How to Break Out of the Academic Ghetto...

Reader Katie King submitted an interesting question about how academic publishing relates to the new trends towards participatory culture we've been documenting here:

I'm wondering to what extent the participatory culture of fandom does or does not affect academic cultures? For example, academic publishing seems to be more and more conservative, more "broadcast" rather than "niche market" oriented.

The issue is a crucial one that speaks to the "Aca" part of my Aca-Fan identity. I know that not all of you are interested in academic politics but you may be interested in what follows because it speaks to the barriers blocking a fuller dialogue between academics and others who share our interests and passions in popular culture. As someone who studies popular culture and the people who produce and consume it, I have always felt an obligation to try to get my insights back into a larger public circulation. But this is easier said than done.

Publish And Perish

The current state of academic publishing poses some real challenges for those of us who want to engage with a public beyond the textbook market. For starters, there is the challenge of publication time. It can take as long as two years, sometimes longer, between the time that an academic completes a book and when that book hits the stores. For that reason, few of us are able to engage in meaningful ways with contemporary developments in popular culture. I can't tell you the number of books which were started with the goal of responding to popular media in real time and which ended with the phenomenon under investigation dead and buried by the time the book hit the market. There are certainly some things I will need to update about Convergence Culture on the blog even if the general trends I identified in the book remain valid.

Second, there are real filters that make it extremely hard for academics to get books into commercial bookstores where they might fall into the hands of non-academic readers. Most proposals for academic books on popularculture boldly assert that there is a potential crossover market around their topics but it's hard to figure out how they are going to reach that readership when their books are never going to appear in Borders or Barnes and Nobles or any of the other chain bookstores where the vast majority of books get sold.

My goal in writing Convergence Culture was to produce a general market nonfiction book. For all practical purposes, the book which NYU Press will publish was written with such a reader in mind -- the chapters are structured through narratives and examples drawn from familiar programs, the language has been striped down as much as possible (there are some purely academic terms but most of the terms I use come from the media industry or from fans rather than from other theorists. And I have added a glossary in the back which readers can consult if they run into an unfamiliar concept.) I don't think I dummied down the book: I simply did not assume that the reader was immersed in the same academic debates as I was. But I found it hard to find an agent who understood what the book was trying to argue or who could imagine a general reader interested in knowing about the logic by which current media operated. I was told again and again that a nonfiction book could only have three big ideas and that the most successful ones only had one core concept. The passage I quoted in my opening post was a bit of a parody of this claim -- trying to reduce the book's sweeping arguments to the core concepts of convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture.

There are some folks out there who think my prose is still much too academic but I work pretty hard to open up my arguments to the widest possible set of readers. If you have enjoyed reading some of the posts on this blog, then I doubt you are going to find Convergence Culture too difficult to read.

NYU Press, by the way, is doing an excellent job working with me and the MIT news office to help publicize the book and set up a press tour around its release, giving me treatment I have received from none of the other publishers I've worked before. They care as much as I do about getting these ideas out to a larger public which is being impacted by the changes in our media landscape.

Why Bad Books Happen to Good Writers

With little hope of writing to a general reader, most academics end up writing mostly to themselves. Certainly, the reader in their heads as they write is someone who goes to the same conferences and reads the same journals they do. And I think this as much as anything else contributes to the extensive use of jargon in most academic prose. You end up short-handing ideas to an in-the-know reader rather than imagining readers who might be introduced to those concepts for the first time. There emerges a kind of insularity -- it isn't just that you end up writing for other academics, but you also become isolated from other kinds of public conversations about the topics that matter to you. Academics often don't read non-academic books, which, after all, get sold in totally different kinds of bookstores.

This is bad enough in an established field but in an emerging field like media studies, at a moment when the whole media landscape is in flux, you cut yourself off from those other voices at your own risk. I have learned so much from conversations with journalists, policy makers, parents, classroom teachers, creative artists, industry leaders, venture capitalists, fans, etc., etc. And indeed, one of my hopes for this blog is that it can create a space where some of these different groups, each dealing with the same issues, may learn a bit more from each other.

