses metaphors which leave little room for deliberate agency while Jenkins' idea of spreadability focusses on the active agency of the ordinary media user in sharing, distributing, creating and/or remixing media content. This focus on the active media user is understood through this concept as increasingly crucial in online/digital era media landscapes where participatory culture is more important than ever, and where the dominance of large-scale media content distribution tightly controlled by corporate or governmental owners has been undermined by the rise of grassroots circulation. The idea of spreadability also contrasts with the idea of “stickiness” in media strategy, which calls for aggregating and holding attention on particular websites or other media channels, Spreadability instead calls for media strategists to embrace how their audiences and users will actively disperse content, using formal and informal networks, not always approved.[50]
  Participatory Politics (Youth Civics and Activism)[edit]
  Jenkins has led the Civic Paths and Media, Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) initiatives at USC Annenberg since 2009 - work supported in part by a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning initiative on Youth & Participatory Politics. The focus of these related initiatives has been on studying innovative online and digital media practices in grassroots youth-led civics and activism movements, and builds on Jenkins' earlier work on fan cultures, online communities, and participatory culture. In 2016, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, a book co-authored by Jenkins and based on the work of Civic Paths and MAPP, was published.
  Children's Culture[edit]
  One focus of Jenkins' earlier scholarly career was children's culture, which he has defined as "popular culture produced for, by, and/or about children.... the central arena through which we construct our fantasies about the future and a battleground through which we struggle to express competing ideological agendas."[51] Key topics in Jenkins' children's culture research include children as media consumers, video game studies, the history of child-rearing, the cultural construction of childhood innocence, and the debates over media violence.[51]

  Henry Jenkins in Budapest, Hungary in June 2012[52]
  Critiques[edit]
  Jenkins’ conception of media convergence, and in particular convergence culture, has inspired much scholarly debate.
  In 2011, a special issue of the academic journal Cultural Studies was dedicated to the critical discussion of Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture. Titled ‘Rethinking “Convergence/Culture,” the volume was edited by James Hay and Nick Couldry. Hay and Couldry identify some of the key scholarly critiques of Jenkins’ work on convergence culture. They are: an excessive emphasis on the participatory potential of users; an under-appreciation of the inherently corporate logic of convergence; an insufficient consideration of the broader media landscape, with its corresponding power dynamics, in which the user engages with convergence; and an overly optimistic view of the democratic contribution of convergence.[53]
  Jenkins published a detailed response in a 2014 issue of the same journal, (also published online by the journal in 2013)—'Rethinking "Rethinking Convergence/Culture"'—countering the critiques laid out in the special issue and clarifying aspects of his work.[54]
  Restricted user agency and corporatisation[edit]
  A prominent critique in the special Cultural Studies issue criticizing Jenkins’ account of convergence culture is that he overstates the power of the user in a convergent media sphere. Jenkins argues that convergence represents a fundamental change in the relationship between producers and consumers of media content. With the transition from supposedly passive to active consumers, the role and agency of consumers have been redefined, with a focus on their ability to engage with media content on their own terms.[55][56] The ability of these ‘newly’ (the novelty and substantiveness of this empowerment is contested by some critics) empowered audiences to migrate to the content they wanted to engage with was central to Jenkins’ claim that convergence is reshaping the cultural logic of media, giving rise to what he termed ‘participatory culture’.[57][58] Participatory culture follows from the replacement of the supposedly passive media consumer with a new active media user in an online sphere, no longer governed by the unidirectional dynamic of traditional mass media but by the two-way dynamic of interactivity. These critics interpreted Jenkins' account as a techno-optimist conception of the agency of these users and therefore saw it as highly contentious. Jenkins’ account of the dynamic of traditional mass media, and subsequent passivity of the audience is criticised as simplistic because he overemphasises the virtues of interactivity, without considering the real-life power structures in which users exist.[59] In his 2014 response, Jenkins rejected these critics' characterization of his work as techno-optimistic or techno-determinist, stressing that the outcomes of current social and technological change are still to be determined. He also argued that his critics confuse interactivity (pre-programmed into the technology) and participation (emerging from social and cultural factors). Jenkins also countered that there has been a significant level of acknowledging the broader context of offline power structures throughout his scholarship.[54]
  Nico Carpentier's argument in the special Cultural Studies issue was that what he sees as Jenkins' “conflation of interaction and participation” is misleading: the opportunities for interaction have increased, but the conglomerated and corporate media environment that convergence has both facilitated and come about in, restricts the capacity of users to genuinely participate in the production, or co-production, of content, due to the media systems' logic of commercial gain.[60] This is in keeping with traditional media business models, which sought a static, easily quantifiable audience to advertise to. In 2012-3, Carpentier and Jenkins had an extended dialogue which clarified that their perspectives actually had much common ground, leading to their co-authoring of a journal article about the distinctions between participation and interaction, and how the two concepts are tied up with power.[61]
  Mark Andrejevic also critiqued Jenkins in the 2011 special issue, emphasizing that interactivity can be seen as the provision of detailed user information for exploitation by marketers in the affective economy, that the users themselves willingly submit to.[62] And according to Ginette Verstraete's critique of Jenkins' work in the same issue, the tools of media convergence are inextricably corporate in their purpose and function, even the generation of alternative meanings through co-creation is necessarily contained within a commercial system where “the primary aim is the generation of capital and power through diffraction”.[63] Thus, user agency as enabled by media convergence is always already restricted.
  This critique of convergence culture as facilitating the disenfranchisement of the user, is taken up by Jack Bratich, who argues that rather than necessarily and inherently facilitating democracy (as Jenkins' position is interpreted by Bratich) convergence may instead achieve the opposite.[64] This emphasis on convergence as restricting the capacities of those who engage with it is also made by Sarah Banet-Weiser in reference to the commodification of creativity.[65] She argues that as convergence is “a crucial element to the logic of capitalism,” the democratisation of creative capacity that has been enabled by media convergence, through platforms such as YouTube, serves a commercial purpose.[66] In this account, users become workers and the vast majority of convergence-enabled creative output, by virtue of the profit-driven platforms on which it takes place, can be seen as a byproduct of the profit-imperative. In contrast to Bratich's and Banet-Weiser's perspectives, in Jenkins' 2014 response to the critical special issue, he wrote that "These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily provide key educational resources, and do not ensure that anyone will listen when groups speak out about injustices they encounter." Jenkins' position is that he has argued consistently - including in his 2006 book Convergence Culture - against any inherent outcomes of convergence.[54]
  Limited focus[edit]
  Catherine Driscoll, Melissa Gregg, Laurie Ouellette, and Julie Wilson refer to Jenkins' work in the 2011 special issue as part of their challenging of the larger framework of media convergence scholarship. They argue that the willing submission of the user to the corporate interests fuelling media convergence is also gendered as the logic of convergence, which is, to a large extent, informed by the logic of capitalism, albeit in an online environment, perpetuating the ongoing exploitation of women through a replication of the ‘free’ labour built into social expectations of women.[67][68] And Richard Maxwell & Toby Miller in the same issue also reference Jenkins' work to critique the broader discourse of media convergence, arguing that the logic of convergence is one of ceaseless growth and innovation that inevitably preferences commercial over individual interests.[69](In Jenkins' 2014 response, he counters that throughout his scholarship he has emphasized collective agency not individual agency[54]). Furthermore, Maxwell & Miller argue prevailing discussions of convergence have attended to the micro level of technological progress over the macro level of rampant economic exploitation, through concepts like ‘playbour' (labour freely provided by users as they interact with the online world) resulting in a dominant focus on the Global North that ignores the often abhorrent material conditions of workers in the Global South who fuel the ongoing proliferation of digital capitalism.
  Democratic contribution[edit]
  In his contribution to the special Cultural Studies issue critiquing Jenkins' work on convergence, Graeme Turner argued for the need to be wary of any overtly optimistic accounts of the impacts of convergence culture.[70] Although there is no denying, he argues, that the idea of convergence has “its heart in the right place,” seeking the “empowerment for the individual ... the democratizing potential of new media, and ... [the desire to] achieve something more socially useful than commercial success,” there are no guarantees that any of this is achievable.[71] In his 2014 response to such criticism, Jenkins acknowledged that "My experiences at intervention have tempered some of the exuberance people have identified in Convergence Culture with a deeper understanding of how difficult it will be to make change happen....I have also developed a deeper appreciation for all of the systemic and structural challenges we face in changing the way established institutions operate, all of the outmoded and entrenched thinking which make even the most reasonable reform of established practices difficult to achieve..."[54]
  "More participatory culture"[edit]
  In Jenkins' 2014 response to the 2011 special issue, he countered arguments such as Turner’s above by stating that while we may not yet know the full extent of the impact of convergence, we are “better off remaining open to new possibilities and emerging models”. However Jenkins agreed too that his original conception of participatory culture could be overly optimistic about the possibilities of convergence.[54] He also suggested that the revised phrasing of ‘more participatory culture,’ which acknowledges the radical potential of convergence without pessimistically characterising it as a tool of “consumer capitalism [that] will always fully contain all forms of grassroots resistance”. Such pessimism, in this view, would repeat the determinist error of the overly optimistic account. As Jenkins wrote in his 2014 response: "Today, I am much more likely to speak about a push toward a more participatory culture, acknowledging how many people are still excluded from even the most minimal opportunities for participation within networked culture, and recognizing that new grassroots tactics are confronting a range of corporate strategies which seek to contain and commodify the popular desire for participation. As a consequence, elites still exert a more powerful influence on political decision-making than grassroots networks, even if we are seeing new ways to assert alternative perspectives into the decision-making process."[54]
  Books published[edit]
  Jenkins, Henry (1992). What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-07855-2.
  Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. Studies in culture and communication. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90571-0.
  Jenkins, Henry (ed. with Kristine Brunovska Karnick) (1994). Classical Hollywood Comedy. American Film Institute Film Readers. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall. ISBN 0-415-90639-3.
  Tulloch, John; Jenkins, Henry (1995). Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek and Their Followers. London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall. ISBN 0-4150-6141-5.
  Jenkins, Henry (ed. with Justine Cassell) (1998). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2620-3258-9.
  Jenkins, Henry (1998). The Children's Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-4231-9.
  Jenkins, Henry (ed. with Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc) (2002). Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-2737-6.
  Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins (Eds.) (2003). Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Media in Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-20146-1.
  Jenkins, Henry and David Thorburn (Eds.) (2003). Democracy and New Media. Media in Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-10101-7.
  Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-4281-5.
  Jenkins, Henry (2006). The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-4282-3.
  Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-4284-X.
  Jenkins, Henry (with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison) (2009), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, ISBN 9780262513623
  Jenkins, Henry; Ford, Sam; Green, Joshua (2013), Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, New York: New York University Press, ISBN 0-8147-4350-1
  Jenkins, Henry; Kelley, Wyn (with Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Erin Reilly) (2013), Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the English Literature Classroom, New York: Teachers College Press, ISBN 9780262513623
  Jenkins, Henry; Ito, Mizuko; boyd, danah (2015), Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, ISBN 0-7456-6070-3
  Jenkins, Henry; Shresthova, Sangita; Gamber-Thompson, Liana; Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta; Zimmerman, Arely (2016), By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, Connected Youth and Digital Futures, New York: New York University Press, ISBN 1-4798-9998-4

• Henry Jenkins Website - http://henryjenkins.org/

  Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of seventeen books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. He is currently editing a handbook on the civic imagination and writing a book on “comics and stuff”. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
  Jenkins is the principal investigator for The Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, to explore ways to inspire creative collaborations within communities as they work together to identify shared values and visions for the future. This project grew out of the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics research group, also funded by MacArthur, which did case studies of innovative organizations that have been effective at getting young people involved in the political process. He is also the Chief Advisor to the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Jenkins also serves on the jury that selects the Peabody Awards, which recognizes “stories that matter” from radio, television, and the web.
  He has previously worked as the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture that has become the springboard for the group's efforts to develop and test educational materials focused on preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape. He also was the founder for the Convergence Culture Consortium, a faculty network which seeks to build bridges between academic researchers and the media industry in order to help inform the rethinking of consumer relations in an age of participatory culture. The Consortium lives on today via the Transforming Hollywood conference, run jointly between USC and UCLA, which recently hosted its 8th event.
  While at MIT, he was one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. Jenkins also plays a significant role as a public advocate for fans, gamers and bloggers: testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into "Marketing Violence to Youth" following the Columbine shootings; advocating for media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission; calling for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property at a closed door meeting of the governing body of the World Economic Forum; signing amicus briefs in opposition to games censorship; regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture; and most recently, serving as an expert witness in the legal struggle over the fan-made film, Prelude to Axanar. He also has served as a consultant on the Amazon children’s series Lost in Oz, where he provided insights on world-building and transmedia strategies as well as new media literacy issues.
  Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  Well, that didn't seem so simple after all. For a somewhat more personal account of who I am, read on.
  About Me
  The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said, "I would have written it shorter, but I didn't have enough time."
  My earliest work centered on television fans – particularly science fiction fans. Part of what drew me into graduate school in media studies was a fascination with popular culture. I grew up reading Mad magazine and Famous Monsters of Filmland – and, much as my parents feared, it warped me for life. Early on, I discovered the joys of comic books and science fiction, spent time playing around with monster makeup, started writing scripts for my own Super 8 movies (The big problem was that I didn't have access to a camera until much later), and collecting television-themed toys. By the time I went to college, I was regularly attending science fiction conventions. Through the woman who would become my wife, I discovered fan fiction. And we spent a great deal of time debating our very different ways of reading our favorite television series.
  When I got to graduate school, I was struck by how impoverished the academic framework for thinking about media spectatorship was – basically, though everyone framed it differently, consumers were assumed to be passive, brainless, inarticulate, and brainwashed. None of this jelled well with my own robust experience of being a fan of popular culture. I was lucky enough to get to study under John Fiske, first at Iowa and then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who introduced me to the cultural studies perspective. Fiske was a key advocate of ethnographic audience research, arguing that media consumers had more tricks up their sleeves than most academic theory acknowledged.
  Out of this tension between academic theory and fan experience emerged first an essay, "Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten" and then a book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Textual Poachers emerged at a moment when fans were still largely marginal to the way mass media was produced and consumed, and still hidden from the view of most "average consumers." As such, the book represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe fans as "rogue readers." What most people took from that book was my concept of "poaching," the idea that fans construct their own culture – fan fiction, artwork, costumes, music and videos – from content appropriated from mass media, reshaping it to serve their own needs and interests. There are two other key concepts in this early work which takes on greater significance in my work today – the idea of participatory culture (which runs throughout Convergence Culture) and the idea of a moral economy (that is, the presumed ethical norms which govern the relations between media producers and consumers).
  Aca/Fan Defined

  Textual Poachers and much of my subsequent work has been written from the perspective of an Aca/Fan – that is, a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic (hence the title of this blog). The goal of my work has been to bridge the gap between these two worlds. I take it as a personal challenge to find a way to break cultural theory out of the academic bookstore ghetto and open up a larger space to talk about the media that matters to us from a consumer's point of view. This philosophy has governed my various stabs at journalism and public advocacy, and they are what has motivated me to develop a personal blog.
  Convergence Culture

  Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide returns to this question of media audiences and participatory cultures at a moment where fans and fan-like activities are absolutely central to the way the culture industries operate. At all levels, the assumption is that consumers will become active participants, but there is widespread dispute about the terms of our participation. We are seeing enormous experimentation into the potential intersections between commercial and grassroots culture and about the power of living within a networked society. At the same time, the media industries are struggling to keep up with these changes, issuing contradictory responses out of different divisions within the same companies. Convergence Culture was designed as a public intervention into this situation, trying to help both consumers and producers understand the changes which are occurring in their relationship.

