Participatory Culture

Interviews

Henry Jenkins

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509538461, 9781509538454
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since 2006, Henry Jenkins's Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog has hosted interviews in which academics, activists, and artists have shared their views on the changing media landscape. For the first time, Jenkins – often called "the Marshall McLuhan for the twenty-first century" – compiles some of these interviews to highlight his recurring interests in popular culture and social change.

Structured around three core concepts – culture, learning, politics – and designed as a companion to Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, this book broadens the conversation to incorporate diverse thinkers such as David Gauntlett, Ethan Zuckerman, Sonia Livingstone, S. Craig Watkins, James Paul Gee, Antero Garcia, Stephen Duncombe, Cathy J. Cohen, Lina Srivastava, Jonathan McIntosh, and William Uricchio. With an introduction from Jenkins and reflections from each interviewee, this volume speaks to a sense of crisis as contemporary culture has failed to fully achieve the democratic potentials once anticipated as a consequence of the participatory turn.

This book is ideal for students and scholars of digital media, popular culture, education, and politics, as well as general readers with an interest in the topic.

PART I
PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

1
Introduction to Participatory Culture

Early in my blog’s history (Nov. 5, 2006), I shared an outtake from a report I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, in which I identified eight defining characteristics of the current media landscape. My goal was to move the discussion of digital media and learning away from an inventory of tools (since the platforms and devices were then, as now, rapidly evolving). Rather, I wanted to discuss larger patterns within the culture that shaped which technologies would be taken up, who could or could not access them, what purposes they might serve, and what status they might hold.

I argued that the contemporary media landscape is:

1. Innovative: “New media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed into the culture at dramatic rates … Each new technology spawns a range of different uses and inspires a diversity of aesthetic responses as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities of users.”
2. Convergent: “Every major idea, image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media channels.… Convergence is being shaped top-down by the decisions being made by massive media conglomerates who have controlling interests across all possible media systems and who enjoy the power to insure that their content circulates globally.… At the same time, convergence is being shaped bottom-up by the participatory impulses of consumers, who want the ability to control and shape the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it.… Moreover, these consumers are taking advantage of the new media technologies to respond to, remix and repurpose existing media content; they use the web to talk back to media producers or tell their own stories about fictional characters.”
3. Everyday: “The technologization of the American home has been an ongoing process across the 20th century.… Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions.”
4. Appropriative: “New technologies make it easy for people to sample and repurpose media images. We can now quote and recontextualize recorded sounds and images (both still and moving) almost as easily as we can quote and recontextualize words. Increasingly, our culture communicates through snippets of borrowed media content.… We want to become a part of the media experiences which matter to us; we want to create and share our own media with others.”
5. Networked: “Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another and from one person to another. Communication occurs at a variety of levels – from intimate and personal to public and large-scale.”
6. Global: “Media content flows fluidly across national borders; people deploy the new communication networks to interact with others around the world. The global scale of this new media landscape changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world.”
7. Generational: “Recent research suggests that young people and adults live in fundamentally different media environments, using communications technologies in different ways and forming contradictory interpretations of their experiences.”
8. Unequal: “In so far as participation … represents a new source of power, wealth, and knowledge, it also represents a new site of privilege and inequality.… Expanding access to cyberspace has the potential of empowering new segments of the public to become fuller participants in cultural and civic life, yet we can be concerned by the ability of these electronic technologies to render invisible anyone who is not able to participate.”

Taken together, these traits constitute the preconditions for what I call participatory culture. I have defined participatory culture in various ways through the years – for example, describing it as the application of the practices and logics of folk culture to raw materials provided by mass culture (2006), or discussing it in terms of an environment where all are allowed to contribute their own expressive work and receive feedback from those who are more experienced (2009), or analyzing it in terms of a space where multiple voices are heard and are able to have some impact on the decisions that impact their own lives (2016). The first definition speaks to issues of culture; the second, education; and the third, politics and civics. At various points, each of these definitions has been central to my work as I addressed different groups – fans, educators, activists, policy makers. The progression of interviews in this book reflects these different frames for thinking about why participation matters. I am bracketing in this collection a fourth important focus of my work – the ways in which networked culture blurs the lines between consumer and producer, forcing media companies to forge different relationships with their fans. The interviews included in this section speak to broad attributes of participatory culture – in particular, changing conceptions of authorship, creativity, and cosmopolitanism.