Another consequence of the slow pace of academic publishing is that we tend to think of our work not as provisional but as monumental. The idea that you might throw out ideas just to create a dialogue with others interested in your topic is very alien to the way most academics think. What you put on the page is your life's work. It's what you've built your career around. It's what builds your reputation. It's what determines whether you get tenure or not. So, there's no room to explore ideas in the kind of open-ended fashion King is describing here. Instead, everyone wraps their ideas in armor. They start to play it safe. They start to hedge their bets. And the result can be deadening prose which has nothing to do with the way most of us live with or think about media.

There are other things going on with academic publishing right now that contribute further to this problem. Academic presses are facing serious economic difficulties. They are cutting down drastically on the books that they publish. Most of the books now need to have large sweeping themes that cut across the broadest possible range of academic disciplines. One might imagine a form of generalization that opened books up to general readers but that isn't what has happened. Instead, this push towards broader approaches encourages a certain kind of abstraction since theory moves across fields more easily than factual study. Academic presses are cutting back on the publishing of anthologies, which don't sell well but often play an important role in sparking dialogue around new topics or showcasing the work of emerging scholars. And there is a strong pressure to tighten the length of most books -- not always a bad idea but often resulting in further tendencies towards jargon as people shorthand their ideas even more and count on the reader to fill in the gaps in their arguments.

So, from one direction, all academic publishing is niche publishing. Most academic journals get read by fewer people than the average fan discussion list reaches. Most academic books are lucky to sell more than a few thousand copies and most of those go to libraries where many of them will go unread for decades. From the other, academic publishing is moving away from more specialized or niche publications. I can't tell you how many general introductions to game studies I've reviewed for presses in recent years -- all with more or less identical tables of contents and interchangeable introductions. Yet, presses have worried that more focused books on specific games, creators, genres, or issues will be too specialized to attract the "general reader."

Changing the Rules

King continues:

My own feeling has always been that the best "participatory" invoking television (my own interests have been Highlander and Xena) are from shows that are not seamlessly written, not exactly grade "A" (whatever that might mean) but "B" -- shows that have lots of "holes" fans can fill in various forms of participation.

My own academic aspirations are to produce not seamlessly argued academic texts, but suggestively extensive ones -- not intensively analytical, but maybe full of their own proper "holes" to be filled in.

Trying to create and argue for this seems to be an uphill battle now. Or is it? Do you have thoughts about this?

The good news is that the web is creating opportunities for academics to break out of the academic bookstore ghetto and engage in a broader range of conversations. Much as other media producers are taking advantage of digital distribution to reach around traditional gatekeepers, a number of academics are experimenting with ways of communicating their core insights to a more general readership, many of whom will not find our books in their local bookstore (thank goodness for Amazon!) and wouldn't be very engaged by our more specialized journals. As they do so, these academics are finding ways to be both more topical (having a chance to respond to media change in real time) and more provisional (floating ideas, getting feedback, and refining them before putting them into print). Academic culture is discovering what every other sector already knows -- the power of social networks to produce richer insights and pool knowledge.

For example, a growing number of my graduate students are starting their own blogs around their thesis topics, providing them with a strong incentive to write every day, creating opportunities to translate their insights into language which can be understood by lay readers, getting a reality check on their claims, and often connecting with people who have specialized or insider knowledge that they might not encounter otherwise. I am seeing such blogs spring up at many other institutions as well and it does produce the kind of exploratory writing King is describing here. For example, check out this site by CMS graduate student Ravi Purushotma. Ravi is researching the ways games and other forms of popular culture can be used for educational purposes. His site, which includes works in progress and videos designed to dramatize his concepts, has generated response from teachers, textbook publishers, and game designers, among others, who have contributed actively to his research and who have also opened up new job options for him after graduation.