  Fans, Bloggers and Gamers maps the transition between the world described in Textual Poachers and the world depicted in Convergence Culture. It reprints many of my key essays about participatory culture through the years, including early writings about fans and later writings which sought to respond to some of the moral panic kicked up by Columbine and claims that games and other forms of popular culture were leading young people to the brink of damnation.
  It's safe to say that neither of these books would have come about if I had not moved to MIT twenty years ago and found myself immersed in the vibrant digital culture of the past decade. I often claimed that I was a walking, talking oxymoron – a humanist from MIT. But I think that my unique perspective as someone studying culture within one of the world's leading technical institutions gave me some distinctive insights into the ways that culture and technology are reshaping before our very eyes. My move to the University of Southern California reflects my growing desire to see inside the media industries, especially as they are being forced to adopt new models of entertainment such as the transmedia storytelling I described in Convergence Culture. I spent two decades at MIT studying the digital revolution, and now I want to spend the next two decades trying to grasp its impact on Hollywood.
  Comparative Media Studies

  One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life was the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program has encouraged students to think across media, across historical periods, across national borders, across academic disciplines, across the divide between theory and practice and across the divides between the academy and the rest of society. Our goal was simply to train the next generation of leaders for industry, government, education, the arts, journalism and academia to think in more imaginative ways about the process of media change. I like to joke that CMS is a program for people who could never decide what they wanted to major in. It is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the terms – my own sense is that the academic disciplines which emerged around the problems of the industrial age have outlived their usefulness in a networked culture and that we need to reconfigure the ways we organize and communicate knowledge to our students.
  Central to the vision of CMS is the idea of "applied humanism." MIT has applied math, applied physics and applied chemistry, so it made sense to me that there should be an applied branch of the humanities. Our goal was to take what we were teaching in our classrooms and give students a chance to apply it more pragmatically to think through some of the core challenges being faced out in the field as core institutions confront media change. With this in mind, we have launched a range of research initiatives which I will continue covering in this blog.
  Convergence Culture Consortium

  The Convergence Culture Consortium was a direct outgrowth of my writing about what happens when participatory culture meets the creative industries. We wanted to bring together key thinkers from a number of different disciplines and universities who were interested in the kinds of social and cultural changes that were impacting the branded entertainment sector. We wanted to bring together leading entertainment companies and marketers to create a dialogue about where media is going and how it impacts consumers. We published research and spark discussion on topics such as advergaming and product placement, transmedia storytelling and mobile entertainment, alternative reality games, digital/fan cultures, and changes in media consumption, among other topics. And I got to go into places like the Cartoon Network and lecture them about what they need to know about the fan communities I study. The consortium shut down after I left MIT, but some of the spirit of C3 has continued via my collaborations with Denise Mann (UCLA) to run the Transforming Hollywood (originally Transmedia Hollywood) conference. Recent events have centered around the future of television, virtual reality and immersive entertainment, diversifying entertainment, and big data’s impact on entertainment. Through my involvement with the Annenberg Innovation Lab, I have continued to engage with the media industries in Los Angeles and beyond, especially as it relates to the continued expansion of transmedia approaches and practices around the world, but also in terms of advising companies on fan engagement. I also serve as an Advisory Board Member for the Disney Jr. television network and as a jury member of the Peabody Awards Committee.

  One important off-shoot of the Consortium was the book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Society, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. The book originated for a white paper originally published by C3 and much discussed with consortium members. The book challenges many common assumption about how social media works, including ideas about viral media, influencers, and the like. Rather, we focus on the ways that the grassroots circulation of media has reshaped the advertising and entertainment industries, is having an impact on nonprofit sectors, and may also create new opportunities for alternative and transnational media producers.
  Project NML

  With Project New Media Literacies, the focus was on the educational challenges of making sure that every kid in America has the social skills and cultural competencies needed to participate in a networked society. According to the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than sixty percent of American teens have produced media, and a significant portion have distributed that media content online. We need to be aware of the challenges faced by both halves of that statistic – those faced by media makers who lack the traditional mentorship and apprenticeship into production practices and ethical norms which would have shaped previous generations of media makers (student journalists, for example) and those faced by those who are not yet making media – what we are calling the participation gap between those who have anywhere, anytime access and those who may only be able to go online on a library computer with limited bandwidth, filtered content, short work spans and no capacity to store or upload what they create.
  This project argues that media literacy skills, broadly defined, need to be integrated into school-based and after-school programs, into adult education for parents and teachers and into popular culture itself if we are going to fully address the challenges of this moment of media in transition. When we moved to Southern California, this research led us to run an after-school program pilot at the Robert F. Kennedy School, to run our own professional development program helping teachers to embrace more participatory practices in their classroom, and to develop a report on transmedia approaches to learning for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, T is For Transmedia. Our work on education has also resulted in three books, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, 2009), Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the Literature Classroom ( with Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Erin Reilly, 2013) and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (with Mimi Ito and danah boyd, 2016).
  The Civic Imagination Project

  Around the time I arrived at USC, I was invited to join a interdisciplinary research network being established by the MacArthur Foundation. Youth and Participatory Politics was headed by Joseph Kahne (then at Mills College) and brought together both quantitative and qualitative researchers interested in trying to understand the political lives of American youth especially as they related to new media platforms and practices. With the help of my research director Sangita Shreshtova, we established the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics research team and more broadly, the Civic Paths research group at USC. We ended up doing case studies on the Harry Potter Alliance; Nerdfighters; Invisible Children; American Muslim youth; the Dreamer movement; and young Libertarians. The results were reported in our book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (with Sangita Shreshtova, Liana Gamber Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman , 2016). As we were developing this book, we also developed byanymedia.org, an online extension, which archives youth-produced media from a range of movements. We partnered with Pivot Television, Participant Media, and hitRECord to develop some conversation starter videos to discuss civics and ethics in the classroom, which we tested with teachers via collaborations with the National Writing Project and the National Association of Media Literacy Educators.
  Along the way, we became interested in the concept of the “Civic Imagination.” We believe that imaginative acts shape many elements of our understanding of the political realm helping us to:
  Model what a better world might look like
  Identify ourselves as civic agents
  Map the process for change
  Build solidarity with others within our imagined/imagining community
  Develop empathy with those whose experiences differ from our own
  And for the oppressed, imagine equality and freedom before we directly experience it
  We have been using world-building exercises to help communities of all kinds think through how they might address some of these core questions together, including participating in the Salzburg Academy for Global Media and Social Change (working with youth from 30 countries) and as part of a summer program in Beirut for journalists and educators from 10 Arab countries. We now have funding to run workshops across the United States and are increasingly working in international contexts. Our team is currently producing an anthology exploring examples of where activist groups from diverse communities around the world have used popular culture to foster the various functions of the civic imagination.
  And Stuff

  And of course, this just scratches the surface in terms of my academic interest. I began my career writing about vaudeville and early sound comedy (What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Anarchistic Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic). Through the years, I have written about professional wrestling, Doctor Seuss, Lassie, Pee-Wee's Playhouse and a host of other popular culture works. This strand of my research is represented by another book, The Wow Climax: Tracing The Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. And comic books remain a popular culture passion. My current book project centers on the representation of material culture, collecting, accumulating, clutter, inheritance, and culling in the work of a range of contemporary alternative comics producers.

  I never can keep my personal life separated from my professional life. This comes from being a fan/academic. Much of what I write about popular culture is driven by an autobiographical impulse and also reflects the tastes and interests of my son, Charlie (now in his thirties) and my wife, Cynthia, who helped get me into fan culture in the first place. I also seek inspiration from my students.
  My wife would no doubt tell you that it is symptomatic of my workaholic tendencies that I cram my personal life into the last paragraph of an overly long and overly detailed account of my life. The reality is that most of my work is deeply personal, and my personal relationships shape everything else I do. Cynthia and I now live in downtown Los Angeles, where we have found that it is possible to have a lifestyle based more on walking and public transportation than on driving. We live in a beautiful art deco building that dates back to 1930 and on a street which is lined with the rotting remains of amazing movie palaces from the golden age of Hollywood.
  And Now a Blog...
  Well, actually, at this point, the blog has been running for more than a decade. We've had an amazing ride so far. Within the next year, I will make my 2000th post. This blog is a place where I share my thoughts about many contemporary developments and publish my works in progress. It is also a space where I showcase the work of my students at MIT and now at USC and give you a glimpse into the world where I live and work. And it is a place where I spotlight interesting work in the field of media studies which may be relevant to a readership that includes not only academics but also journalists, educators, industry insiders, policy makers, fans and gamers. You will see that I regularly run interviews with interesting people I encounter in the course of my research. I hope you enjoy what you see here. Sit down, take off your shoes and stay a while. As I said, I am long-winded, but I will make it worth your time.

• - https://annenberg.usc.edu/faculty/communication-journalism/henry-jenkins

  Henry Jenkins
  Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education
  Program
  Communication Ph.D Program
  Digital Social Media Program
  Global Communication Program
  Email hjenkins@usc.edu

  Website http://www.henryjenkins.org
  Expertise Criticism Education Entertainment IDEA Media History Networks New Media Popular Culture Public Culture Social Media

  Henry Jenkins joined USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993 - 2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment.
  As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory culture on business, politics and education. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking websites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.
  Through parallels drawn between the consumption of pop culture and the processing of news information, he and his fellow researchers have identified new methods to encourage citizen engagement. Jenkins runs the Civic Paths research group in Annenberg, which currently is exploring the Civic Imagination as a result of funding from the MacArthur Foundation. Their previous work resulted in By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.
  Jenkins has also played a central role in demonstrating the importance of new media technologies in educational settings. He also has worked closely with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to shape a media literacy program designed to explore the effects of participatory media on young people, and reveal potential new pathways for education through emerging digital media.
  He has published more than 17 books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Era, and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.
  His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities the early history of film comedy, and contemporary comics and graphic novels.

  Five Minutes with Henry Jenkins: Popular culture and political change 'By Any Media Necessary'
  Sep. 22, 2016 Yosuke Kitazawa Updated Sep. 22, 2016 5:41 pm
  Inside USC Annenberg's classrooms, students are the ones typically tasked with answering the hard questions. "Five Minutes with..." turns the tables on faculty members by asking them the questions.

  Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at USC. He is recognized as a leading thinker in the effort to redefine the role of journalism in the digital age. His work has focused on media consumers and participatory culture, which he defines as "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices."
  Jenkins describes himself an "Aca-Fan," a hybrid academic and a fan who tries to bridge the gap between those two worlds. A voracious consumer of popular culture himself, his research has involved observing fan experiences—of film, television, games, books—from a cultural studies perspective.

  His latest book "By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism" examines how contemporary American youth are utilizing new forms of communication, like social media and viral memes, to fight social issues, dispelling the notion that they’re uninterested in politics and current affairs. The book provides case studies analyzing a wide variety of organizations and movements involving youth, including the Harry Potter Alliance, Invisible Children, and DREAMer movement.
  Jenkins shared a few thoughts with us about the book, participatory politics, Twitter revolutions, and the age-old battle between Star Wars and Star Trek fans.
  What do you mean by "the new youth activism"?

  I have been part of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP), and our book emerged from multidisciplinary conversations seeking to understand the political lives of young people today. My co-authors—Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Arely Zimmerman—were researchers and scholars affiliated with our Civic Paths research group here at USC.
  Our book looks closely at five cases—Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 campaign, fan activism as embodied by the Harry Potter Alliance and Nerd Fighters, the DREAMer movement for the rights of undocumented youth, various cultural movements involving American Muslims, and young Libertarians. We could have discussed many others, especially Occupy Wall Street and #Blacklivesmatter, and perhaps even the Bernie Sanders campaign. We've identified a much broader range of examples through our digital archive, at byanymedia.org.

  In each of these movements, young people play central roles—their participation is not simply an apprenticeship to adult leaders. They are not simply stuffing envelopes; they are often shaping the strategies, tactics, and messages of these movements. They are not treated as citizens in the making, but rather as already political agents who are making a difference in the world. In each of these cases, the mechanisms and infrastructure of what I call participatory culture get adopted and deployed by these movements in order to bring about social change. We call this participatory politics.
  These movements have been innovative in their use of social media but they all represent efforts to change the world "by any media necessary"—that is, through tactics that deploy whatever communication resources they can access. Social media has in particular enabled them to circulate their messages through larger networks with limited opportunity costs. Often, these groups are seeking change through educational or cultural mechanisms as much as through institutional politics, reflecting a growing sense that American democratic institutions are busted. While it is urgent to repair that damaged system, some problems can't wait and changing people's hearts and minds can make a difference in how we treat each other.

  Are there any examples of movements from the past that could not exist today? Or vice versa?

  Malcolm Gladwell famously set up a contrast between the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today's "Twitter revolutions." We think this contrast is problematic in many senses, starting with the fact that he is comparing a social movement with a media platform. We could talk about the civil rights movement as a long distance telephone revolution—the leaders spent a lot of time coordinating activities across geographic distances via the telephone—but we would never reduce that movement to a single platform. Rather, the civil rights movement used many different means to change people's thinking, and the same would be true of today's activists.
  This is why we evoke Malcolm X when talking about change "by any media necessary" and the connections back to Malcolm X are clear. He shared a vision of social change which required his community to gain greater control over the means of media production and circulation and saw youth as a driver of those changes. So, we see lots of continuities with previous movements, but the new media environment opens up other possibilities—new communication channels—which expand the repertoire available to social movements.

  That said, we do see some distinctions if we look at the traditional immigration reform movement and the DREAMers. The immigration reform movement has historically been more hierarchical, with messages controlled by select community leaders (especially ethnic media producers); the DREAMers have been much more broad-based and participatory, with young people often producing and sharing their own "coming out" videos via YouTube, other media sharing sites, and even in person. In many cases, these are the digital have-nots: young bloggers who do not own their own computers, young video makers who do not own their own cameras. They have been effective at coordinating their activities across geographic distances and cultural differences because of the networked structure of their organization. And they have made the process of change an everyday aspect of their lives via social media as opposed to a special event, such as a protest rally.

  What role does social media play in youth activism? How do non-millennial activists view social media?

  Young people get much of their information from social media, which means that news and political messages are integrated into their everyday interactions with their friends. While social media is one tool among many for today's social movements, it has a special status because it connects so immediately with people's everyday lives. Many young people complain that the language of politics is exclusive (in that it assumes a policy wonk already well informed about the political process) and repulsive (in that it reads every issue through partisan gamesmanship). The use of memes and remix videos, for example, spread through social media, allows young people to experiment with other languages through which to frame political messages. And these platforms are appropriate for the models of social change driving their campaigns—change that comes on a grassroots level, change that comes through educating people and shifting the culture rather than necessarily changing laws.

