- Henry Jenkins is an influential Media theorist, who is interested in Media in the online world, or Media 2.0. Since the emergence of the internet as a participatory, interactive medium, there has been a great deal of writing about how this has transformed audiences, institutions and the nature of media products. Jenkins looks at many areas, but for this topic, his 1992 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is particularly important.
Textual Poachers
- Jenkins' research in Textual Poachers showed how fans construct their own culture by appropriating and remixing—"poaching"—content from mass culture. Through this "poaching", the fans carried out such creative cultural activities as rethinking personal identity issues such as gender and sexuality; writing stories to shift focus onto a media "storyworld's" secondary characters; producing content to expand of the timelines of a storyworld; or filling in missing scenes in the storyworld's official narratives order to better satisfy the fan community.
Jenkins' (Inter)active Audience Approach
- Jenkins belongs to a group of Media thinkers who are highly optimistic about the Media. They view the Media, and Web 2.0 as empowering to the audience, breaking down traditional boundaries of class and status. The audience is interactive and powerful. They can participate and create their own narratives, questioning messages and generating their own ideas.
- Jenkins, Shirky and others clearly contrast with the more traditional media effects theory models, which see the media as powerful and the audience as passive.
Participatory Culture
- Jenkins noted that the development of “new” Media (roughly post 2000) has accelerated “participatory culture”, in which audiences are active and creative participants rather than passive consumers. They create online communities, produce new creative forms, collaborate to solve problems, and shape the flow of media. This generates what Jenkins describes as “collective intelligence.”
Three Key Terms From Jenkins
- Fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties
- Participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation
- Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user-creation and moderation, social networking, and "crowdsourcing."
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