Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past 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 thirteen 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 and 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.
Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group that 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 continues to be actively involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium, a faculty network that 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. And he is working at USC to develop a new research project focused on young people, participatory culture, and public engagement.
Jenkins actively blogs at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.
This interview was conducted by Christine Newkirk, the Managing Editor of Youth Media Reporter at the Academy for Educational Development. Christine has worked for several years in the youth media field as a scholar, practitioner, social science researcher and evaluator in New York, Costa Rica and Brazil. She is currently completing her Master’s thesis in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Newkirk’s research interests include youth activism, new media technologies, and grassroots social and economic development.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Jenkins: Participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals that will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms.
Young people have historically been early adapters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression, which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Jenkins: Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community, which shares their interests and passions, have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding a recurring base of support for their work.
The challenge, then, is to get messages out from one’s own community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Jenkins: I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world. Using existing material provides young people scaffoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling to explore different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure. For example, one of the groups my team is currently studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights.
Working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community is helping those who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation.
The group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics. The group has tackled genocide in Darfur, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors, which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways.
Another example is the group Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. Young fans were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As a result, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. But they scored a huge success by largely shaping the conversations which occured around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films—Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America, which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups, which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered.
They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Jenkins: Ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in any classroom.
At the end of the day, new technology does not advance your work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate.
I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. Some time ago, danah boyd and I published an online conversation which focused on the risks and challenges of integrating these new technologies into the classroom here: www.danah.org/papers/MySpaceDOPA.html. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
Participatory culture is a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. From my perspective, I see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests.
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FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
YMR: What have you learned about the production of culture through your study of participatory culture? Can you describe particpatory culture and its role in reframing the relationship between commercial media and the audience?
My interest in participatory culture began more than 25 years ago when I first sought ways to describe to the academic world what I was observing in my involvement with media fandom. At the time, much of the writing on media consumption emphasized the passive absorption of meaning, and I was spending time in a community which was regularly involved in passionate discussions of the media that mattered to them. They were in effect taking existing media content as raw materials or as my mentor John Fiske would call it, a resource for their own cultural productions. They were writing stories and novels about the characters from television shows; they were composing and performing and recording and exchanging music; they were editing videos which mixes popular songs with video images; they were creating their own costumes. And they did so within networks which supported their creative development and enabled the circulation of what they made to larger communities. So I coined the term participatory culture to describe the differences in the ways they related to media from media spectatorship as it was currently understood in media studies. It is part of the title of my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
Over the past two decades, these fan practices have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Many people are now remixing sounds and images and circulating them in every larger social networks. What these guys were doing editing with two vcrs and patch cords can now be done using powerful and low cost digital editing tools. They exchange of remix videos under the table at fan conventions is now conducted very publicly via YouTube, where a video may get several million views.
I argue in my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, that as these fan practices become more visible, they are exerting a much greater influence on how the mainstream media conceptualizes its relationship to its audiences and publics. And in my current book project, Spreadable Media, we are making the argument that even on the level of circulation, these participatory communities are reshaping how media operations. The choices each of us made to pass along meaningful bits of content to our friends is resulting in new trends in commercial media production and helping to build a support base for niche, independent, and global media makers.
As I describe this emerging culture, I am often ask if what is being produced is bad. Yes, much of it is bad, and that’s a very good thing for the revitalization of our culture. Beginning media makers need spaces where they can make bad art, get feedback from an accepting yet critically engaged community, and get better. They need to see bad art so that they don’t feel so bad about their own fledgling efforts. Educators talk about meaningful peripheral participation—that is, the need for times and spaces where newbies can lurk and observe, can take their first steps, and gradually become integrated into the production community. In the old mass media model, cultural productions that did not reach a certain level of technical polish were hidden from view. There was an enormous gap between the professional and the amateur.
On YouTube, though, you can see media productions of all qualities and degrees of personal/professional development; you can share what you make at every step in your journey and you can see what people working at the next stage are producing. Often, you can reach out to them for advice and mentorship; minimally you can learn by observing what they are doing as the processes of cultural production become more transparent. These are all aspects of what I am calling participatory culture.