  That said, researchers often find young people moving away from political speech on social media over time because of discomfort in bringing divisive issues into what is for them a core support mechanism. We hear more and more stories of people getting so fed up by the divisive political debates on Facebook this election cycle, that they are abandoning social media altogether, or conversely, choosing to keep their political opinions to themselves. So, as they say in Facebook-land, it's complicated.

  Should an organization like the Harry Potter Alliance, deeply rooted in pop culture, be taken seriously when it comes to influencing policy?

  Our research has led us more and more to focus on what we call the Civic Imagination. Imagination plays a range of functions in the process of political change. Before we can change the world, we have to be able to imagine what a better world looks like. We have to see ourselves as agents capable of making change. We have to see ourselves as connecting in powerful ways to a larger community. We often need empathy for people whose experiences differ from our own.

  In different historical and cultural contexts, the civic imagination is inspired from different sources. For the American founding fathers, it was the ideal of democracy in the classical world. For the civil rights movement, it was the rhetoric of the black church and particularly the story of Moses. For many young people around the world, the civic imagination is being fed by stories appropriated and remixed from popular culture. We see activists are fighting for social justice using superheroes, the three finger salute from "Hunger Games," the Guy Fawkes mask from "V for Vendetta," and as of this summer, Pokemon Go. We've found this across all of the social movements we've considered, and as we expand our research for our next phase we increasingly believe that this is a global phenomenon.

  The Harry Potter Alliance is a powerful example of the civic imagination at work—a large network of young activists working in support of human rights struggles while tapping the infrastructure and skills of the fan community. The practices which work to draw in young people who may not have seen themselves as "political" before may sometimes work to decrease the success of such groups when working within political institutions, but less so than you might think. These groups are forging partnerships with human rights organizations and NGOs, they are helping to shape the agendas of political debates, and they are drawing mainstream media coverage to their issues.

  What's the role of entertainment in promoting social justice causes, such as the events put on by Invisible Children or, more recently, celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio's participation in the protest against building the Dakota Access Pipeline?

  What you are describing here are examples of celebrity activism, which can be effective, especially at drawing mainstream media coverage to particular causes, and also sometimes in getting media to circulate broadly through the celebrity's network of fans and followers. Yet, the use of celebrities can often blunt the critical thrust of activist messages, since the celebrity will not want to put their professional lives at risk.

  Such efforts are centralized and top-down, which make them the opposite of the kinds of decentralized and bottom-up political movements we discuss in our book. The before mentioned Harry Potter Alliance taps the power of a shared mythology, but does not depend on institutionalized gatekeepers. Indeed, the group has been willing to put its relationship with the commercial producers at risk, waging a four-year boycott of Warner Brothers, which controls the film rights to the Harry Potter series, to educate people about Fair Trade issues. Celebrity activism depends on the authorization provided by unique individuals, whereas fan activism is shaped by the public's ability to appropriate, remix, and recirculate stories from popular culture that they find meaningful.

  Invisible Children interested us in part because of the ways it struggled with the tensions between a top-down celebrity activism model and a more grassroots and participatory model, with different priorities dominating their efforts at different stages in their process.
  You've written extensively about science fiction fandom. Which would be more likely to bring about social change: Star Wars fans or Trekkies?
  We can imagine political activism emerging from both fandoms, but they might take somewhat different shape. For my generation, Star Trek was very much a show about inclusion and acceptance of diversity. What diversity means has shifted through the years, but I've written about how GLBT activists have used Star Trek's promise of a more inclusive society to lobby for the inclusion of queer characters on the series. Star Trek fans have also rallied behind inclusion in terms of recruitment for NASA, a cause which Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) spent many years promoting.
  Activism around Star Wars, on the other hand, has started from the notion of the Rebel Alliance, a metaphor which has been used by activists on both the Right and the Left. In the past year, I've seen Star Wars fans rally for campaign finance reform (battling against Dark Money as the Dark Side of the Force) and as a platform to celebrate teachers (because of the role of Obi-Wan and Yoda as mentor figures). But most pervasively, it has also in the past year been used to reflect on issues of inclusion, because of the growing diversity in its cast of characters.
  Both offer us resources we can use to rally for social change, but doing so depends on matching the right metaphor to the right cause.

• NiemanLab - http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/11/why-spreadable-doesnt-equal-viral-a-conversation-with-henry-jenkins/

  Why spreadable doesn’t equal viral: A conversation with Henry Jenkins
  By Nikki Usher @nikkiusher Nov. 23, 2010, noon

  For years, academic Henry Jenkins has been talking about the connections between mainstream content and user-produced content. From his post as the founder and former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, Jenkins published Convergence Culture, which is about what happens when, as the book puts it, “old and new media collide.” It’s a tale of fan mashups and corporate reactions.
  And now he’s back with a new catchphrase. If convergence culture was 2006, spreadable media is now. The argument: If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. For things to live online, people have to share it socially. They also have to make it their own — which can be as participatory as just passing a YouTube clip on as a link or making a copycat video themselves.
  But what does this mean for news? If news is growing more social, how does Jenkins’ notion of spreadability work for traditional media? And how can traditional media harness user energy to make content not just meaningful but also profitable?
  These were some of the questions I had when I first heard the concept, which Jenkins and his collaborators first put out in a white paper in 2009. But I’ve had a chance to read the first few chapters of the book, due out in late 2011. Spreadable Media (coauthored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green) doesn’t mention traditional journalism. But as I’ve had a chance to work with Jenkins, who’s now a professor at USC, I wanted to see what spreadable media might mean for news. Here’s how Jenkins explained the idea’s implications for journalism in an email interview. Among the topics: why all journalists are citizen journalists, journalists and their possible conversations with audiences, paywalls, and most-emailed lists.
  NU: What is spreadable media?
  HJ: The concept of spreadable media rests on the distinction between distribution (the top-down spread of media content as captured in the broadcast paradigm) and circulation (a hybrid system where content spreads as a result of a series of informal transactions between commercial and noncommercial participants.) Spreadable media is media which travels across media platforms at least in part because the people take it in their own hands and share it with their social networks.
  This kind of informal circulation may be solicited or at least accepted by media producers as part of the normal way of doing business or it may take forms which get labeled piracy. Either way, the widespread circulation of media content through the conscious actions of dispersed networks of consumer/participants tends to create greater visibility and awareness as the content travels in unpredicted directions and encounters people who are potentially interested in further engagements with the people who produced it.
  So, at its heart, our book is interested in the value being generated through this grassroots circulation and how various sectors of the media industry are being reconfigured in order to accept the help of grassroots intermediaries who help expand their reach to the public. Along the way, we dissect many of the myths about how media circulates and how value gets generated in the digital era.
  NU: How does spreadable media relate to your term convergence culture?
  HJ: Convergence culture starts by rejection of the technologically focused definition of convergence as the integration of media functions within a single media device — the magic black box — in favor of one which stresses the flow of media content across multiple media channels. Certainly the rise of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, have made the magical black box much closer to reality now than it was when I wrote Convergence Culture, but I would say we’ve had much more experiencing living in a convergence culture than living with convergence devices. We live at a moment where every story, image, or bit of information will travel across every available media platform either through decisions made in corporate bedrooms or decisions made in consumers’ living rooms.
  The book outlined what this means for entertainment, branding, education, politics, and religion, placing a strong emphasis on what I call participatory culture. Citizen journalism is the application of participatory culture to the news sector but similar kinds of trends are impacting each of these other spaces where media gets produced and distributed. The emphasis in that book though is on participation in the form of cultural production — people creating videos, writing fan fiction, and otherwise generating their own media.
  Spreadable Media takes the convergence culture context as given. We are now half a decade deeper into the trends the first book describes. Since the book was published, we’ve seen the expansion of mobile communication, social network sites, Web 2.0, and the rise and fall of Second Life, all extending our understanding of participatory culture and transmedia communication. So, what are the consequences of those shifts to how information, brands, and media content circulates? We certainly are still interested in participatory models of cultural production but we are now much more interested in acts of curration and circulation, which on both an individual and aggregated level, are impacting the communication environment.
  NU: Let’s talk specifically about what spreadable media might mean for news. What are your thoughts on the way the news industry might make sense of this concept?
  HJ: A central idea animating the book is “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” There is a constant tension at this moment of media transition between wanting to lock down content and meter access on the one hand (a model based on “stickiness”) and wanting to empower consumers to help spread the word (a model based on “spreadability.”) We can see that tension in terms of the desire to gate access to news content and the mechanisms of spreading which characterize Twitter and blogs. Journalists have long embraced a central idea in this book — that content represents a resource which community use to talk amongst themselves. Journalists need to know how they fit into those circuits.
  In the book’s opening chapter, I reflect on the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. I argue that its central role was not in helping to organize the protests but rather in getting information about what was happening to the outside world and to increase people’s emotional engagement with it. Twitter stepped in to bring what was happening in the streets of Tehran closer to people in the west — with key roles played by the Iranian diaspora in the United States and Europe who helped to facilitate the circulation of this information. The general American public felt greater closeness to the people in Iran because they were learning about these events through the same tools as they used to share cute cat pictures with their friends. And they felt a greater investment in what was happening because they were actively helping to alert others about the events.
  As this unfiltered information was flowing through Twitter, those on the social networks started putting pressure on news agencies to provide more cover. You could imagine Twitter as a self-contained news system, but the opposite happened: they used #cnnfail because they wanted the skills and resources that professional journalists could bring to the process. They were signaling how much they still relied on legacy media to sort through the pieces and help provide a context for the information being circulated. While it was framed as a critique of journalism, it was actually a call for help. News organizations need to be more alert in registering these signs of public interests and more nimble in responding to them.
  NU: Are bloggers an example of people experimenting with media spreadability? What do we do for news organizations who want to bring all of that user engagement and monetize it?
  HJ: We’ve long known that news stories generate conversations that people cut out news articles to put on bulletin boards and refrigerators, that we clip news stories and send them to friends. This happened in a pre-digital world and it happens now with more speed and scope thanks to the affordances of digital networking tools.
  Blogs originated as a tool for sharing links; Twitter is now used extensively to share links with other consumers. News sites which prevent the sharing of such content amongst readers may look like ways to protect the commercial interest of that content, but in fact, they kill it, destroying its value as a cultural resource within networked communities, and insuring that the public will look elsewhere for news that can be spread.
  In the book, we use the example of how the Susan Boyle video moved through the blog community, being situated into a range of different ongoing conversations wherever she was relevant — with science blogs talking about her vocal cords, church blogs organizing prayer groups, mommy blogs dealing with her role as a caretaker for her elderly mother, music blogs discussing her song choices, and fashion blogs talking about her make-over for the show. Every news story today spreads through these grassroots intermediaries and gets inserted into various conversations across a range of different communities. The better journalists understand how value gets created through this process, the more effective they will be both at serving their ever more diverse constituencies and at developing a business model which allows them to capture value through circulation.
  NU: You say in your white paper and current drafts of the book that content that users can’t manipulate and whose intellectual property is controlled by organizations will be the least likely to spread. That seems to describe a typical news article, and maybe a typical news organization. How can news organizations make their content more spreadable?
  HJ: Spreadability is partially about technical affordances. YouTube videos spread well because they allow users to embed them on their blogs and Facebook profiles. At the same time, the embedded video’s interface makes it easy for us to follow it back to its original context on YouTube. It is content which is designed to be spread.
  Spreadability is also about social relations with consumers. Many of those who create spreadable content actively encourage readers to spread their materials, often directly courting them as participants in the process of distribution. We are certainly seeing news sites right now — Slashdot comes to mind — which encourage readers to gather and appraise content, but far fewer are encouraging us to help create awareness through actively circulating their content.
  It is interesting to think about groups which have a strong investment in seeing content spread and a lower investment in controlling its distribution. Think about political campaigns with low budgets who want to maximize their reach to voters. Think about religious media who place a higher value on spreading the gospel than monetizing the circulation of information. Think of activist groups who want to reach beyond their core group of supporters. In each case, they build in direct appeals to their fans to help them spread the content rather than constructing prohibitions on grassroots circulation.
  Right now, news organizations are caught between their civic mission — to meet the information needs of their communities and their economic needs — to stay in business long enough to serve their publics.
  NU: What does spreadable media mean to the conversations journalists need to have with their audiences?
  HJ: As information spreads, it gets inserted into a range of conversations which help people to process the information and understand its value for them as members of a community. In the book, Sam Ford, my co-author, draws on his experience in the PR world to talk about companies who actively listen to and respond to what their consumers say about them. He argues that the conversations seeded by spreadable media are much richer ways to monitor public response than narrowly structured focus groups. And he cites some examples of companies which identified problems in their customer relations and rectified them as a result of listening closely to what consumers said about them.
  Newspapers have historically relied on letters to the editor to perform some of these functions, but this focuses only on those groups who seek to influence directly their editorial decisions, while there are other things a news organization might learn by actively listening to conversation people are having around and through the circulation of their content.
  NU: Spreadable media seems to be a reaction to the idea that things are viral and that people have no agency. But doesn’t the whole idea of viral mean that people are actually taking action to share something? Don’t we want our news stories to be most-emailed and our videos to be viral?
  HJ: Very much so. Viral media asks some of the same questions we are asking, having to do with how media content circulates through grassroots communities outside the direct control of the people who originates it. But the language of viral media mystifies how this process works. Many talk as if things just happened to “go viral” when they have no way to explain how or why the content has grabbed the public imagination. Other framings of “viral media” strip away the agency of the very communities whose circulation of the content they want to explain. It is a kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation, in which people become unknowing carriers of powerful and contagious ideas which they bring back to their homes and work place, infecting their friends and family.
  Our work starts from the idea that people are making conscious decisions to aid the circulation of certain content because they see it as a meaningful contribution to their ongoing conversations, a gift which they can share with people they care about. As they circulate this content, they first are playing key roles in appraising its value at a time of exploding media options; they also help to frame the content, helping it to fit better into the ongoing social interactions; they may also build upon, appropriate, transform, and remix the content further extending its shelf life and enabling its broader circulation.
  NU: One of the things I found most fascinating about your current exploration was your distinction between ordinary Internet users, who operate according to the gift economy, and media companies that operate according to market logic. Can you explain?
  HJ: Basically, spreadable media moves between commercial and noncommercial economies. For the producer, the content may be a commodity or a promotion; for the consumer, it is a resource or a gift. The producer is appraising the transaction based on its economic value. While the consumer makes a decision about whether the price is too high for the value of the content, they are also making decisions based on the social or sentimental value of the content. When they pass that content along to their friends, they do so because they value their friends far more than because they want to promote the economic interests of producers. When they consume media, they often do so so that they have currency they need in the social interactions we have around media.
  Media producers need to understand the set of values and transactions which shape how their media flows in order to understand when and how it is appropriate to monetize the activities of their consumers. We are used to transforming commodities into gifts. We do it every time we go to a store to buy a bottle of wine to a dinner party. We bought it as a commodity, we give it as a gift, and the moment of transformation comes when we remove the price tag. We need to better understand the same transformation as consumers take content from commercial sites and circulate it via Twitter or Facebook to their communities.
  NU: If you had to project, what might this mean for user-generated content? And what happens when we start putting paywalls up on sites?
  HJ: In the case of news, we might think about many different types of user-generated content. Often, we are talking about the citizen as reporter (especially in the case of hyperlocal news), producing content which can be uploaded to news sites. We might also think about the citizen as editor, determining which news matters to their community and passing it along in a more targeted way to their friends. We might think about the citizen as commentator, who responds to the news through what they write on their blogs or updates. We might think of these media as amplifying their role as consumers, allowing them to more fully express demands for what should get more coverage, as occurred in the #cnnfail debates after the Iranian elections.
  Right now, we dump all of this into a box called “citizen journalism,” which is in its own way as misleading as categories like “viral media.” We might start from the fact that journalists are themselves citizens, or that these groups are doing many things through their sharing of news, only some of which should be understood as producing journalism. Focusing on citizen journalism results in an oppositional framing of blogging as competing with professional news production. Spreadable media would push us to think about journalists and bloggers as each making a range of contributions through their participation in a larger civic ecology.
  NU: And finally: How many people do you expect to actually engage in making media mashups? I see more people watching Auto-Tune the News mashup videos on YouTube than making their own media out of existing media.
  HJ: Our book makes the point that there are many different forms of participation, some requiring more skills, more technical access, more community engagement than others. Spectacular forms of grassroots cultural production rest on one end of a continuum of different forms of community participation. So some people certainly will be mashing up the news, just as they are remixing songs, films, and television shows. And we can point to many exciting examples of political remix videos which emerge from people’s engagement with news and commentary — think about the recent mashup of Donald Duck and Glenn Beck.
  But many more people will help to shape their news by appraising its value and passing it along to specific people or groups who they think will be interested in it. We all probably have friends or relatives who mostly communicate through forwarding things. They may or may not be exerting great selectivity in their curatorial roles, but they are helping to insure the circulation of that information. More people in the future will be engaging with news on that level and their acts of circulation will play a larger role in shaping the flow of information across the culture.