Increasingly, we are also trying to make the work of the research group in CMS as transparent as our arrangements with various sponsors allow, opening up the work in progress to the public. For example, my CMS colleague Beth Coleman is currently in China, leading a team of our students, and working with our research partners from GSD&M advertising. They are looking at social networks and the use of mobile media, particularly with young people, university students, artists, and cultural leaders. The research team is comprised of individuals from heterogeneous fields of expertise, including media studies, network analysis, cultural

anthropology, and market planning.People can follow their adventures and learn of their discoveries via their Project Good Luck website where they are blogging some of their fieldnotes.

There have also been a number of collective projects where academics write about media or popular culture topics as they unfold. Bad Subjects has been going for more than a decade out of Berkeley, offering left-of-center social commentary (what they call "political education for everyday life"). Their writing can sometimes becomes a bit too abstract for my taste, but the site often offers unconventional and challenging perspectives on contemporary issues. Flow is a webzine focused on television and new media and published by graduate students at the University of Texas-Austin. Its contributors include many of the top scholars in the field, all trying to produce work which would appeal to a crossover readership. That said, the editors of Flow have told me that they are having difficulty -- even on the web -- reaching non-academic readers. Because the history of academic writing to the public has been so dismal, the public often runs in fear when they hear a writer is an academic and therefore don't give them a chance or meet them half-way. The borders are being policed from both directions.

And then there is the trend towards academics (not to mention journalists) putting up their works on progress on the web and seeking feedback from interested readers. Many university presses are nervous about us giving away our ideas for free but early signs suggest that where these books take on a life on the web, they actually increase public awareness of the project and thus increase sales. Writers who have been involved in such a process also confirm that they produce better books because they are able to clear up misleading or badly phrased passages and make new discoveries as their ideas get tested by the wisdom of the crowd.

A good example of this process at work right now would be McKenzie Wark's new book, GAM3R 7HE0RY -- a collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book, a group which is exploring innovative new approaches to publishing. Wark has posted the entire book on the web where it is generating lively discussions among gamers, game industry insiders, and games researchers alike.

Unfortunately, little or none of this activity counts towards tenure and promotion within most universities. Indeed, there are lots of institutional pressures discouraging younger academics from engaging in public outreach in forms which do not "advance their careers" and this slows down many who might otherwise try to broaden the conversation. Right now, these outlets end up becoming part of a "process" which leads towards a more monumental publication, rather than being seen as valuable in their own right. For the time being, it seems unlikely that we can escape the stranglehold that university presses have on our writing because of the credentialization issue. Yet, the push away from more specialized publications may force this to change. Whole disciplines may discover that they have no print outlets for their work and will have to reorganize and find ways to use digital publishing and peer-review to achieve the same goals.

Update: Jonathan's comments below are a useful corrective and I accept them as a friendly ammendment to this original post. I was speaking from the perspective of someone who very much wants to be sharing my current work with a larger public and has every reason to want to go beyond the academic bookstore and university library space. But university presses sometimes (less often than they once did) do valuable work when they publish research that does not have a strong market appeal, that is unpopular, challenging, difficult, or groundbreaking in ways that is not going to be finding a broad public audience anytime soon. Nothing in my text should be taken as devaluing either such work or the job that university presses play in publishing it. That said, I still question whether many academics don't fall back on this as an excuse for sloppy and jargon-filled writing when they might want to examine closely their motives for closing off such work from larger public scrutiny. I suppose I have more faith in the public's ability and willingness to engage with serious ideas than current academic practice acknowledges. More than anything else, though, I want to open up more options for different kinds of academic publishing that does have greater public access and that is open to a more exploratory process. I don't think Jonathan or I disagree on that point.