YMR: How are new media technologies providing spaces for marginalized groups to engage in the re-negotiation of popular culture (including popular culture around gender roles, race, and politics) in the United States? What does participatory culture mean for the potential of young people to reframe cultural and political debates in the 21st Century?
Let’s start with the obvious. Grassroots media makers have much more powerful ways of sharing what they make with each other now than at any other moment in human history and on a scale previously imagined. Yes, we live in a world where the concentration of media ownership means that corporate media exerts a very strong influence on our lives, but we also live in a world where grassroots media makers can produce and share media with each other across a broad range of different platforms. As this happens, those media makers who can connect their work to a larger community which shares their interests and passions have a real advantage in terms of breaking out of the clutter and finding an recurring base of support for their work.
So, to take a minority group as an example, far more Asian-Americans reach the top levels of visibility on YouTube than on network television; the same has proven to be true in terms of the production and circulation of popular music; Asian-American comics artists are using the web to form a community of support around their work and using comics to call attention to the concerns of their community; and all of the above gets discussed and promoted through powerful Asian-American blogs. Asian-American groups are using social networks to rally audiences for films by Asian-American artists and to get activists to protest against the “white casting” of Asian parts in contemporary films—as has occurred most recently around the Last Airbender production (see below).
The challenge, however, is to get these messages out from their own ethnic community to reach a more diverse viewership. Here, the porousness of the digital environment helps in this process. While it is possible to ignore content online which does not seem to speak to your interests (and it is much harder to ignore network television or Hollywood blockbusters) but it is also possible, even likely, that you will stumble onto media produced by people outside your own core community. YouTube represents a shared space—a borderlands or no man’s land—between many different forms of participatory culture. What we have to do is open our eyes and open our minds.
Young people certainly benefit from this lower of the barriers to media production and circulation. Young people have historically been early adapaters and adopters of new media platforms of all kinds—in the 19th century, they created a national circuit for sharing what we would now call zines, newsletters printed by hand-setting type of toy printing press; in the early 20th century, schools and scout troops were among the core hubs for amateur radio production; they were among the first to use amateur movie and video cameras to produce fiction films (even if these films remained “home movies” because there was no means of public distribution and exhibition); and they have been key players since the dawn of the digital age. They are looking for places where they can associate with friends without adult supervision and they are looking for modes of expression which are not tightly edited by adult supervisors. Everything I said above about Asian-American media production holds for youth media production as well.
YMR: How can educators best leverage new media tools in the classroom and in after-school settings to help young people A) investigate popular culture, and B) to ultimately tell unique stories and create bridges with like-minded young people around these stories?
Let me first make it clear that for me, participatory culture has more to do with cultural practices than technologies and tools. In my discussion of youth media above, we see young media makers moving from platform to platform, adopting new tools, while the core community continues. It is about taking whatever technologies are available at a particular moment and exploiting their affordances to serve your community’s ongoing needs and interests. Participatory culture is thus a frame of mind, more than a toolkit. So, yes, it’s great if schools can bring in new digital tools to enhance their teaching, but it is even more important that they bring in a participatory learning models to shape the dynamics of their teaching practices.
I’ve been doing work for the past five years with the New Media Literacies Project to develop resources for teaching the skills needed to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. We’ve developed resources which tap into the full range of new media technologies and which encourage teachers to engage with popular culture materials through their classes. But, we stress this as a set of conceptual skills and competencies, more than pure technological skills. Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and we will have to continually learn new tools. But all the more important that we learn how to navigate through social networks, that we learn how to pool knowledge with others who have diverse expertise, that we learn how to remix the contents of our culture to express new ideas, that we learn how to recognize and respond to diverse cultural norms, and that we learn how to evaluate information from many different sources. These skills are fundamentals which will impact how we interface with each other across an expanding array of platforms. You can learn more about these ideas by checking out my whitepaper, written for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, and following along our blog about the New Media Literacies Project.