• MIT Center for Civic Media Website - https://civic.mit.edu/team/henry-jenkins

  Henry Jenkins
  Bio:
  Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He is the principal investigator of Project nml (New Media Literacies), funded by the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation to promote the social skills and cultural competencies required to insure that every young person is able to fully participate in the new media landscape. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Governor's Board of the World Economic Forum and has served on the advisory board of the Free Expression Network. Jenkins has a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  Links:
  Official MIT Site
  Henry’s Official Weblog
  Henry’s bio at CMS
  Wikipedia
  MySpace
  Henry's C4FCM blog
  Bibliography:
  Henry is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, Democracy and New Media, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His most recent books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
  Title:
  Principal Investigator

• Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Website - https://cmsw.mit.edu/profile/henry-jenkins/

  Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the previous decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Cultureand From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on“spreadable media” with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post. – See more at: http://henryjenkins.org/aboutmehtml#sthash.ev25qsgl.dpuf

Jenkins, Henry: SPREADABLE MEDIA

(Nov. 15, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Jenkins, Henry SPREADABLE MEDIA New York Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 2, 15 ISBN: 978-0-8147-4350-8
A wide-ranging examination of the contemporary media environment as individuals increasingly control their own creation of content. Jenkins (Communication and Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006, etc.) and digital strategists Ford and Green collaborate in a book combining abstract academic theory, how-to advice for businesses and popular-cultural anecdotes for lay readers. The basic message is simple--"If it doesn't spread, it's dead."--but the authors express their theories with language that will feel unfamiliar to nonspecialist users of digital media. Even most Luddites probably know that circa 2012, content circulates from grass-roots sources as well as corporate sources. But why that is happening, and exactly what it means for corporate bottom lines, nonprofit think tanks and individual consumers, is less evident. The authors attempt to provide a framework for understanding the phenomena involved, going beyond the bits-and-bytes technology to the elusive democratization of communication throughout global society. The outcomes of a networked culture are not inevitable; without the predictions of further change, the authors write that their book would be pointless. In the introduction, the authors aid general understanding by sharing the example of Susan Boyle, the remarkable songstress who rose from obscurity through YouTube. The case study helps explain not only the spread of entertainment content, but also the spread of news content, overtly political and religious messages, advertising and branding. In the past, Boyle's fame could have theoretically spread slowly through individuals sharing newspaper clippings by snail mail, but she never could have become an international celebrity within a week of her singing debut without the power of networked culture. May serve as a useful handbook for digital media strategists and marketers, but this dense tome will take a major effort for nonspecialists to fully understand.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jenkins, Henry: SPREADABLE MEDIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A308117107/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=233c1a41. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A308117107

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

Philip Herbst
95.4 (Oct. 15, 1998): p376.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. index. Dec. 1998. 300p. MIT, $35 (0-262-03258-9). DDC: 306.4
This book brings together the perspectives of feminist activists and media scholars in a thought-provoking discussion of the "gendering" of video games. Until recently, women have appeared in computer games mostly as eroticized competitors to the male protagonist, distressed maidens, or other victims or objects. Recently, the girls' games movement has taken the computer-game industry to task for the use of these misogynistic images. Contributors discuss this issue as well as myriad related concerns: the cultural definition of computer games as boys' toys; girls' access to the technology and interest in it; and the complications of creating gender-neutral play space. In addition, girl garners have a chance to discuss factoring their interests into the development of action games. There are no simple solutions to the often troublesome relation between gender and technology, but this book's presentation of the problems and possibilities makes academic reading relevant again.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Herbst, Philip. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Booklist, 15 Oct. 1998, p. 376. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A55053310/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9582cfe1. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A55053310

FROM BARBIE TO MORTAL K0MBAT: Gender and Computer Games

245.46 (Nov. 16, 1998): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. MIT, $35 (300p) ISBN 0-262-03258-9
In this intriguing anthology of essays, studies and interviews, voices from both academia and industry discuss what the experience of computer games is and should be for girls. While game creators have recently discovered the young female consumer, few of these authors are happy with the offerings, which tend to push domesticity and an obsession with looks. Almost all the contributors share some basic belief that the marketplace is dominated by games promoting bad values while shortchanging values identifiable as truly feminist. As Cassell points out, feminism in this context can mean values not pertaining exclusively to gender. The resulting proposals for video games are filled with such buzzwords as "subjective," "creativity, community" and "collaboration" (all good) as opposed to "violent," "competitive" and "conquest" (all bad). It is always nice to see theorists come down from the clouds to enter into discussions of everyday-life subjects such as the ramifications of the Tomb Raider character Lara Croft' s ample endowment. The best move of the editors is to conclude the volume with commentary by girl gainers, many of whom worry that the contributors' solutions will underequip girls for the ugly real world. Says one: "I don't want to be friends! I want to be King!" (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"FROM BARBIE TO MORTAL K0MBAT: Gender and Computer Games." Publishers Weekly, 16 Nov. 1998, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A53265976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fcfcf382. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A53265976

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

Sandra Hackman
16.6 (Mar. 1999): p11+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 341 pp., $35.00 hardcover.
When I was ten years old I loved the woods, exploring the seemingly endless expanses behind my suburban backyard. From the moment I saw a snake sunning on a rock in a stream to the many afternoons I spent clearing leaves and climbing boulders, my exploratory forays into those seemingly wild spaces were special time spent free and independent. My most prized creation was a clearing not far from the house, a personal sanctuary away from the bedlam and responsibility I endured as the eldest of a large family.
Was I reflecting a traditionally female need to create a private domain, breaching a feminine stereotype by roaming beyond the physical boundaries of my home base - or simply doing what most kids do? Constructing identity by exploring actual and inner space would seem to be the fundamental mission of childhood. Today our ubiquitously commercial culture largely determines how kids fulfill that mission. That culture is epitomized by the content and marketing of video and computer games - popular technology that opens new vistas for the work and play of childhood but all too often reinforces rigid gender roles.
In From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, cultural theorists, software designers, game players, media professors and developmental psychologists, among others, offer thoughtful perspectives, in essays and interviews, on the medium's potential to enable kids to forge their own identity. These contributors describe their research on how girls and boys approach play, talk about their own experiences in using and creating computer games, and build on this information to envision games that promote a diverse conception of gender. The book's editors - Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, she a member of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he a professor of media studies at MIT - have created an imaginative, original and complex volume that crystallizes feminist dilemmas regarding the origin and persistence of gender roles. Ultimately, the multiple voices of the contributors converge on a feminist vision of technology as well as a pluralistic notion of childhood.
Until recently, big toy companies like Nintendo and Sega have designed and marketed computer and video games (this book treats them as interchangeable) with boys in mind. Although a few games incorporate a strong, adventurous female character and entail solving puzzles or exploring intriguing environments, many - like other toys - have diverged toward extreme notions of gender. They typically entice garners to play male characters who maniacally fire laser weapons, zoom through tunnels and engage in brutal hand-to-hand combat with invaders from evil worlds. In "Mortal Kombat," for example, one of the best-selling shoot-'em-ups, blood spurts and bodies explode as players attempt to remain alive while massacring opponents. As academic contributors Cornelia Brunner, Dorothy Bennett and Margaret Honey point out, these violent scenarios emphasize "victory over justice, competition over collaboration, speed over flexibility."
Most big game companies have responded to calls for more female characters by adding the occasional bosomy babe designed to titillate male players. Cassell and Jenkins ask how to go beyond such simplistic responses by creating games that reflect what girls want - without reinforcing traditional conceptions of gender.
A "girls' games" movement has sprung up in response to the notion of computer games as male turf. This movement encompasses women who celebrate their affinity for aggressive alien-bashing contests, and feminist entrepreneurs who are producing software in a different voice designed to speak specifically to girls. Both groups are represented here. In interviews in which they movingly convey their deeply felt desire to build strong women, the game designers say they derive their notions of what girls want from their own childhood experiences, as well as from talking with girls themselves.
Like the academic contributors to this volume, the game designers find that girls prefer collaborative games based on complex characters involved in real-world settings. In a peculiar twist, the first computer software successfully to exploit aspects of such interests was Mattel's "Barbie, Fashion Designer," aimed largely at girls five through seven years of age. Lest it elicit groans from feminists deploring its retrograde focus, many of these contributors emphasize the software's strengths: it enables girls to design and print out actual clothes and thus become the link between their dolls and the real world. Nancie S. Martin of Mattel, one of the creators of the Barbie software, says she sees a serious mission to serve girls, and envisions herself as part of a larger community that listens to them and respects their desires.
Other designers have attempted more complex responses to the notion, reinforced through focus groups, that girls find adventure in navigating the emotional and social dilemmas of everyday life. To respond to that need, Brenda Laurel, founder of the company Purple Moon, has created games such as "Rockett's New School" and "Secret Paths," built around "friendship scenarios" aimed at girls aged seven through twelve. In "Secret Paths," the player decides whether to invite other female characters into a treehouse, and then follows a secret trail into the forest on a "vision quest" designed to shed light on one girl's problems. The quest entails discovering secret stones by solving puzzles. If the player uncovers all the stones, they metamorphose into a necklace that tells a multicultural legend.
The goals of these and other designers - to give girls vehicles for self-expression and thereby build their confidence and self-esteem - prove inspirational and resonate deeply. Like most other girls, I would have benefited greatly from the notion that my perceptions of social and emotional events going on around me rang true. Yet the question nags: would I, as a self-identified tomboy who prided myself in playing a mean game of kickball with the boys, have chosen games that didn't engage all my physical instincts, or even those games that were overtly targeted to girls? As this book makes apparent, most research has focused on divining the differences between male and female approaches to computers and games. Although many games for girls incorporate subversive elements, purported male-female differences often yield products that force kids to choose between "Conquest or A Day at the Mall," in the words of Brunner, Bennett and Honey. Yet what about kids who don't fit any prescribed category, or who embrace both notions of gender?
In her game "Runaways," designed for teenagers and young adults, University of California, Los Angeles, professor Marsha Kinder enables players to specify - and change - their gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity and then explore how others treat them as they track down a missing young woman. Noting that most research by game companies often simply tests how effectively kids have absorbed cultural conditioning, Kinder wants young adults to see how socially determined these attributes can be and develop the courage to change them. She has tested her ideas by talking with residents of teenage shelters, who identify peer and family conflicts over fundamental aspects of identity as the source of their deep-seated problems. By exposing the destructiveness of stereotypes while supporting teens, Kinder's ultimate end is to use "the protean powers [of the computer]...to address issues of social change."
To help kids explore their identity without any adult-imposed restrictions, Justine Cassell is designing a computer system that enables them to tell their own stories and create characters that answer back. Like many of these contributors, she sees storytelling as an important vehicle for self-expression, maintaining that until now such an activity "has not had a technological home." Her elaborately constructed system, which combines supposedly gender-neutral stuffed animals (every kid I know considers most animals male) with the computer, comes across as perhaps overly theoretical and trying too hard. But she bases her conception on a cogent feminist vision of knowledge as experiential, collaborative and above all controlled by the user. In Cassell's view, feminist software should recognize users as diverse and allow them to map their own paths. What's more, as girls, in particular, use computers to learn the value of their perceptions and construct power, storytelling can serve as a "nexus of change in the relationship between gender and technology."
Jenkins, too, envisions games that would enable both boys and girls to soar beyond adult conceptions of gendered spaces. The best would enable girls to develop self-confidence, competence and competitive strength by exploring unsafe places while encouraging boys to express themselves through means other than misogynistic violence. He highlights Sega's "Nights into Dreams," in which characters attempt to solve their complex emotional problems by saving an endangered dream world and becoming an androgynous harlequin figure who flies through the air. In this game, which incorporates the mobility associated with boys' games with the psychological elements of girls', "the penalty for failure...is to be trapped on the ground and fixed in a single gender."
Ultimately this book - pluralistic, experiential and collaborative - inspires us to search for games that give voice to participants' exploratory and even competitive desires while enabling them to build identities based on the emotional nuances of real life. Toward that end, these dedicated contributors provide an imaginative conception of computers as a vehicle for telling stories and thereby undermining narrow conceptions of gender. Justine Cassell perhaps best sums up their quest:
I'd like to design computer games that are as attractive to girls who love Nintendo as they are to girls who can't stand it. My approach is twofold: to aim for a new generation of toys and games with children as codesigners, in the sense that they can decide the story that they wish to tell and the games will listen; and to encourage a new generation of girls and boys who value equally what technology can do, and what the narrative self has to offer. (p. 321)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hackman, Sandra. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." The Women's Review of Books, Mar. 1999, p. 11+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54169891/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d2eac582. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A54169891

Spreadable Media

(May 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Spreadable Media
Henry Jenkins, et. al.
New York University Press
838 Broadway, 3rd floor
New York, NY 10003
9780814743508, $29.95, www.nyupress.org
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture is a 'must' for any business that would keep up with changes in the modern media environment where big business no longer has a stranglehold on media distribution. It's a companion to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and it challenges old concepts describing modern media, considering the arena of media engagement, audience development, how value is created in social media circles, and what makes for a model of 'spreadable' content. Businesses receive specific examples from film, music, games, television and more, with chapters assuming participation in media content development. The result is a recommendation not just for media studies collections, but for any who would understand the business implications of media's evolving and changing systems.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Spreadable Media." California Bookwatch, May 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A331081045/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e3050f98. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A331081045

