Beyond-broadcast-jenkins

Henry Jenkins on the role of media education in fostering participatory democracy

MIT Professory Henry Jenkins gave a keynote talk today at Beyond Broadcast at MIT (Saturday, Feb. 24, 2007)

Lostremote.com -- check out

Steve Schultze is in MIT comparative media studies.

There are about 450 people here. The attendee group is large and diverse.

"What does it mean to allow the audience to speak back . . . to conduct their own meetings, to make their own news?"

An exciting thing out of last year -- a lot of ideas for how to do that -- give the public a way to speak back.

"Can these tools potentially reinvigorate these age-old values that we've held ... and does it cross boundaries between public and non-public media ... does it cross boundaries between what we think of as fun and serious work . . . does it provide ground for working on political issues that is not inehrently and increasingly partisan?"

MIT is director of comparative media studies program, and a long time research on fan and culture studies.

Henry Jenkins says he is drawing from ideas in his new book, Convergence Culture.

He talks about how he created a website called Bird is Evil created by a Phillipino American.

"At the end of this process ... he said he took down his site and said I got too close to reality."

"What is the line which connects participatory culture to participatory democracy?"

"This is what democracy looks like?" -- movie of Seattle post office.

"What does democracy look like?"

"What does it mean to society that our dominate images of democracy in the 21st century look to the past?"

"What does it mean for avators in a game space to be marking inside of Tienemen Square?"

"The Legendary K.O. George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People"

"Freedom of the press: Our founding fathers knew strong, vigorous reporting would serve America best."

"One of my concerns about the media reform movement is it relies too heavily on the same set of images of what popular culture does for our society."

"We evoke a set of left concerns about mass conformity."

"we talk about brand images being imprinted our bodies."

"We talk about peple who concsume mass culture being idiots and fools."

"I want to suggest we ar eself defeating as mass movement ... at the moment it holds popular culture in contempt and it alianteces a group of peole who find this deeply meaningful .... and it puts us on a path to assuming that we can build ppoular culture .....

Suggests instead a movement tat embraces popular culture.

Starts with Stephen Dumkon. Lays out a vision of what a progressive popular culture should look like.

"progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams ..... our dreamscapes will not be created" by the left, but wil lbe participatory, active only if the people help create them; they will be open ended. Finally the spectacle will not cover over or replace reality and truth but" amplify it. "

"Instead, our spectacles will be partiicpatory: dreams that the public can mould . . . .  they will be active: spectacles tha twork only if the people help create them."

"The wil lbe open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to fomulate questions."

He says it is democratic popular culture, not progressive popular culture.

-- paricipatory, active, open ended, transparent and transformative.

showgeorgethedoor.org

TrueMajorityAction

"All the rhetoric comes from fan culture." "But it was distributedby True Majority -- Ben Cohen's organization, the ice cream entrepreneur."

"What would it mean for demcracy to be intimate, something we brought into our bedrooms . . . a lifestyle and not a special event."

Lays out basic principles in the book:

1. Convergence culture -- things distributed across as many platforms as possible, a world where as you disperse the media cross the culture, there are a sorts of places it can be inserted.

2. In a networked society, people are foming knowledge societies -- called collective intelligence -- like the Wikipedia movement. "Its fundamentally bipartisan . . and it's having a real effect."

3. Emergec of new form of partiicpatory culture -- a contemporary versionf ofolk culture, as conumers take media into their own hands.

-- Interactivity is a property of technologies.

-- Participation is a property of cultures.

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE ATTRIBUTES INCLUDES:

-- Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement -- Strong support for creating and sharing -- Some kind of informal mentorship -- Members feel their contribution matters -- Some degree of social connection among members

There is hundreds of years of participatory culture. There are zenes from the 19th century. Teen-agers.

In the 1920s, there were all kinds of radios, Apirl 1924 radio news. FCC said children were using it.

4) "We are acquiring skills through game play that we will later use for other purposes." An example: Bush in 30 Seconds is modeled after Project Greenlight. MeetUp started around trading beanie babies. The Dean campaign pulls on thse various ways and used them as tools for political organizing. "And we can get that the campaigns of this next cycle will go a long way toward figuring out the next uses of this stuff."

"Delivering messages that were nastier and more divisive than the campaigns themselves."

www.freakingnews.com

He shows a "purple" map of the United States.

DOPA legislation -- reintroduced by Ted Stevens. Banks "I would suggest anytime the workd protection is in an act, you had better look at it very closely." Add that with copyright and it becomes a threat to participatory culture.

Need a lot at the places where we all come together.

Video Game Voters Network

ADvertising agency which works for the old industry -- Al Gore's Penquin Army.

Why are they using it?

"It means there is new power in partiicpatory media that they want a piece of."

The save the internet movement is fundamentally bipartisan and pariicpatory and it taps regularly images and iconomogry of both traditional and partiicpatory culture.

Jenkins shows a video at: savetheinternet.com -- take a look at that.

Kids have the technology in the home, and as a result it goes beyond schools.

"This is the new hidden curriculum."

"They argument that we should ban my space . . . tends to "lock them out of the real participatory culture that is emerging."

"We are poking the eyes out of kids, cutting them off from information." "It is something we've really got to confront and eal with, both on a technological level and a cultural level."