Convergence and Divergence: Two Parts of the Same Process

ReaderMorgan Ramsay flaged a column by Al and Laura Ries which argues that we should be thinking less in terms of convergence and more in terms of divergence. Here's part of what they say:

Convergence captures the imagination, but divergence captures the market.... Why divergence and not convergence? Because convergence requires compromise and divergence satisfies the evolving needs of different market segments.... Irreconcilable differences will always doom such convergence concepts. Television is a "passive" medium; the Internet is an "active" medium. A couch potato will never put up with the complexities of interactive TV and an Internet junkie will never surf the Net with an awkward box designed for another purpose. Like automobiles, different market segments demand different products... Companies today are pouring billions of dollars into such convergence concepts as smart phones, smart gas pumps, smart homes, smart watches, smart clothing, smart refrigerators, smart toilets and smart appliances. This is a tragic waste of time and money. Companies would be more innovative, more profitable and more successful if they would focus on the opposite idea: divergence.

Here's my response. This may get a little more theoretical than some of my posts.

The Black Box Fallacy

Mr. and Mrs. Ries see convergence primarily in technological terms - that is, the combination of different media functions within the same device. This is what I call the black box fallacy. To some degree, this kind of convergence is already taking place - have you tried to buy a cellphone recently that only made phonecalls and did not perform a range of other media functions? Our cellphones represent this technological notion of convergence gone wild and the last time I looked consumers were gobbling them up even if they didn't use those other media appliances very much if at all. The camera/phone, for example, has taken off in a way that the flying boat never did. It is now the digital equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. At least some convergence devices do capture the market. But if we are waiting for all of the media technologies to merge into a single media appliance, we will be waiting for a very very long time.

Convergence is a Cultural Process

My book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide isn't terribly interested in convergence on a technological level. Rather, my focus is on convergence as a cultural process which involves the flow of stories, images, sounds, brands, relationships across the entire media system.

Here's what I write in the book's introduction:

Keep this in mind: Convergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint. There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere....Our cell phones are not simply telecommunications devices; they also allow us to play games, download information from the Internet, and take and send photographs or text messages. Increasingly they allow us to watch previews of new films, download installments of serialized novels, or attend concerts from remote locations. All of this is already happening in Northern Europe or Asia. Any of these functions can also be performed using other media appliances. You can listen to the Dixie Chicks through your DVD player, your car radio, your walkman, your computer's mp3 files, a web radio station, or a music cable channel....

In turn, media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks. And fans of a popular television series may sample dialogue, summarize episodes, debate subtexts, create original fan fiction, record their own soundtracks, make their own movies--and distribute all of this worldwide via the internet.

Convergence is taking place within the same appliances... within the same franchise... within the same company... within the brain of the consumer... and within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed.

In such a world, all of the media systems are increasingly interconnected; we use them all in relationship to each other, whether or not the technologies are actually hardwired together. I doubt we are going to see a stable relationship between the technologies any time soon. I doubt we will live any longer in a world where various media can be understood as discrete and self-contained.

Convergence is an Ad Hoc Process

The notion of convergence which Al and Laura Reiss are critiquing would indeed require top-down coordination and systemic management of the technological infrastructure and would seemingly priviledge some relationships between devices over others. I share their skepticism that this kind of convergence is coming anytime soon. But we are already living in a convergence culture. A cultural model of convergence allows us to examine incremental, ad hoc, decentralized, unofficial, unauthorized and uncoordinated change. This model of convergence focuses on conflicting goals and expectations amongst different groups (commercial, amateur) involved in the circulation (legal, illegal) of media content. Technological convergence requires control, where-as convergence culture is out of control.

Convergence culture is occurring precisely because the public does not want a one-size-fits-all relationship to media content. Consumers want the media they want where they want it when they want it and in the format they want. On the technological level, this does indeed involve divergence between technologies; on an economic level, this may involve fragmentation of the market. On the cultural level, though, this desire for a divergence of technology works to spread media content across every possible delivery system and insures that there will be multiple points of entry to many of the most successful media franchises. The "couch potato" and the "internet junkie", in the Riess's comments above, will establish very different relationships to this content as they consume it on different terms and in different media, yet increasingly, they are both engaged with aspects of the same media franchise. (Both of these are fictional constructs, by the way, since nobody consumes simply one medium nor does anyone enjoy a purely passive or purely active relationship with media content.)