In Convergence Culture, I describe one way that young people are developing their voice and sharing stories with each other—through the creation of fan fiction and fan vids. A platform like Fan Fiction Alley in the Harry Potter fan world provides an enormous amount of support to new writers through what is known as beta-reading. Basically, each new writer gets assigned a more experienced mentor. I put it in those terms, because experience is not presumed based on age. There may be 14-year-olds giving advice to people their mothers age, as long as the 14-year-old has demonstrated the capacity to write a compelling story. This process allows the writers to grow. The fact that they are starting with borrowed materials means that they have a larger readership for what they write, a readership which has a shared background and mutual interests which encourages the exchange of insights. They can learn by breaking apart the work of J.K. Rowling and putting it back together again to create a new story. The existing material provides them scafoldings as they develop different aspects of storytelling. Despite or perhaps because of their use of shared materials, distinctive voices and perspectives emerge. People use their stories to explore many different aspects of themselves and the world around them. And displacing these issues onto fictional characters often allows them to dig deeper without fearing exposure—after all, it is Harry Potter who is speculating about whether or not he may be having queer feelings for his same sex classmates and not the author. This is why I keep coming back to fandom as a powerful model for thinking about how participatory culture works to support youth expression.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across in your research of young people using new media technologies to find their unique voices, speak out, mobilize groups and/or challenge the status quo?
Lately, my interest in participatory culture has pulled me towards a greater attention to public participation and civic engagement. I am heading a team of graduate students in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at University of Southern California who are trying to explore ways that fandom and other forms of participatory culture is opening up a space for activism and enagement with public policy issues, ranging from copyright and intellectual property to racially biased casting in Hollywood to human rights issues around the world.
To continue with the Harry Potter theme which I started in the last question, one of the groups we are studying is the Harry Potter Alliance, a group which now has 100,000 members world-wide who are committing to working to support human rights. The group starts from the model of “Dumbledore’s Army” in the Rowling novels: an underground group of youth activists who challenges evil in their society and works together to change the world. What, the Harry Potter Alliance asks, if we had a Dumbledore’s Army for our world? What evils would it battle and how would we fight them? The group has tackled genocide in Darfer, worker’s rights and equal marriage in the United States, and disaster relief in Haiti, among a range of other concerns.
There’s so much I admire about this group. For one thing, they are working in relation to the existing infrastructure of the fan community to help people who may never have thought of themselves as political before transition into greater political participation. They are working with fan blogs and podcasts; they are partnering with “wizard rock” performers who share their music via mp3 files in social networks; and they are also partnering with more traditional activist groups and charities to insure that their work reaches a public beyond the Harry Potter fan community.
For another, they have adopted a decentralized structure while local chapters identify issues they want to work on and reach out to other organization members for support. Sometimes, this is purely collaborative, while other times, they use the concept of “house competitions” to see which group can get the most voters to the polls to vote on the gay marriage proposition in Maine, for example. While the group has a loose shared agenda, they are not a single issue organization and so there’s space for many different agendas working side by side, pooling resources as needed, working separately otherwise. And the group is equally open in its use of media tools and platforms, cobbling together a network of expressive capacities. They use Ning and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, Flickr and Skype, Live Journal and podcasting, depending on their goals and the kind of interface they want to create with their various publics.
The group has been extraordinarily effective, recently winning a competition for online mobilization run by Chase Manhattan Bank, and delivering now four cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti. Part of what allows them to do this is that they recognize the emotional underpinnings needed to support activism, embedding it within peoples friendship and interest networks, and making it part of their playful engagement with popular culture. They adopt new metaphors which make politics come alive for their mostly young participants, many of whom find the policy wonk rhetoric of traditional activism confusing or off-putting. The Harry Potter Alliance is simply one of many such groups we are exploring which fuse culture and politics, new media technology and community organizing, in powerful new ways. You can learn more about this research at http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/.
YMR: What new media technologies do you see that are not yet fully utilized by educators in the classroom and the youth media field? How might these technologies be more accessible or bridged with those in traditional education settings?