I begin the book with the Italian activist/artistic collective, the Wu Ming Foundation, because their story speaks so powerfully to the ways that transformations in the media landscape are resulting in shifts in the status of authors and their relationship with their public. The Wu Ming Foundation, from the start, has refused to accept traditional boundaries between high and low art, between creators and consumers, between individual artists and their collaborators, and between art and politics. My work on participatory culture resonated with them because they were already exploring new forms of performance and storytelling which opened up space for their readers and fans to actively contribute to their creative process, and because they were using their artistic pranks to identify points of vulnerability in the way mass media and professional journalism were currently operating. They were creating works that were designed to be appropriated, that actively encouraged people to take up and extend their artistic projects in new directions. They often did so by masking their own identities so that others would have greater freedom to become the authors of the culture around them. Interestingly, as we are writing, we are seeing the impact of the global appropriation and remixing of their work in the form of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Wu Ming’s novel, Q, deals with the exploits of a spy for the Roman Catholic church during the sixteenth century, but has been widely read as an allegory for contemporary European politics. Q – a transnational best-seller – has been published in 18 languages. The QAnon conspiracy theory refers to a series of revelations from someone who claims to be part of the American deep state and who goes by the name Q. This Q has constructed a narrative that makes Donald Trump the protagonist in a struggle against, among other things, human trafficking, in which Hollywood and the Democratic party are implicated. Here, we see Wu Ming’s politics turned upside down, but we also see an extension of some of the tactics by which they had sought to disrupt the communication sector a decade or more earlier.

David Gauntlett and I share a commitment to help promote grassroots creativity, which is central to my conception of participatory culture. But we also share some important disagreements. The one which surfaced during my exchange with him was the difference between his focus on creativity as understood through the frames of folk culture and maker culture, and my own interest in the ways fan communities remix and remake raw materials drawn from mass culture. This disagreement was clearly an important one for both of us: Gauntlett returns to this moment as the focal point for his reflections on the interview. At stake is what it means to create, what relationship exists between artists and the culture around them, how cultural traditions and shared stories might impact their practices, and what forms of acknowledgment they owe to those who come before. Gauntlett’s work reminds us that the idea of grassroots creativity has a larger history, that it is visible in the ways folk practices – ranging from stitching and weaving to singing and dancing – were passed down from one generation to the next. He is interested in exploring what value people placed on the things they made with their own hands, as opposed to the readymade objects of industrial culture. And he is interested in the ways the digital is enabling new platforms for people to share what they make with each other.

My conversation with Ethan Zuckerman asks whether our use of networked communications technology really fulfills the potentials many of us saw for a more global circulation of ideas. Zuckerman is almost certainly the most cosmopolitan person I know – always a bit jet-lagged because of his brutal travel schedule, connected through his work on Global Voices with bloggers who write knowingly about social and political movements in their countries, helping to develop new tools and practices for connecting people together through his work at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. This interview was shaped by the context of the Arab Spring movement which he was tracking closely. Many in the west had been excited by the ways in which Twitter allowed the perspectives of those resisting – and in some cases overturning – longstanding and repressive governments in the Middle East to be communicated quickly and directly with supporters around the world. Yet, these exchanges resulted in misunderstandings and raised false expectations because they were not grounded in the kinds of ongoing exchanges that might allow us to better understand each other. What he calls “incomplete globalization” reflects the difference between spectacular examples of “global” communication and the “everyday” aspects of participation in a networked culture.

Further Reading

My ideas about participatory culture have been central to my writing through the years. You can see these concepts take shape through: Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992); Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, August 2006); Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York University Press, August 2006); Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley, with Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and Erin Reilly, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the English Literature Classroom (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2013); Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, January 2013); Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (New York University Press, 2016).

For other perspectives on participatory culture, see my blog interviews with Jean Burgess (Oct. 7, 2007); Axel Bruns (May 9, 2008); Alex Juhasz (Feb. 19, 2009); Paul Booth (Aug. 13, 2010); Howard Rheingold (Aug. 13, 2012); Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Oct. 11, 2012); Sarah Banet-Weiser (April 10, 2013); Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (May 6, 2013); Mirko Tobias Schafer (May 12, 2013); Daren Brabham (Oct. 2, 2013); Limor Shiffman (Feb. 17, 2014); John Banks (May 9, 2014); Aran Seinnreich (Oct. 29, 2014); Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (April 21, 2016); Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Nov. 17, 2016); Adam Fish (April 27, 2017); Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner (May 30, 2017). I have also run two series which look at participatory culture in specific cultural contexts – Poland (Nov. 22 – Dec. 6, 2013) and the Czech Republic (Feb. 21 – March 1, 2018).

For more on the Wu Ming Foundation and QAnon, see How Do You Like It So Far? (Episode 22).

2
How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution: The Wu Ming Foundation (2006)

Wu Ming is a band of writers that formed in January 2000 after the end of the multi-use collective moniker experience known as the Luther Blissett Project. Wu Ming wrote several novels, including Q (1999), 54 (2002), Manituana (2007), Altai (2009), The Army of Sleepwalkers (2014), and Proletkult (2018), as well as hard-to-categorize nonfiction books, the most recent of which is Un Viaggio Che Non Promettiamo Breve [No Promise That This Trip Will Be Short] (2018), a narrative history of No Tav, the mass movement effectively opposing – since 1991 – the construction of a high-speed railroad between Italy and France.

You talked about the Luther Blissett movement as “grassroots mythmaking,” comparing it with fan fiction and contrasting it wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction: Between Blog and Book
• Part I Participatory Culture
• Part II Participatory Learning
• Part III Participatory Politics
• Index
• End User License Agreement