Jenkins, Henry: Participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics

S. Pepper
53.10 (June 2016): p1470+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Jenkins, Henry. Participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics, by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd. Polity, 2016. 214p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780745660707 cloth, $59.95; ISBN 9780745660714 pbk, $19.95; ISBN 9780745689432 ebook, $9.95
(CC) 53-4256
HQ799
2015-12712 CIP
In this book, Jenkins (communication, USC), Ito (digital media and learning, Univ. of California, Irvine), and boyd (a principle researcher at Microsoft)--all well-known media scholars--carry on a sustained conversation about participatory culture, connected learning, and networked youth. Each author discusses issues of fandom, learning, activism, and identity as they relate to the networked public. This is not a book about Face book, Twitter, or You Tube per se. Rather, it is about how youth are making use of those platforms (and many others) to connect, make things, take action, and express themselves--that is, to participate in the world. This book can function as an introductory overview of the scholarly landscape, or it can serve to energize new media researchers to ask important questions about democracy and collaboration in a networked era. The authors bring a cross-section of research about participatory culture to the table, as they discuss everything from the It Gets Better Project and Kony 2012 to World of Warcraft and the Harry Potter Alliance. Structured as an ongoing dialogue (like a panel discussion or a dinner party with academics), the book is both exciting and frustrating, but leaves one happy to have been there and with a head buzzing full of ideas. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All levels.--S. Pepper, Northeastern Illinois University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pepper, S. "Jenkins, Henry: Participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1470+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A454942667/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a31444df. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942667

Jenkins, Henry. Spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture

S. Pepper
51.10 (June 2014): p1795.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Jenkins, Henry. Spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York University, 2013. 350pbibl index afp ISBN9780814743508, $29.95
51-5421
P94
2012-28526 CIP
It has been seven years since Jenkins (USC) published Convergence Culture (CH, Jun'07, 44-5465), and the present is a worthy and exciting follow-up to that text. Jenkins and his coauthors--both PhDs now working as strategists in the communication industry--argue that understanding online videos, news stories, status updates, and the like as "spreadable media" requires repositioning the user as the primary actor in the scenario, rather than thinking of the content itself as the primary element with agency. They note that thinking has been trapped by metaphors like "viral" and "meme," and these terms do not accurately describe the way much of ones day-to-day engagement with the Internet works. From advertising and marketing to piracy and fandom, the examples explored are timely and serve to reveal the current state of networked culture. The book has a companion website with numerous essays from outside contributors, who extend and debate the book's central thesis. Written in a very accessible way and drawing on media theorists and public intellectuals, this book will interest a broad audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** All readers.--S. Pepper, Northeastern Illinois University
Pepper, S.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pepper, S. "Jenkins, Henry. Spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2014, p. 1795. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A370321917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e4920bdf. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A370321917

Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam and Green, Joshua, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Damien Spry
.150 (Feb. 2014): p189.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.uq.edu.au/mia/
Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam and Green, Joshua, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York University Press, New York, 2013, ISBN 9 7808 1474 3508, xv+352 pp., A$29.95. Distributor: Footprint Books.
Any new publication from a scholar with the stature of Henry Jenkins attracts attention and is rightly subject to serious scrutiny. Part-manifesto, part-literature review, part-strategic communications primer, Spreadable Media is co-authored by digital strategists Sam Ford and Joshua Green, so readers might expect the book to aim for cross-over appeal. In terms of its comprehensible, comprehensive treatment of its key themes--entertainment media, either professionally produced or the product of amateurs and enthusiasts, and the fans that blur the boundaries between producer and audience--it offers a rich account of concepts and case studies that scholars and professional communicators should appreciate.
The tone is part-illumination and partinspiration in that energetic, enthusiastic, entrepreneurial 'Silicon Valley' way. Few boundaries are pushed so some digital media specialists--while enjoying the lively accounts of new media trends--may have the sensation that they are part of a congregation, with Jenkins, Ford and Green as evangelical preachers.
Spreadable Media is at its most engaging and illuminating when it is focused on its core idea that media content is, or ought to be, shareable--or 'spreadable'. The authors themselves acknowledge that this term is a bit clunky, but it serves its dual purposes: (1) to highlight how, why and by whom media content is moved, transformed, re-mixed, curated and re-purposed; and (2) to address some of the biases and shortcomings of other key terms in new media studies that have been invoked to describe and explain these processes--terms like 'memes' and 'viral media', for example, are critiqued for promoting the concept of content being transmitted unwittingly by carriers, rather than the authors' quite correct view that media content is spread by active, creative participants via various mediated social networks.
A later chapter on transnational spreadable media is the least satisfying in the book. It contains a lively overview of the ideas of some important international global media scholars--Appadurai, Ito, Iwabuchi, Friedman and others are introduced, their arguments presented in an engaging and generous manner. (There are some notable exceptions. It is curious that there is no consideration of Castells' Network Society.) Awkwardly, the examples from the rest of the world are considered from an American vantage point--American media reinterpreted in Malawi or being 'fan-subbed' in China; American audiences engaging with Japanese animation; American university campuses as the site of diasporic nostalgia for TV shows or music from 'back home'.
Likewise, Jenkins, Ford and Green have relatively little to say about some of the tougher questions about the conditions of contemporary mediated modernity: How does surveillance 'spread'? How does power (both in the sense of empowerment and exploitation or discrimination) 'spread'? How are spreadable media culturally contingent, and subject to socio-political structuration? Its message--most appropriate perhaps for corporate communicators and professionals (and serious amateurs) in entertainment media--is clearly articulated, and useful enough for this audience that the book ought to become widely spread (!) among those practitioners as well as scholars and students in this areas of creative endeavour.
--Damien Spry, Media and Communications, Hallym University, Chuncheon, South Korea
Spry, Damien
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spry, Damien. "Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam and Green, Joshua, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture." Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, Feb. 2014, p. 189. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A363973240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b95e576c. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A363973240

The Participatory cultures handbook

B.S. John
50.10 (June 2013): p1826.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
50-5425
HM851
2011-48598 CIP
The Participatory cultures handbook, ed. by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson. Routledge, 2013. 289p bibl index iSBN 9780415882231, $150.00; ISBN 9780415506090 pbk, $44.95; ISBN 9780203117927 e-book, contact publisher for price
Packaging into one volume the range and uncertainty of how different individuals and groups use the online world is, of course, a significant challenge. This volume is necessarily uneven. There are pockets of provocative observations (e.g., do "hacktivists" contribute to political passivity?) and more mundane recitations (e.g., fan wikis are participative platforms). Particularly curious is the wide range of contributors--of the 40 authors, a quarter are outside the academy, among them a poet, a game designer, and a project manager for a particle physics grid. With such a wide range of contributors, the volume provides (often elliptical) takes on participatory activism, participatory creativity, and the need to rethink education. Still, overall, the collection includes essays that appear divorced from any central theories of participatory culture. Delwiche and Henderson (both, communication, Trinity Univ.) do attempt to situate participatory culture in an introductory chapter, but the discussion is mostly temporal. The book would have benefited from more breadth of theory; does Henry Jenkins really need to be cited by so many of the contributors? Regardless, the book serves as a solid entree into deeper thinking about participatory culture. Summing Up: Recommended. ** With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates, researchers/faculty, professionals.--B. S. John, Old Dominion University
John, B.S.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
John, B.S. "The Participatory cultures handbook." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2013, p. 1826. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A332789000/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c7d07304. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A332789000

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide

D. Orcutt
48.10 (June 2011): p1846.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
44-5465
P94
2006-7358 CIP
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. NewYork University, 2006. 308p bibl index afp ISBN 0-8147-4281-5, $29.95; ISBN 9780814742815, $29.95. Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2007jun CHOICE.
The standard convergence narrative of recent years presents media concentration as a threat both to the diversity of communication channels and to individuals' opportunities to engage in public discourse. A respected and well-established media scholar, Jenkins (MIT) here counters such pessimistic perspectives on the brave new media world with theoretical and evidentiary attestations to the growing power of individuals and grassroots groups to affect the larger media landscape. The author devotes the first five chapters (of six) to close readings of developments within fan cultures devoted to Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. Only in the last chapter does he turn to analysis of overt political activism, ably demonstrating how as popular (consumer) culture becomes more participatory it fosters the potential for a more participatory public (civic) culture. Extended sidebars offer alternative examples and interesting digressions without interrupting the narrative flow. A 16-page glossary of media studies and other terms ensures accessibility for the less experienced. This volume is must reading. Summing Up: Essential. All readers; all collections.--D. Orcutt, North Carolina State University
Orcutt, D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Orcutt, D. "Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2011, p. 1846. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A257675832/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26cff78a. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A257675832

The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture by Henry Jenkins

Josh Shepperd
.60 (Fall 2007): p94+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/journals/jvlt.html
Henry Jenkins. The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York UP, 2007. $22.00.
Popular culture is uniquely compelling in that it represents a reflective exaggeration of the dissonance between consumption and reception. The culture consumer is often characterized as highly invested in how popular art is portrayed while reacting with simultaneous fickleness about a product's legacy. The stream of cultural information is disseminated at such a rapid rate that one's attention to a particular representation of popular art rarely lasts more than one musical album, television season, or project. Fan culture reflects an anomaly to this tendency, but the average individual does not embrace popular culture as a whole. The "fan" often picks a few products at a time over which to obsess, while literally thousands of other cultural products pass by unnoticed.
Horkheimer and Adorno worried that such a perpetual stream of information had the ability to relativize one's judgment by providing a magnitude of fundamentally similar products. They argue that culture industries serve to limit alternative possibilities for thought by creating ubiquitous media that propagate the division of labor. If one finds glorified representations of one's fundamental experience throughout the day--even in recreation--one is no longer provided with the tools to question possibilities for change. The culture industries provide an expanse of the division of labor to the point where social conditions appear natural, even ideal. When patterns of resistance may arise, the culture industries reappropriate those modalities into the fold of capitalist consciousness. Such pockets of resistance are thus neutralized and relativized by not seeming like resistance at all; instead, they are just one of the many heads of the hydra of capitalist production. Horkheimer and Adorno provide a brilliant but centrally pessimistic view of popular art as a cog within the production of class consciousness. Their assessment of what they consider to be culture industry representations thus follow negatively, disproportionately so, and one could argue that their textual readings approach popular art from a structurally limited accusatory perspective. Their straw man examples may be thought of as caricatures more than accurate readings.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Henry Jenkins may be seen as a modern counterpoint to the traditional culture industry argument. Against historically dismissive academic circles he has provided an important intervention to approach questions of popular culture and fan culture as real material practices worthy of examination. Jenkins is not swayed from providing a close reading of popular art texts by, for instance, the suspicion that it may play a transient role in the perpetuation of class antagonism. In fact, Jenkins is predominantly cheerful about the effect of popular art upon the emotions in his new book The Wow Climax. Rather than attempting to subjugate popular culture into a lesser art used to control mass sentiments, Jenkins endeavors to understand the conditions in which aesthetic messages are produced and which emotions popular art wishes to give voice to. The book is less interested with defining a theory of emotions in relation to popular culture than acknowledging that the emotional reactions evoked by popular art are as worthy of investigation as, for instance, quantitative studies on television viewing habits. In order to provide his account he first makes a basic distinction between popular art and popular culture. For the purposes of the book, popular art is defined as a product disseminated to those at large and is further transferred into popular culture through interpretation and identification, resulting in fan culture.
The Wow Climax is broken into three sections, each giving voice to distinct arguments about emotions. Section 1 investigates the "Lively Arts" of video games and Matthew Barney's avant-garde reinterpretation of horror movie imagery. Beginning with the influence of Gilbert Seldes's writing on popular aesthetics, Jenkins contends that an aesthetic language of popular culture must emphasize the energy that goes into popular art attunement. Although popular art is widely consumed, it is still usually associated with lower arts. However, Seldes argued that it is the very transient nature of popular art that provides new energy to one's mental life, breaking the routine of mundanity. Jenkins goes on to state that the most memorable moments in games don't depend on spectacle alone; one becomes attuned with games in the way that Seldes envisions, and the responsive nature of gaming has a performative element that ameliorates the emotional experience of the player. Similarly, Barney's work draws an affective power on the viewer through the appropriation and evocation of familiar popular art emotions and reactions, particularly those of horror movies, which actively "call upon the horror fan to 'read' rather than merely 'watch' movies" (47).
Section 2 explores the effects of the "immediate experience" of comic books, WWF (WWE) wrestling melodrama, the feminist exploitation films of Stephanie Rothman, and the film career of Lupe Velez. In this section Jenkins contends that popular culture is often accused of advocating a "dangerous loss of control" over the culturally enforced inhibitions of bourgeoisie society, when in fact popular culture helps through intensified imagery to come to terms with moral questions and fears. Through an autoethnographic lens, Jenkins recalls the effect of comic books on his adolescent relationship to death. Comics are the site of extravagant stories in which the cycles of life are depicted and the reader is confronted to reconcile anxieties and vulnerabilities associated with questions of trauma, loss, and mortality. The spectacular display of imagery and emotion elicits a response in the reader that is intimate while externalizing emotion. Similarly, wrestling reduces the wrestler's body to a series of "iconic surfaces and stock attitudes" (90).These characters publicly embody emotions that are usually shunned, thus acting as exaggerated focal points for the directedness of the audience's emotional attention. Wrestlers are then repeatedly physically punished for those emotions, while the audience lives vicariously through them. Similarly, the exploitation films of Stephanie Rothman focus on the simultaneous cinema narratives of resistance and exploitation. Through her films Rothman negotiates the "partially corrupt" landscape of exploitation cinema to elucidate and problematize erotic and violent spectacle.
Section 3 examines the relationship between children and the popular television shows Pee Wee's Playhouse and Lassie as well as provides a study on contrasts between outside play and the new virtual play space of gaming. Jenkins argues that the child consumer is a central figure in any discussion of popular culture because the child is more sensitive to the emotional power of popular art than the adult is. The exaggerated depictions of popular art and our reactions to those depictions are often projected upon the child, in which moral regulation is usually named for. The child is slowly indoctrinated into habits of restraint, while the pleasure principle is enervated and rationalized until it is lost. Thus "play" becomes a guilty pleasure. However, in Pee Wee's Playhouse children are encouraged to express heightened reactions and emotions, including those of fragmentation and free association. Jenkins uses Pee Wee as an example of a show that is helpful in teaching children to express emotions in an environment where they are often constrained by the expectations to suppress their feelings. Similarly, in his essays on indoor play vs. outdoor play and Lassie, Jenkins shows that children (and dogs) are treated with sentimental value while simultaneously being forced into spatial and emotional acculturation.
Jenkins's larger argument seems to consist of an attempt to show that popular culture employs both the coding of social expectations while appealing intrinsically to questions that individuals navigate in their everyday lives. To accumulate the attention of the cultural consumer, effective popular art appeals to central cultural themes first, individuals second. The appeal is made visually; what takes place on a screen is largely kinesthetic. Movement appeals to bodily memories and aesthetic predilections with "immediacy" and "intensification." Further, our own conflicts play out in a larger-than-life public way as they hit on everyday fantasies and conflicts: "Commonly staged actions appeal to bodily memories, and the ways that various aesthetic devices can intensify and exaggerate the impact of such actions is by making them more legible and more intense than their real world counterparts" (35). The "spectacular display" of popular art, such as in WWF wrestling, is successful in extricating previously "private and invisible emotions" in an essential unconcealed manner; this evocation causes feelings of intimacy between the fan and the popular art. Rather than approaching popular art pejoratively, Jenkins argues that the intimate emotional effects focus otherwise unspoken anxieties and fears and thus break down social and cultural conflicts through participation with the intensified spectacle.
The Wow Climax in many ways is as much an attempt to define a methodology for media studies writing as it is a textual study of media culture. Jenkins approaches each essay as a textual reading of emotional evocation while pointing to the cultural influences that guide the narrative structure of each representation. Jenkins is not reluctant to disclose childhood memories or employ a great deal of personal reflection--as he does in his essay on comic books--to account for different emotions elicited by different texts. As a self-professed devotee of popular art, Jenkins argues that the experience of popular culture is not delimited by a degree of distanciation. Indeed, a study of popular media in many ways must be acknowledged as ethnographic, as Jenkins contends that he is already firmly embedded within the dialectical environment in which he chooses to study.
Traditionally popular art and culture have been subjugated into secondary categories, even by those who produce such art. Theoretical traditions have assumed that the researcher must take a serious and neutral role regarding his or her research, which Jenkins says has restricted the researcher from providing insightful work on mediums that function ubiquitously but may be regarded marginally, like popular culture. Aesthetic research is usually subject to cultural, social, economic, and political hierarchies, which Jenkins argues are further connected to regulatory policies. The judgments of the traditional researcher regularly result in the "foreclosure" of works from artistic consideration before a study can even begin. However, popular culture reflects a deep-rooted demand for participation, and Jenkins believes that there must be an academic method to fit the phenomenon. The appreciation of popular art further depends on skills we acquire outside of formal education, and Jenkins is committed to employing various styles of academic prose in order to take into account the emotional dynamics of popular art. To understand how popular culture works on our emotions, "we have to pull it close, get intimate with it, let it work its magic on us, and then write about our own engagement" (10). With The Wow Climax, Jenkins hopes to contribute to media studies an alternative to usual social theory approaches that place popular art and culture within the larger context of function and economy. Popular culture is the emotional experience of popular art, which can be thought about as a phenomenon that is produced and dispensed to the masses but individually constituted.
Jenkins's book provides a clear contribution and alternative to traditional popular culture pessimists like Horkheimer and Adorno. He provides rigorous and close textual readings of the cultural and emotional implications that arise from the experience of popular art. "While his arguments are well taken, and, indeed, it seems as though such an approach is long overdue in response to structuralist readings of culture, Jenkins does not always provide a clear continuity throughout the book; at times it reads more as a collection of essays that speak to emotional evocation of individual but disparate subjects than a systematic argument about the emotional impact of popular art. The three sections are loosely connected under the auspices of emotion, but, as he admits early in the book, these essays were not originally written with the culminating book topic in mind. The book may perhaps have benefited from an attempt to define a theory of emotion in concert with recent work in comparative literature or philosophy in order to bring his textual readings onto a dialectical level. That it lacks a conclusion further problematizes the disparity in essay topics. Without a summation of how each of the sections and chapters has been connected, it remains unclear exactly what he hopes to express about future research on emotions and media. That said, the book makes some important methodological observations for media studies while providing some penetrating textual readings of historical popular art.
Shepperd, Josh
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shepperd, Josh. "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture by Henry Jenkins." Velvet Light Trap, no. 60, 2007, p. 94+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A169309591/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3af05fc3. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A169309591