Technologies of Freedom

My book is inspired in part by the work of MIT Political Scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1983) for whom convergence and divergence are interrelated processes. Here's what he wrote more than two decades ago:

A process called the 'convergence of modes' is blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television. A single physical means--be it wires, cables or airwaves--may carry services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by any one medium--be it broadcasting, the press, or telephony--can now be provided in several different physical ways. So the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.

Pool predicted a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems competed and collaborated, searching for the stability that would always elude them:

Convergence does not mean ultimate stability or unity. It operates as a constant force for unification but always in dynamic tension with change.... There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that.

We are still learning just how complicated the process of change really is as we watch agents at various levels respond to the shifts in the ways our culture operates.

Welcome to Convergence Culture

Welcome to my blog. I launched this site in June in anticipation of the release of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book is now out and can be purchased here.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

This circulation of media content - across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders - depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer. I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic, whereby consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content. The term, participatory culture, is intended to contrast with older notions of media spectatorship. In this emerging media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands. Convergence does not occur through media appliances - however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers. Yet, each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that's what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate.

The book develops these ideas through case studies of a number of key media properties, including Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Global Frequency and the presidential campaign of 2004.

Here's What the Blurbs Say (Skip This Part)

At the risk of being immodest, let me share with you some of the things that others have been saying about the book:

"I thought I knew twenty-first century pop media until I read Henry Jenkins. The fresh research and radical insights in Convergence Culture deserve a wide and thoughtful readership. Bring on the 'monolithic block of eyeballs!'" --Bruce Sterling, author, blogger, visionary

"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

"One of those rare works that is closer to an operating system than a traditional book: it's a platform that people will be building on for years to come. . . . It should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's popular culture--but thankfully, a book this fun to read doesn't need a mandate."

--Steven Johnson, author of the national bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good For You

Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I've been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins's clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of electric media has become immensely more complicated in today's many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture­­. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins. --Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"I simply could not put this book down! Henry Jenkins provides a fascinating account of how new media intersects old media and engages the imagination of fans in more and more powerful ways. Educators, media specialists, policy makers and parents will find Convergence Culture both lively and enlightening." --John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp & director of Xerox PARC

And oh, one more endorsement, for a second book also coming out this summer, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture:

"Jenkins is a one of us: a geek, a fan, a popcult packrat. He's also an incisive and unflinching critic. His affection for the subject and sharp eye for 'what it all means' are an unbeatable combination. This is fascinating, engrossing and enlightening reading."

--Cory Doctorow, author of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and co-editor of Boing Boing

Check Out This Webcast

For those who would like to see me talk about convergence culture, check out webcast of a keynote presentation I did about some of the key themes from the book at the New Media Conference in 2004.

About This Blog

I am going to be using this blog to talk about some of the issues raised in the book -- including providing some of the sections I had to edit out of the book for length reasons, updating some of the case studies in the book, commenting on recent events which reflect some of the book's key themes, and responding to questions and criticisms from readers. Frankly, one of the challenges of writing about contemporary media change is that many of the specifics of popular culture will have shifted by the time a print book appears, so I am excited to have a space where I can play catch-up.

Have no fear, though, if you have not read the book yet, this space will also allow me to comment on many other contemporary developments in the new media landscape. This is after all my 12 book over the past 16 years and so I have a broader array of interests than can be gleamed from any given publication.

And along the way, I will be sharing more about the work we are doing through the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT to put the ideas found in these books into practice through work on consumer culture, media

Update: Some people have read this to suggest this site is purely a "publicity stunt" for the book or to imply that I plan to stop blogging once the book tour is over. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to this site. I am going to do my best to keep blogging in the months ahead. Getting the book out has given me an incentive to start blogging. But it isn't the only reason for this blog. I've wanted to do this for a long time but like many of you, I have been procrastinating. In any case, I plan to continue to blog once classes start back up. This may result in some cut back in the number of entries per week but I am going to try to continue to get out something every weekday, even if it means more use of interviews and guest bloggers to fill in some gaps in my schedule.

