"Jenkins is an astute observer of media culture and his insights are spot-on...He intends his book to be a powerful tool both now and in the future...This is a book to be praised. It raises many issues." -- Los Angeles Times
"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." -- Choice
"Henry Jenkins offers crucial insight into an unexpected and unforeseen future. Unlike most predictions about how New Media will shape the world in which we live, the reality is turning out far stranger and more interesting than we might have imagined. The social implications of this change could be staggering." -- Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims
"Jenkins tries to bring clarity to cultural changes that are melting and morphing into new shapes on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis. Convergence Culture provides a view that looks at the restless ocean and tracks the currents rather than just looking at the individual rocks on the beach." -- The McClatchy Newspapers
Henry Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an Americanmedia scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.[1] Previously, he was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MITComparative Media Studies program with William Uricchio. He is also author of several books, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.
One of Jenkins' earlier arguments was that the boundary between text and reader has broken down, not merely in the way the reader "constructs" the text (see deconstructionism), but in the growth of fan cultures. These could be seen by how "fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."
Jenkins refers to world-making as "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".[2] Some may get world-making confused with world-building or transmedia storytelling. This would be slightly off, the position where this term departs is in the world creation of multi-culture itself, not the media in which it spreads and grows. World-Making concentrates on the consumer side of franchising, not the different forms of media it spreads and connects. The term itself had been popularized by Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman in his book "Ways of Worldmaking" in 1978.
More recently, Jenkins' research has been focused on the concept of "Media Convergence", arguing that the simple technological-focused view that was once hyped was short sighted and that an understanding of how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources offers a far richer understanding of the relationship between different media forms. In this respect, he suggests that convergence be understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. According to Jenkins, there are nine sites where important negotiations between consumers and producers are occurring. These sites are revising audience measurement, remapping globalization, reengaging citizens, renegotiating relations between producers and consumers, redesigning the digital economy, rethinking media aesthetics, regulating media content, redefining intellectual property rights and restricting media ownership. This research led to his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.
Jenkins has lately done much research in the field of video game critical studies. In his article, "Complete freedom of Movement": Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces," he discusses the cultural geography of video game spaces. More importantly, he investigates as to what draws boys to video games and whether girls should feel the same attraction. Inspired by such cultural critics as Gilbert Seldes who believed that Cinema was unfairly victimized during his time for being a rising new medium.[3] On the matter, Jenkins says
Games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as those earlier media were for the machine age. They open up new aesthetic experiences and transform the computer screen into a realm of experimentation and innovation that is broadly accesible.[4]
In 2006 Jenkins was the lead author of a White Paper for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. This paper, called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, was created by Jenkins and staff members of Project New Media Literacies. Project New Media Literacies, or pNML, was one of the first research initiatives funded by MacArthur's $50million digital learning initiative back in 2005. The project promotes a constructivist approach that young learners need to be full and active participants in a culture that increasingly values innovation, collaborative knowledge-building, and the ability to tap into collective intelligence networks.
He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999. This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program.
Recognition
He was featured in both Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer magazines, where he was asked about the effects of violence in video games. He offered a very different perspective from Jack Thompson's.
On May 12, 2009, a socially networked artwork called Will Henry Jenkins Hear About It? was underway. It features bottles in the sea with the message "Will Henry Jenkins hear about it?" and posting the same message through different social networks to see if Henry Jenkins will come across the message.
Works
Jenkins, Henry (1992). What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 416. ISBN0231078552.
Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. Studies in culture and communication. New York: Routledge. p. 343. ISBN0415905710.
Jenkins, Henry (1995). Classical Hollywood Comedy. AFI film readers. New York: Routledge. p. 430. ISBN0415906393.
Jenkins, Henry (1998). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. p. 360. ISBN0262032589.
Jenkins, Henry (1998). The Children's Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press. p. 532. ISBN0814742319.
Jenkins, Henry (2003). Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Media in transition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 404. ISBN0262201461.
Jenkins, Henry (ed. with David Thorburn) (2003). Democracy and New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 385. ISBN0262101017.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. p. 308. ISBN0814742815.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. p. 279. ISBN081474284X.
Jenkins, Henry (2007). The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press. p. 285. ISBN0814742823.
2006 White Paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
