[media] article on Henry Jenkins: Mud-Wrestling Media Maven From MIT
There is an amazing article entitled "The Mud-Wrestling Media Maven From MIT" featuring Henry Jenkins that recently was published by the online journal The Academic Life, the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it Jeffrey Young interviews Jenkins on media culture, Jenkin's history, role and attitudes towards media and how he himself has become quite the personal media mashup.
McLuhan and Jenkins probably wouldn't agree on much, since Jenkins argues that the medium is not the message. "Convergence does not depend on any specific delivery mechanism," he writes in Convergence Culture. Media convergence does not mean that consumers will one day buy a single "black box" to watch all forms of programming, he says. Cellphones, laptops, televisions, and other devices can be involved. The convergence will happen in the minds of consumers who pull together elements from all those formats, and then remix the images to create their own fan-made creations.
It goes on to even mention GK's contribution to his mashup by bringing up the event held on the Teen Second Life grid where the teens created the avatar for Henry to use during his first TSL appearance.
Jenkins often mentions the various ways in which his own image has been remixed, and it seems clear that he's delighted by the attention. The artist Christian Jankowski took a cast of Jenkins's head for a project called "The Violence of Theory," in which the busts of several academic theorists were placed in glass cases at a New York gallery. Young designers created a 3-D character made to look like the Henry Jenkins that appeared in a panel discussion held in Teen Second Life, the online virtual world. Someone even wrote a fan-fiction short story in which Jenkins is a main character.Jenkins is, in effect, putting theory into practice. He is encouraging people to spread and remix his ideas. In the process, he is building what amounts to an academic brand.
In true Web 2.0 mashup fashion there are also links in the article to video footage of Jenkins mud-wrestling, interactive graphs representing his research funding and even supplementary audio to accompany the article itself. As a whole this is a great piece and worth the check out.
Read the full article here.