Again, for me, ultimately, it is not about the tools. We need to learn to communicate across a broad range of different platforms, to recognize the affordances and limitations of each, to know how to navigate different social networks and get our ideas in front of many different publics in ways that they will find meaningful and engaging. I believe these practices can be taught in a classroom which has no laptop per child and in classrooms that have one laptop per child.
So, yes, I can point towards many promising areas where new technologies are supporting new forms of learning (the use of augmented reality practices through mobile telephones, for example), but at the end of the day, none of these work if you stick to the same old top-down models of knowledge transmission in the classroom, if you are grading the podcast as if it were just another kind of book report, rather than creating a context which is open to collaboration, the active production and sharing of knowledge towards mutual problem solving.
Right now, most of those skills are being acquired outside the classroom through a range of informal learning contexts, yet there’s a profound break in the learning ecology where for all too many kids, their best ways of learning are prohibited at school as they are striped of the technologies and communities which enhance their learning beyond the school house gate. I am particularly concerned about those youth who have little or no access to technologies outside of school and yet find that the school has banned Wikipedia and Facebook, has blocked access to YouTube and blogging technologies. Schools have an obligation to help these young people learn to become effective communicators and navigate these spaces. The schools have an obligation to help young people learn how to be creative, safe, ethical and socially responsible users of these tools. So, rather than thinking about whether schools should use Skype or Location-Aware mobile applications, let’s just say that schools need to embrace participatory learning through embracing whatever tools are accessible and appropriate to the needs of their communities.
YMR: What are some of the greatest examples you have come across with respect to the positive contributions of young people in cultural or political debates facilitated by media convergence and participatory culture? Do you feel that these events have helped elevate the status of young people in global society?
I’ve already told the story of the Harry Potter Alliance, so let me focus on another group, Racebender, which has been researched by my graduate student, Lori Kido Lopez. This group was started by fans of the American animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, who had been drawn to the program in part because of its representation of a multiracial/multicultural society. They were disappointed when they learned that the characters who they had always seen as coming from many different races were all cast by Caucasian actors for the live action big screen version and so they began organizing, initially to protest and try to reverse the casting decisions, then to educate the public about what was going on and to urge the boycott of the film upon its release.
As they did so, they collectively educated themselves about the history of race-based casting in the Hollywood system, identifying many previous examples where characters of color in fictions or real life stories were recast as white when made into movies, as well as an even more offensive history of blackface and yellowface performances where white actors performed often cartoonish versions of people of color. Like the Harry Potter Alliance, the group used a range of platforms—from live protests to online videos—to get their ideas across to the larger community. And in the process, they used social networks to make their struggle a global one, partnering with young supporters in many different countries to try to slow down the box office success of this big budget movie.
So, by some standards, the effort failed. They did not get the film recast and the film has still made significant amount of money in the theaters. By other standards, they scored a huge success, largely shaping the conversations which occurred around the film and educating many journalists (as well as the public) about the core issues it embodied. Almost every review of Last Airbender I read mentioned the protests and the filmmakers ere forced again and again to respond to the criticisms about their casting decisions. Moreover, the press began to apply what they learned from the Racebender protest to talk about other recent films —Prince of Persia—for example which also cast characters of color with white actors. And the group already is trying to gear up to protest another forthcoming film based on the Marvel comic book series, Runaways, which may also be about to cast a Asian-American character with a white actor.
We can read the Racebender campaign as symptomatic of the growing number of debates about race in America which have come to characterize the Obama era—including ongoing discussion of racialized images in political discourse. But we can also see it as part of the growing number of youth led activist groups which are reaching a global scope and are impacting public discussions around important issues, especially in the space of cultural politics. Many of these movements have their roots in participatory culture. As young people learn to express their ideas and exchange the media they produce with others, they feel more connected and more empowered. They are able to tap into these new collectivities and connectivities to exert a collective, public voice, across a range of media platforms, and in doing so, they are helping to reframe how the media covers and how the public thinks about issues of concern to these populations.