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century

34.4 (Apr. 2007): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.teacherlibrarian.com/
CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: MEDIA EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY Henry Jenkins, with Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robinson, and Margaret Weigel (MacArthur Foundation, 2006. 72 pp. Download the white paper at www.digital learning.macfound.org.)
Bottom Line: The first of many reports from the ongoing $50 million MacArthur Foundation grant to study kids and how they learn through media, this white paper is a must-read as we examine education for the 21st century. This study shows why schools must foster the cultural competendes and social skills of collaboration and networking that young people need in the new participatory media. The terms used in this report should be studied for their unique meanings because every teacher-librarian is now coping with a generation quite different than the one he grew up in. We cannot ignore the world that this generation of students is creating through social networking and Internet tools. This white paper is a good resource to discuss at every gathering of teacher-librarians and in professional learning communities at the building level.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century." Teacher Librarian, vol. 34, no. 4, 2007, p. 53. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162361834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=da9eefc0. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A162361834

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

MARGARET WALSH
43.3 (July 2001): p166.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Frank Cass & Company Ltd.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0007-6791&linktype=1
JUSTINE CASSELL and HENRY JENKINS (eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 2000. Pp. xviii + 360; illus. H/back ISBN 0 262 03258 9, [pound]22.50; p/back ISBN 0 262 53168 2, [pound]10.95).
So what do business historians want to know about computer games for boys and girls? Perhaps only enough to keep their children entertained! What they need to know about the electronic versions of the Barbie doll and about Mortal Kombat, a top-selling game in the fighting category, is another matter. By the late 1990s, 35 million homes - or between 30 and 40 per cent of homes in the United States - owned a console system for playing games on a television set with a converter box. Another 10-20 per cent of homes rented such consoles or shared them with a neighbour. Add in the PC games which are loaded into a personal computer, and the total amount spent on electronic games in the United States in 1997 was $5.8 billion. Computer games domestically had become big business. Extend this home market and think about the globalisation of games software, and analysts suggest this will be worth $11 billion in 2000 and some $17 billion in 2003. The impact of interactive television, the internet and the mobile phone will expand the games industry even further, making it into gigantic business.
This business, however, is skewed. It has experienced and still suffers from a gender gap. Most software has been produced by males for male consumers who are culturally conditioned towards games featuring conquest, winning, scoring points, assertion and domination. Surveys, however, suggest that the market for boy's games is saturated because 80 per cent of American boys play video games on a regular basis. The same is not true for girls. Females constituted between 14 and 25 per cent of the games market in the mid-1990s. So there is scope for major expansion in this gendered space. Here all the diverse offerings in this collection of essays and interviews agree. Experts ranging from academics in education, media studies, computing and psychology to the producers of computer games know that they must address the female market. But their aims and their methods of so doing differ. The new feminist entrepreneurs struggle to decide whether it is better to have a 'pink market' which accepts cultural stereotypes of gender roles or whether to use this entertainment and learning technology to try and break down cultural stereotypes. Are boys primarily interested in triumphalism and zapping targets while girls like character-centred plots, issues of friendship and social relationship? Do boys mainly use video technology while girls like computer games? And if girls and boys use the same games do they want stories where sexy blondes zap out enemies or scale great heights of achievement? The verdict is still open. Entrepreneurs and academics use extensive market research to test out options. There are focus groups and surveys and still no agreement. This is not surprising. Society has politically accepted multi-diversity between races , genders, ethnicities religions and age cohorts. So the markets should logically be niche markets! But the economics of national and international corporations is geared to mass marketing, as are the major retail stores. If the product is not showcased well enough to sell within 6-8 weeks, then it is taking up too much shelf space. Can the political and economic agendas be merged? The debate is both fascinating and emotional. Many business historians would not get beyond the cover and the contents page of this volume. They should not do this! Business history now clearly addresses the production unit as part of the socio-economic environment and in the age of high-speed interactive communications both manufacturers and their historians must be more flexible and culturally aware.
WALSH, MARGARET
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
WALSH, MARGARET. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Business History, vol. 43, no. 3, 2001, p. 166. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A77417807/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c49b699. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A77417807

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

22.1 (Spring 1999): p55+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 George Mason University
http://comm.gmu.edu/
H-REVIEW@H-NET.MSU.EDU H-NET BOOK REVIEW, published by H-Childhood@h-net.msu.edu (February 1999), included a book review, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," by Grace Palladino of The University of Maryland-College Park that we reprint below. The 1998 book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, is edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, and published by MIT Press. At 360 pages with tables, illustrations, notes, and index, the book is available at $35.00 (clothbound), ISBN 0-262-03258-9. Review:
In the early 1990s, when my ten year old niece spent most of her time with Super Mario and the Nintendo gang, her elders shook their heads in despair. Wasn't she wasting time learning useless knowledge? Wouldn't she be better off reading a book, playing with friends, or even just joining in conversation? Our apprehension only underscored the great divide between pre- and postcomputer generations: The computer games we disdained a decade ago are hailed today as gateways to technology and high paying jobs. Little did I know that my niece's distressing behavior would be a model of progressive girlhood, so much so that MIT's Women's Studies department would sponsor a one-day symposium on gender and computer games.
The book that resulted from the symposium, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, is a wide-ranging collection of essays that examines the rise of the "Girls' Game Movement" and the consequences of separating girls from boys in cyberspace and the marketplace. Supporters argue that the allegedly neutral status quo is in fact biased against girls who have no interest in violent competitive games, no point of identification with predominately male actors, and no desire to fight the boys for access to the computer--which, supporters point out, they tend to identify as male turf anyway.
This built-in bias, or so the argument goes, keeps girls from achieving the skills, status, satisfaction, and power that computer-based jobs apparently deliver. By offering stress-free, female friendly computer games, the industry will not only broaden the market but enhance a girl's chances to land a good-paying job. Critics of the movement, on the other hand, only have to mention the most popular girls-only games ("Fashion Designer Barbie," "Let's Talk About Me," for example) to make their point: These non-competitive, mindless point-and-click exercises are mired in the traditional female world of clothes, makeup, social relations, and appearance and are designed to hold a girl back, not propel her forward.
The debate that ensues raises some interesting questions that are not necessarily answered here: Does it matter whether sweeping generalizations about girls and their interests emanate from feminists or traditionalists? Should girls be shielded from the "stress" they encounter in cyberspace, or would they be better off learning to fight for themselves when the stakes are comparatively small? Is there any proof that girls (or boys for that matter) are more satisfied in their adult lives because they played computer games? And do girl consumers benefit as much as scholar-consultants or game makers do from the expansion of the market? Because we barely hear from the girls themselves, and because no one really questions the relation between game-playing (or chatting, or surfing the net) and technical prowess in the future, we don't hear much about these issues.
But what we do hear is often interesting, especially when game makers themselves do the talking. Unburdened by the theory that clouds some of the academic essays, these interviews show us the practical side of market building and demonstrate what the editors call entrepreneurial feminism in action. Like the girl consumers they try to attract, game makers offer a range of opinion on what's important and what's not--the bottom line being, of course, that they have to sell their games to stay in business. "As far as the content being traditionally coded as feminine," one points out, "we did go to the girls and ask them what they wanted, and some of the things they want are traditional" (p. 161). Another wonders what the fuss is all about. "We get asked all the time, 'Why didn't you develop games for girls?' Well, these are for girls. These are for girls and boys. They're for everybody. There for fun, you know?"(p. 195). Overall, the most interesting interviews are with Theresa Duncan and Monica Gesue, who have been inspired by their own childhood enjoyment of books like Alice and Wonderland and Harriet the Spy and seem more concerned with narrative, complexity, and enjoyment than they are with issues that launched this book.
Historians of childhood may find this book interesting for the light it sheds on the modern development of the youth market. But they should be warned that there is no sense of historical development here, no effort to relate this chapter of the ever expanding girls' market to earlier chapters like the development of Seventeen magazine in the 1940s. After visiting some of the web sites mentioned, though, I think a comparison could be made. At girl sites like Purple Moon and Girlgames (which are related to, but not the same as the CD-ROMs described in the book), shopping seems to be the number one concern.
So I still don't know whether I was right to worry about my niece's obsession with computer games. Now that she's older I worry about the time she wastes chatting on line with fellow fans of Phish (a music group, for those of you completely out of touch). But having watched her do exceedingly well in school (and become more of an artist than a computer nerd) I realize that these cultural crises are usually constructed to sell one thing or another--sometimes books condemning computer games, sometimes books promoting computer games, and sometimes the games themselves. Her experience also makes me realize that I have more faith in a girl's ability to fight her own battles and develop her own talents, tastes, and skills for the future, than I have in adults, academics or otherwise, who insist on paving the way for her.
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. For use, please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Women and Language, vol. 22, no. 1, 1999, p. 55+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131686718/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1baac412. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A131686718

Jenkins, Henry & others. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Rachel Hoover
(Apr. 19, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Jenkins, Henry & others. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York Univ. 2013. 352p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780814743508. $29.95. COMM
Jenkins (communications, journalism & cinematic arts, Annenberg Sch. for Communication, Univ. of Southern California; Convergence Culture), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications), and Joshua Green (strategist, Undercurrent; coauthor, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture) have written a timely and accurate account of the current state of media in our networked culture. While referencing writers such as Howard Rheingold (The Virtual Community) and Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur), the authors describe the problem with a traditional broadcast media paradigm that expects viewers to come to them and why instead meeting the audience where they are and creating valuable relationships is important. They discuss exemplars of independent media who already understand the need for spreadability--that content is easy to share and transform without reprisal--and echo messages like musician Amanda Palmer's "We are the media," whereby consumers decide what content is worth their time and how they contribute to and shape it.
Verdict This book covers topics that are relevant and accessible to anyone looking for a better grasp of how the communications environment is changing and seeking models for how to be successful within it. It will be especially meaningful for those in the media and communications fields, marketing, content creation, and advertising.--Rachel Hoover, Thomas Ford Memorial Lib., Western Springs, IL
Hoover, Rachel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoover, Rachel. "Jenkins, Henry & others. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture." Xpress Reviews, 19 Apr. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A329366273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=adfa23cf. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A329366273

"Jenkins, Henry: SPREADABLE MEDIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A308117107/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=233c1a41. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Herbst, Philip. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Booklist, 15 Oct. 1998, p. 376. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A55053310/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9582cfe1. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. "FROM BARBIE TO MORTAL K0MBAT: Gender and Computer Games." Publishers Weekly, 16 Nov. 1998, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A53265976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fcfcf382. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Hackman, Sandra. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." The Women's Review of Books, Mar. 1999, p. 11+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54169891/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d2eac582. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. "Spreadable Media." California Bookwatch, May 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A331081045/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e3050f98. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Pepper, S. "Jenkins, Henry: Participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1470+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A454942667/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a31444df. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Pepper, S. "Jenkins, Henry. Spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2014, p. 1795. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A370321917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e4920bdf. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Spry, Damien. "Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam and Green, Joshua, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture." Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, Feb. 2014, p. 189. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A363973240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b95e576c. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. John, B.S. "The Participatory cultures handbook." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2013, p. 1826. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A332789000/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c7d07304. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Orcutt, D. "Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2011, p. 1846. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A257675832/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26cff78a. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Shepperd, Josh. "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture by Henry Jenkins." Velvet Light Trap, no. 60, 2007, p. 94+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A169309591/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3af05fc3. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century." Teacher Librarian, vol. 34, no. 4, 2007, p. 53. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A162361834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=da9eefc0. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. WALSH, MARGARET. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Business History, vol. 43, no. 3, 2001, p. 166. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A77417807/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c49b699. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games." Women and Language, vol. 22, no. 1, 1999, p. 55+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131686718/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1baac412. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017. Hoover, Rachel. "Jenkins, Henry & others. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture." Xpress Reviews, 19 Apr. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A329366273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=adfa23cf. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