Who the &%&# Is Henry Jenkins?

ABOUT HENRY JENKINS The simple answer is:

Henry Jenkins is 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 nine 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.

Until recently, Jenkins wrote a monthly column and blogged about media and cultural change for Technology Review Online. A longtime advocate of games culture, he currently co-authors a column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine which seeks to promote innovation and diversity in game design. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. 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 was also one of the principal investigators on collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment. 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; and regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture. Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at MIT for more than 16 years, where he is also housemaster of Senior House dormitory.

Well, that didn't seem so simple after all. For a somewhat more personal account of whom I am, read below.

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 (Thomas Jefferson, I think), 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, starting 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.

Textual Poachers

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 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, still hidden from the view of most "average consumers" and as such, represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe them 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 the Convergence Culture book) 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 current, provisional 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 are motivating me to develop a personal blog.

Convergence Culture

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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, my second new book, 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 16 years ago and found myself immersed in the vibrant digital culture of the past decade. I often claim that I am 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 gives me some distinctive insights into the ways that culture and technology are reshaping before our very eyes.

Comparative Media Studies

One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life has been the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program encourages 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 is 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 is to take what we are 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 be writing more about as this blog continues.

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium is a direct outgrowth of the books coming out this summer. 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 impacted the branded entertainment sector. We wanted to bring together leading entertainment companies, advertising firms, and key sponsors to create a dialogue about where media is going and how it impacts consumers. We are developing white papers on topics such as advergaming and product placement, transmedia storytelling and mobile entertainment, alternative reality games, and fan cultures, among other topics. And I get to go into places like Cartoon Network or the MTV Networks and lecture them about what they need to know about the fan communities I study.

Project NML

Project New Media Literacies also grows out of the ideas in my most recent books. Here, the focus is 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 a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than half of all American teens have produced media and a significant portion have distributed that media content on line. 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.

The Education Arcade

The Education Arcade represents a systematic attempt to explore and experiment with the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. I was one of the first humanities scholars in the world to write seriously about video games -- not as a social problem but as an emerging medium of aesthetic expression and social experience. Through the years, my work on games has led me to consult with Purple Moon on the development of the girls game movement (and later to co-edit a book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games), to run a creative leaders program for Electronic Arts, to become a key public critic of the media effects argument and the push to regulate games content, and to become actively involved in the design and implementation of "serious games."

We have more new initiatives coming soon -- including, we hope, some work on public policy and civic media. But these three initiatives illustrate the ways we are trying to fuse theory and practice through the program.

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 WWF wrestling, Doctor Seuss, Lassie, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and a host of other popular culture works. This strand of my research is represented by yet another forthcoming book, The Wow Climax: Tracing The Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, coming out near the end of this year. And comic books are my current popular culture passion. I hope to write a book about genre theory and superheroes before much longer.

I never can keep my personal life separated from my professional life. This is what comes of being a fan/academic. Much of what I write about popular culture comes from an autobiographical impulse and also reflects the tastes and interests of my son, Henry, now in his mid-twenties, and my wife, Cynthia, who helped get me into fan culture in the first place. I also seek inspiration from not only the students I teach through the CMS program but also the students who live in Senior House, the dorm where I am housemaster. I expect all of these folks will be making appearances in my blog posts from time to time. 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.

And Now a Blog...

This blog is frankly long overdue. I've wanted to have a blog for some time. I used to blog for Technology Review; we run blogs for many of the projects; and I've run blogs through several of my classes. But I have until now been reluctant to make the time commitment needed to make a personal blog work. Reread the account above and you will see the reason why I have been a little preoccupied. So I've blogged for other people; I've written about blog; and now I have my own blog.

Karolin Lohmus has translated this post for Estonian readers. You can find it at https://www.espertoautoricambi.it/science/2018/02/04/kes-on-henry-jenkins/