• Masters of Media
  https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2007/09/16/review-of-henry-jenkins-fans-bloggers-and-gamers/
  Word count: 1321

  Review: Henry Jenkins’ Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers
  By: Qilan Zhao
  On: September 16, 2007

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  This is a review of Henry Jenkins’ book Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory culture (2006). Henry Jenkins is the co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers is a compilation of several essays, including his previous work on fandom, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992).
  The introduction of the book is entitled as the confession of ACA/fan, which already gives away Jenkins’ personal interest in fandom. Jenkins is certainly not the first scholar whose work centered on fandom, but is one of the few who took fandom seriously, even within the context of science and knowledge. What makes his work stand out in comparison to previous studies on fandom is that his work captures fans’ experience as a source for active participation in producing meaning. Rather seeing fans (or audience) as passive recipients of the media texts, Jenkins argues that fans like “poachers” occupy someone else’s property and adapt/alter it to suit their own taste. This approach provides a useful insight into the position of fans in relation to media text, which as Jenkins emphasizes, is not one-way streamed. This also means that corporate media hegemony is contested by the consumers of the texts, and that meaning of the text is not a top-down dictation, but rather a constructive one that requires fans’ participation and input.
  Furthermore, Jenkins emphasis on active participation also entails a closer and critical look at the way research on fandom has been conducted up until now. Jenkins refers to the first generation of scholars such as John Fiske, John Tulloch, and Janice Radway who uses ethnographic methods, derived in part of sociological methods. Even though these early works on fandom acknowledged fandom to be a participatory and constructive phenomenon, it was “important for these writers to be outside what they were writing about, to be free of any direct implication in their subject matter” (Jenkins 2006: 11). Jenkins considers himself to be part of the second generation scholars who tried to find a way to alter the perception based on insider knowledge of what it is to be a fan, and to find a language to articulate a different perspective that comes out of lived experience and situated knowledge. Jenkins and scholars from this second generation opened up a way for a third generation of scholars who identify themselves as scholars and fans (ACA/fan).

  I think that Jenkins makes a strong point by sketching the phases of social/cultural research on fandom and popular culture. It has become more acceptable nowadays to be personally involved in the subject or research matter. It is a way for not only fans, but also scholars to share their findings and collectively build on knowledge. For instance, it is usual to publish research findings on a weblog, even before the official publication of the article. Jenkins supports the interactive dialogue between research subjects (fan) and scholars. But it’s also an important issue to see the ways in which scholars are becoming part of a participatory culture of shared knowledge, enabled by the wave of web2.0 applications.
  Secondly, Jenkins confronts scholars with the common practice of taking the work of fans for granted. According to Jenkins, there is the tendency as a scholar to consider their own analysis of the media text as a legitimate contribution to knowledge; whereas the work of fans or what they have to say about the media content does not pertain to the world of academia. In other words, fans are excluded in the contribution of knowledge. I may not completely agree with Jenkins on the extent to which fans are producing knowledge (which I shall discuss later on), but Jenkins gave the fans a voice and a place within the academia.
  Scholars such as Simone Murray on the other hand are a bit more skeptical on fandom as a participatory culture and the emerging power in fan communities that is capable of shifting the boundaries between media content producers and consumers:
  “Admirable though Jenkins’ attention to corporate regulatory structures is, his schema in Textual Poachers tends to posit fan cultures as rebelling against an essentially monolithic and stable corporate order. A more responsive depiction of the contemporary milieu given the instability of the global market economy, and the landscape of constant merger and divestment against which media conglomerates constitute themselves, might be to understand fans as exerting pressure on the parameters of a media system which is itself unstable. (Murray 2004:73 )
  I do not completely agree with Murray’s point. For Jenkins, fans are not opposing or rebelling against corporate media. Partially true is that fans create alternative content, because they cannot identify with the one the producer of the text is providing. Alternative deviations from the original text are innumerable, therefore hard or even impossible to categorize (or to grasp). But Jenkins was more interested in the intentions behind these alterations and concluded that fans do not just randomly create content. In a fan community, there is a certain loyalty to the original media content. Depending on the nature and the need of the fan community, each member of a community produces content based on a certain consensus. This allows marginalized groups in society to alter the media content to their needs, which can also be seen as a form of empowerment. But fans are indeed exerting pressure on the parameters of a media system, but not through oppositional forces, but in dialogue as (according to Jenkins) fans are finding ways to mediate between the original text and their own interpretation of the text. The gap in between these two provides a space for imagination and creativity.
  What I missed in Jenkins’ essays is the definition of knowledge. Fandom provides important data to construct certain kind of knowledge. But what would this knowledge entail? As I have discussed before, content (re)production in fan community can amount to anything or everything. Taking the female gaming community for instance; through the 90’s several female clans (Quake) emerged and most of them were short-lived. The importance of these clans cannot be reduced to their longevity; these marginalized female gamers used the medium for their own empowerment and thereby contesting the gender status quo in the gaming culture. But does their activity last long enough to actually contribute significant change? What kind of knowledge can we extract from (most of the time) instable and short-lived communities?
  Due to new media technologies, the media chain is shifting and so are the boundaries between (and their roles as) content producers, distributors, and consumers/users. Jenkins made clear that the production of media content on the side of consumers/users is worthy of academic research. I really liked the last section of the book when it all comes down to meaning versus effect. Youth violence has been associated with the rise of violent videogames. This has always been contended, but it is only viable if we (and most people still do) consider users of media (gamers/fans/bloggers) as passive recipient, without the ability to make up their own interpretation and meaning of the text. Jenkins makes it very clear at the end of the book. It is all about meaning, the interaction with any forms of medium, especially when it is for entertainment purposes. Effects are not monolithic and certainly not dictated. To understand the effects of particular medium, Jenkins argues that we should focus on the side where meaning is produced, and as you may have guessed, that is what participatory culture is all about; active participation in consuming, and producing (several) meanings out of one media text.
  More about Jenkins, visit Jenkins’ official weblog.
  Reviews of Jenkins’ Fans, bloggers, and gamers:
  Kate Kutchbert

• The Digital Antiquarian
  http://maher.filfre.net/writings/convergence.html
  Word count: 1530

  "Convergence" is the "paradigm shift" of the last few years. The word gets bandied about a lot in the media world, but seems to have no set definition. I first heard it applied to the idea that someday soon all home media consumption -- Internet, television, music, gaming, and movies -- would take place on a single black box in the living room that would take the place of the home PC, television, stereo, gaming console and DVD player. Microsoft created its X-Box console with just this type of convergence in mind. It wouldn't be just a device to play games on, but the centerpiece of all home entertainment. Technologically, this wasn't such a stretch. Sociologically, though, it was, and it never happened. If anything, the marketplace is filled with an even more bewildering array of electronic gadgets today. With this style of convergence effectively dead, the word has gone on to take on a host of possible definitions. I sometimes get the disconcerting feeling that even many of those who use the word are doing so mainly because it is expected and somehow makes them feel good about whatever agenda they happen to be promoting.

  This brings us to MIT Media Studies Professor Henry Jenkins and his 2006 book Convergence Culture. Jenkins knows exactly what he means by the term convergence, and his definition is much more complex, subtle, and interesting than the old one. Jenkins is not interested in the hardware level at all, but rather looks at looks at trends in media over the past decade on the macro level. He uses the term to refer to two principal trends: the tendency of modern media creations to attract a much greater degree of audience participation than ever before, to the point that some are actually influenced profoundly by their fanbase, becoming almost a form of interactive storytelling; and the phenomenon of a single franchise being distributed through and impacting a range of media delivery methods. These two trends go together, making it very hard to pull them apart and examine them separately. Therefore, and on the assumption that the best teacher is a solid example, Jenkins doesn't try. He rather divides the body of his book into six substantial chapters, each examining in detail a single franchise.

  His first subject of study is the reality television show Survivor. When it appeared in 2000, it was the first of its kind on American television and, for better or for worse, caused both quite a sensation and the inevitable stream of copycats. Jenkins focuses on the community of so-called "Survivor spoilers" which sprang up in its wake. Taking advantage of the fact that the entire season-long contest is filmed months before it appears on television, these people go to incredible lengths to penetrate the show's veil of secrecy and "spoil" each episode before it airs by publicizing the results. To do so, they use both the softest means, such as psychological analysises of the contestants, and the hardest. Jenkins describes one spoiler who has formed a liaison with a satellite imaging company, and uses their data to search out contest sites before they have been announced. The spoiler community quickly began to influence the production staff of the show. What has followed since is an intricate game of cat and mouse worthy of a spy novel. As an example, Jenkins describes how the production staff hid a picture away on a cranny of the Survivor website's server where the ever-snooping spoilers would be sure to find it. Said picture had red Xs over some contestants, presumably those soon to lose by being voted off the island. It seemed a gold mine to the spoiler community... until the next episode aired and did not follow this intelligence at all. The picture had apparently been a deliberate plant. Since then, both sides have gotten even more devious, as the show has become a closed feedback loop, with both its producers and the spoilers responding to the efforts of the other. Ratings, meanwhile, just continued to increase for each of Survivor's first few seasons.

  It is arguably this demonstration of the power of public engagement that convinced the Fox television network to air the national musical talent contest American Idol, which unlike Survivor explicitly involved the viewing audience by allowing them to have a voice in deciding the winner by text messaging their votes with their mobile phones. This method of communication is very popular in Europe, but had not really caught on in North America at the time of American Idol's 2002 premiere. (It is in fact worth observing that both Survivor and American Idol were in fact clones of shows that originated in Europe. We may be the largest media market in the world, but we are apparently not the most original.) One of the goals of American Idol sponsor Verizon was to encourage Americans to become familiar with this function of their mobile phones many may not have even known existed. This leveraging of a single property across multiple forms of media is classic convergence behavior by Jenkins' definition.

  Perhaps Jenkins' best illustration of all aspects of convergence is his discussion of the Matrix phenomenon. Most are familiar with the trilogy of movies, but casual viewers perhaps do not realize that they are seeing only part of the story. To fully experience the Wachowski brothers' epic, one must also collect all issues of the comic book; explore the web site; view the anime cartoon; and play the video game. These interlocking parts do not, as one might expect, merely tell the same story in different formats, but rather make their own unique contributions to a single unfolding macro-narrative, and reference one another freely. There are aspects of the later movies, for instance, that make no sense unless one has read the comic or played the game. Jenkins attributes much of the lukewarm reception of the second and third films among the mainstream media to this: "Many film critics trashed the later sequels because they were not sufficiently self-contained and thus bordered on incoherent" (96). Meanwhile, the true fans presumably nodded knowingly during the films and laughed at the hopelessly clueless critics. Jenkins argues that the Matrix is an example of a brand new kind of trans-media storytelling, one which we do not have yet have a critical framework in place to really assess.

  The Matrix phenomenon also has spawned the other type of convergence, in the form of a rabid fanbase who research the philosophy behind the story; write elaborate fictions of their own set within its world; create short Matrix movies of their own; and of course are vocal with complaints and/or praise as they watch the official storyline unfold. The new Matrix massive multiplayer online game will allow these fans a new, wide open field to participate in their shared fantasy.

  Here and in his similar explorations of Star Wars and Harry Potter, Jenkins does a very good job of documenting recent changes in the media landscape, but often fails to critically examine those changes. As a student of literature, I am a great fan storytelling, but I have to question whether getting lost in mediated worlds to the extent of many of those described in his book is really a healthy thing. He also leaves unexplored the question of quality. I may come off as a snooty elitist here in opposition to man of the people Jenkins, but I can't help remarking that most of the properties he examines just aren't very good. Survivor is a celebration of all the worst aspects of human nature; American Idol is a veritable monument to bland, uninteresting music, a triumph of showbiz over artistry; and the Matrix, with its intellectual pretensions in the form of recycled Cliff's Notes philosophy, I find perhaps the most irritating of all. The fan communities to which Jenkins devotes so much time strike me, in spite of their undeniable talent and energy, as vaguely pathetic at times. I can't help but wonder what they might be capable of if they saw fit to put that talent and energy into original work that they could truly call their own. In fact, all but one of the properties Jenkins discusses are big media creations. His discussion of the Internet rise of Howard Dean is a welcome exception, but more could have been done in this area that I personally find much more inspiring than all the fan fiction in the world. I am of course biased, but I can't help but think that a chapter on the modern interactive fiction community, chronicling its stewardship and development of a form that has been abandoned by commercial interests, would not have been amiss.

  In the end, though, and even if I don't entirely share Jenkins' enthusiasm toward the brave new world he describes, Convergence Culture is a throughly researched and very readable guide to that world. My brief comments here have really only scratched its surface. I would encourage anyone with an interest in the subjects it deals with to get to know it better.

• Hastac
  https://www.hastac.org/blogs/tara-l-conley/2013/11/01/book-review-convergence-culture-where-old-and-new-media-collide
  Word count: 3028

  Book Review Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
  Page Views: 5271
  80
  By Tara Conley
  on November 1, 2013

  There is a reason why writer and critic Howard Rheingold declared Henry Jenkins as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. Like McLuhan, Jenkins’ scholarly work on media and culture has funneled into mainstream conversations, and as a result, his insights about how we live and learn through and with media and technology have affected the way many of us—that is, educators, scholars, and mediamakers—understand the world. Unlike McLuhan whose notoriety spread into mainstream and pop culture circles by the late 1970s largely because of his quirky personality and punchy proverbs like “the medium is the message”, Jenkins has managed to bring his theoretical insights into the mainstream primarily because he is purposeful in engaging popular culture artifacts in a way that is accessible for a variety of audiences.
  In Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide (2006), Jenkins employs a familiar method often found in his other foundational texts; he cites popular culture media artifacts as entry points to detangle theory while inviting readers to engage in the study of culture and history. As a way of guiding readers throughout theoretical ideas and conceptual frameworks, Convergence presents several case studies, all of which Jenkins describes as the most successful media franchises in US popular culture, including Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. The 2008 paperback publication includes an Afterword that discusses politics in the YouTube age. These media sites, or ethnographic foci provide readers with a way into understanding what Jenkins means by convergence, that is, a paradigm shift of communication and media landscapes where information flows across multiple grassroots and corporate platforms, and because of these dynamic and uncertain processes our understanding of what it means to participate and collaborate are always in flux. As participation and collaboration change and as “increased interdependence of communication systems” (p. 254) occur, we find that non-experts and non-elites are primary shapeshifters of these media landscapes. Throughout the book, Jenkins challenges readers to think differently about what convergence means, and at times we are left to piece together our own interpretation of this incomplete concept.
  While reading through each case study I began to understand that Jenkins’ discussions about convergence culture was also commentary about technological change. Jenkins cites MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool as the twenty-first century prophet of convergence, and the one who reminds us that technological change does not necessarily mean an inevitable and mechanical shift from one systematic point to the next. Instead, technological change, as predicted by Pool, describes “a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems compet[e] and collaborat[e], searching for the stability that would always elude them” (p. 11). Convergence, then, does not so much describe change as it describes tension with change. Using case studies and by analyzing media most familiar and compelling, Jenkins’ aim is to look at how convergence thinking reshapes American culture. With Convergence Jenkins wishes to appeal to lay audiences as well as industry leaders and policy makers. His goal is not to critique media perspectives on convergence but rather to document these perspectives because, as he argues, “I don’t think we can meaningfully critique convergence until it is more fully understood” (p. 13).
  Survivor and Spoiling Cultures
  Beginning his analysis with the popular reality TV game show Survivor, Jenkins cites this media franchise to illustrate the impact of spoiling communities and collective intelligence on media production and consumption. Jenkins notes that “[m]apping how these knowledge communities work can help us better understand the social nature of contemporary media consumption” (p. 20). Never before has an audience been able to engage with a television show as it was happening, and even work to “spoil” or reveal secrets about the show’s location and banished contestants. Characteristic of online community forums or spoiling communities is that “[n]o one knows everything, everyone knows something, [and] all knowledge resides in humanity” (quoted on p. 26-27). Jenkins defines collective intelligence as the “ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members” (p. 27). As the notion of community is changing, newer forms of communities begin to emerge, and these sorts of knowledge collectives are necessary in order to restore democratic citizenship. Unfortunately, however, because we have bought into an expert paradigm, argues Jenkins, we see that more Americans “do not participate in public debates” (p. 29). As an alternative, spoiling is a practice wherein “knowledge gets produced and evaluated” via more democratic means (p. 29). In other words, spoiling is like a peer review or vetting process without all the institutionalized formalities that encourage expert knowledge over open and democratized knowledges.

  It is fair to argue that the Internet birthed spoiling culture in popular media. When Jenkins wrote Convergence in 2006 he was looking primarily at the ways community boards and forums functioned as spoiling communities. Currently, in 2013, one could argue that Twitter is a type of spoiling community particular in response to TV drama shows like ABC’s Scandal and AMC’s Breaking Bad. Jenkins notes that spoiling is an action that requires sleuthing and investigating, and is characterized as adversarial since “one group [is] trying to get their hands on the knowledge the other group is trying to protect” (p. 43). One could argue that spoiling also takes place on Twitter or Facebook with shows like Big Brother, a similar contestant reality game show like Survivor.
  American Idol and Affective Economies
  Jenkins’ chapter on American Idol (AI) further explores the ways older and newer media collide, in addition to introducing readers to a concept he calls ‘affective economies’. Affective economies describe the idea that the consumer is “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked” with/in media content (p. 20). Using AI as a case study, Jenkins highlights the various ways advertisers and networks perceive audiences and manage viewership. He argues that reality television like Survivor and AI proved to be the “first application of media convergence” (p. 59) because they illustrate the intersection of old (television and radio) and new media (web and mobile telecommunications), and also the multifaceted manner in which transmedia platforms are built and maintained. Jenkins mentions that AI may have also been responsible for getting more Americans “excited about text messaging” (p. 59), thereby ushering in a new (but not so new for Asian and European countries) form of mobile communication to the US-American public.

  (Source)
  The overwhelming success of the AI franchise is not only due to the loyalty and emotional connection audiences felt for show itself, but also the connection audiences had to the AI’s advertisers. Jenkins continues throughout the chapter to explore media convergence by discussing the positive outcomes and negative implications of affective economies and brand loyalty, particularly calling our attention to the collective intelligence of consumers and audiences and their ability to challenge corporate decisions while at the same time being exploited by corporate structures.
  The Matrix &Star Wars and Transmedia Storytelling
  Jenkins highlights The Matrix franchise to examine transmedia storytelling, most notably, citing the problems with the way the franchise designed and executed transmedia narratives. As Jenkins notes, The Matrix franchise forces audiences to do their homework in order to “truly appreciate what [they] are watching” (p. 96). However, the problem with this sort of transmedia storytelling is that not all viewers are willing to engage with other media platforms, like video games, in order to participate fully in the media and storytelling experience. Jenkins’ chapter on the Star Wars franchise delves into how corporate and grassroots convergence gave rise to uncertainty about what rules “should govern [consumer] interaction” and participation. Unlike the transmedia storytelling that wound up isolating some Matrix’ fans, the transmedia storytelling of the Star Wars took on a deeper meaning for children’s play and amateur filmmaking. As fans engaged in the transmedia storytelling of Star Wars they did so by using digital and physical artifacts that added new meaning to the story. Fans would use artifacts like action figures to create Star Wars fan fiction or parody. As fan fiction and parody became a more popular form of remixing and retelling Star Wars, Lucasfilms pushed back because of copyright infringements. Eventually, corporate media stepped in to limit the scope of this type of fan participation.

  Critique
  At this point in the book, I found that the case studies Jenkins cited were not as engaging as I initially thought they would be at the beginning of the book. As a media scholar reading this text in 2013, I found some of the case studies outdated and uninteresting to follow. Granted, just because a media text is outdated certainly does not mean it is an irrelevant site to study. I am well aware that I probably exist in the minority when it comes to my lack of enthusiasm for media franchises like Star Wars and The Matrix. That said, though, I could not help but think about the ways Jenkins analyses might also apply to the current social media landscape. Because the last publication date of the book occurred in 2008, there is no mention of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook (although much of Jenkins analyses does incorporate discussions about online message boards). Consequently, at times, I found myself drifting in an out of the text while reading plot synopses about shows and movies in which I was never interested. I also found myself thinking about how social media platforms might also transform the ways in which old and new media converge, and how corporations and grassroots merge, and certainly how people actively, and not so actively participate.
  I understand, too, that in analyzing popular culture and media, communications scholars often face the problem that, at some point, the content we analyze will be outdated since newer media platforms and technologies are continuously changing and emerging. Since 2006, Jenkins has discussed at length the ways newer media platforms and artifacts impact participation and learning (see, for instance Jenkins 2009).
  If taken as an historical text Convergence presents a chronicled narrative of television franchises similar to the way Erik Barnouw journeys through the history of American television in Tube of Plenty (1990). Convergence might also be understood as an historical text that echoes the form and function of McLuhan’s 1964 seminal text Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, particularly in the way Jenkins’ engages popular culture to flesh out what it means to presently existing within a paradigm of media culture that is not fully understood.
  On Literacy, Democracy, and Participation
  The more relevant and poignant discussions in Convergence came when Jenkins addressed characteristics of convergence culture having to do with literacy, participation, and democracy. The focal point in chapter 5 concerns the constraints and affordances that participatory and transmedia texts like Harry Potter confront while up against what Jenkins states as “the most powerful forces shaping children’s lives [that is] education and religion” (p. 178). Jenkins argues that literacy is not simply what we do with print but also what we do with media. It is also in this chapter when Jenkins points out the uncertainties we confront while living in a convergence culture. He writes:
  “None of us really knows how to live in this era of media convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture. These changes are producing anxieties and uncertainties, even panic, as people imagine a world without gatekeepers and live with the reality of expanding corporate media power” (p. 176).
  Jenkins highlights the story of Heather Lawver, a young girl who started a fan community website The Daily Prophet that engages young people from all over the world to write and tell stories inspired by the Harry Potter franchise. Children enter into an imaginary world using fictive identities to explore a range of issues related to school, family, and fantasy.
  In a participatory culture and fan community, children obtain skills characteristic of a convergence era, that is, they learn how to pool information, share and compare, evaluate, make connections, express interpretations, and circulate what they create online. Children learn through what professor James Paul Gee calls “affinity spaces” (quoted on p. 186). Affinity spaces invite young people to immerse in a learning environment that is not necessarily restricted by space, institutional bureaucracy, and adult authority, but rather depends on peer-to-peer teaching and learning across various informal learning spaces. In a participatory culture, every participant is responsible for scaffolding, not just the teacher. Unlike most traditional schooling spaces, fan communities encourage literacy through alternative ways of learning and participation with new media.

  (Source)
  Here, Jenkins discussion about literacy in a digital age are very much in dialogue with Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) and Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age (2003). As Jenkins’ discusses Heather Lawver’s case study and Harry Potter, he is also inviting readers to think about the ways young Harry Potter fans engage with tools and representations of new media like digital video, audio, imagery, and hypertext. Though Jenkins is not explicitly making a case for multimodality and new media literacies in Convergence, while citing Heather Lawver’s story, he does call forth concepts associated with making meaning through multiple modes of writing, reading, and remixing texts.
  Chapter 6 highlights remixing culture in response to political campaigning and organizing. Jenkins references the 2004 presidential election naming, in particular, Howard Dean’s successful online fundraising campaign lead by Joe Trippi. Though Dean’s 2004 campaign has been celebrated as the first successful online political organizing effort, it was also a moment in which the public was able to control the outcome of what turned out to be an embarrassing campaign as media makers mocked and remixed Dean’s now infamous concession “scream speech” using digital video, audio, and Photoshopped images.

  (Source: FreakingNews.com)
  Jenkins references Trippi’s book Democracy, the Internet, and Overthrow of Everything, in which Trippi dismisses convergence, calling it a “dangerous time for this burgeoning democratic movement [...] when the corporation and advertisers will threaten to co-opt and erode the democratic online ethic” (quoted on p. 223). Jenkins is quick to retort Trippi’s claim stating that Trippi is falling prey to the Black Box Fallacy, the false notion that in the future media content will stream, and thus be controlled from a singular and centralized source. Jenkins asserts, “we are already living in a convergence culture. We are already learning how to live betwixt and between those multiple media systems” (p. 223). Jenkins’ rebuttal to Trippi is also when, for me at least, his argument becomes most salient because Jenkins is speaking directly to those who participate in a convergence culture even though they believe they are not part of it.
  Jenkins concludes the book by discussing the current television landscape that has been influenced by the grassroots and democratizing practices on the Internet. Jenkins talks about Current TV (now defunct) as a network that from its inception wanted to “encourage the active participation of young people as citizen journalists” (p. 251). In addition to Current TV, Jenkins references other online media platforms like particatoryculture.org and ourmedia.org as evidence of the way amateur media makers are gaining visibility and credibility as organizers and political activists.
  Jenkins ends Convergence with a welcoming:
  "Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. Convergence culture is the future, but it is taking shape now. Consumers will be more powerful within convergence culture--but only if they recognize and use that power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture” (p. 270).
  My Takeaway
  Since Convergence is both an historical and theoretical text it has, and will continue to have a home in digital humanities, and in media and communication studies. With Convergence, Jenkins invites readers to broaden our understanding of participatory culture and interrogate what it means when seemingly disparate sectors, networks, and industries merge to produce different kinds of stories and alternative ways of telling these stories. This book teaches that we not only exist in an age of informed citizenry, but we are also monitorial citizens; those with the capacity to assess, critique, and evaluate the plethora of information thrown at us on a daily basis. As Jenkins describes it, the monitorial citizen is already acquiring new skills and new ethics of sharing that enable co-deliberation to take place because convergence is already happening.
  And so, my takeaway from Convergence is that as we exist in this betwixt and between space wherein information is constantly being funnel through various communications platforms, we must be intent on rethinking how we participate, collaborate, and deliberate together in order to understand the worlds around us and to solve problems collectively. Convergence then, is more than just an expression of technological change, it is an era when we, as consumers and citizens are confronted with more information than we can ever process, and as such we find ourselves meandering through the “kludge-like process” (p. 17) with the hopes of being able to “create a context where we listen and learn from one another” (p. 250). This sort of reconciling and negotiating through the informational clutter all in efforts to marry ideas and solve problems is, as I see it, a process of cultural and interpersonal change, a moment characterized as perhaps the greatest collective challenge we face in the twenty-first century.
  References
  Barnouw, E. (1990). Tube of plenty: The evolution of American television. London. Oxford University Press.
  Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century
  Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York. New York University Press.
  Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. New York: Routledge.
  Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Boston, MA. The MIT Press
  McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Boston, MA. The MIT Press

• H-Net
  http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1184
  Word count: 633

  Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. viii + 343 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-90571-8; $38.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-90572-5.
  Reviewed by Anne Collins Smith (Susquehanna University)
  Published on H-PCAACA (August, 1997)

  In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins examines the underground world of the media fandom, people who create fiction, artwork, and other forms of expression based on television shows. Drawing on a rich theoretical background with sources ranging from feminist literary criticism to cultural anthropology, Jenkins applies and adapts Michel de Certeau's model of "poaching," in which an audience appropriates a text for itself. Taking a stand against the stereotypical portrayal of fans as obsessive nerds who are out of touch with reality, he demonstrates that fans are pro-active constructors of an alternative culture using elements "poached" and reworked from the popular media.
  Jenkins addresses a number of fannish phenomena, including fan fiction and fan-produced music videos. He offers the most plausible academic explanation yet for the popularity of homoerotic fan fiction. Unlike earlier theorists who viewed this fiction as pornography, he analyzes it as a holistic narrative structure which includes--but is not limited to--depictions of sexual activity. Jenkins argues that fans are constructing a fluid continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual, a continuum that exists for women--no one blinks if straight women hug and kiss each other--but which is sharply divided for men.
  I originally found it puzzling that Jenkins devoted a whole chapter to filking (science-fiction folksong writing and performance). He elucidated several important elements of filking, however, that justified its prominent position in his analysis and shed light on the whole atmosphere of fandom. While many filks are about specific media shows and characters, many others are about fans or the activities of fandom, providing a self-referential description not commonly available in other fannish products.
  I found the analysis to be sound overall; only one chapter was structurally flawed. Jenkins' discussion of the relationship between fans and producers of ongoing TV shows lacks closure. He recounts how fans of Beauty and the Beast managed to keep the show on the air but were unable to influence its content, as the producers chose to de-emphasize the romantic qualities of the program in favor of action-adventure. He documents the feelings of helplessness and frustration that fans experience as a result of this and other programming decisions, but his analysis does not move beyond recounting these experiences. The questions that naturally arise from this chapter are never answered. Does Jenkins believe that fans are justified in their attempts to influence producers? Does he believe that producers are justified in ignoring the fans? Does the attempt by the consumer to alter the product at the source represent a new trend in mass consumption, or are there forces at work that will ensure the failure of these attempts?
  The author's narrative voice is curiously distant. After taking some pains to establish his credentials as a member of the group being studied, Jenkins proceeds to adopt a third-person stand that gives no indication of his participation in fandom, giving his recounting of various events a spooky "eye in the sky" quality.
  This book is theoretically complex, thoroughly researched, and tightly argued. Moreover, Jenkins models admirable behavior for the popular-culture researcher, carefully balancing respect for fans' privacy and a desire to let their voices be heard. This book would be an invaluable resource for anyone working in media studies or audience theory.
  This review is copyrighted (c) 1997 by H-Net and the Popular Culture and the American Culture Associations. It may be reproduced electronically for educational or scholarly use. The Associations reserve print rights and permissions. (Contact: P.C.Rollins at the following electronic address: Rollins@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu).

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