Henry Jenkins
Biography
Henry Jenkins III (b. 4 June 1958) is an American media scholar, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He previously spent two decades at MIT, where he was Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and founding director of the Comparative Media Studies programme.
His work is distinguished by an early and sustained refusal to treat audiences as passive, and by taking fan practice seriously as a subject of scholarship at a time when it was largely treated as an embarrassment.
Key Ideas
- Textual poaching. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) applied Michel de Certeau's figure of the poacher to fandom, arguing that fans do not simply consume texts but raid them — taking what is useful, discarding the rest, and building fan fiction, videos, art and communities from the material. The book was written from inside the communities it studies, and its methodological argument (that the scholar can be a fan) was contested at the time.
- Convergence culture. The argument of Convergence Culture (2006). Jenkins insists that convergence is not primarily a technological process — not everything collapsing into one device — but a cultural one, occurring in the brains of consumers and in their interactions with others. Content flows across multiple platforms, industries cooperate and compete across them, and audiences go almost anywhere in search of the experience they want.
- Transmedia storytelling. A story told across multiple media, where each medium contributes something distinctive and no single text carries the whole. Jenkins's rule is that a transmedia work should be self-contained enough to enjoy alone and incomplete enough to reward following the story elsewhere.
- Collective intelligence. Jenkins borrows Pierre Lévy's term to describe how dispersed audiences pool knowledge — his standing example being the online communities that collectively solved the puzzles of a season of Survivor faster than any individual could.
- Participatory culture. Developed in the 2006 MacArthur white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: a culture with low barriers to expression, strong support for sharing, informal mentorship, and members who believe their contributions matter. Jenkins pairs this with the participation gap — the argument that unequal access to participation, not to hardware, is the meaningful digital divide.
- Spreadable media. Spreadable Media (2013, with Sam Ford and Joshua Green) argues against the virus metaphor for online circulation. Media do not spread because they are infectious; they spread because people choose to pass them on, for reasons of their own, and "if it doesn't spread, it's dead." See meme for the position they are arguing against.
Selected Works
- Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
- Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006)
- Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (2006)
- Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013)
- By Any Media Necessary (2016)
Criticism
Jenkins has been criticised for optimism — for describing participatory culture in terms that underweight how much of the participation is unpaid labour captured by platforms, and how unevenly the capacity to participate is distributed. He has engaged the critique directly, and the participation gap is his own concession to part of it.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Jenkins supplies the account of audiences that most technology writing lacks: people as producers and circulators rather than recipients. His spreadability argument is also the sharpest available correction to the assumption, inherited from memetics, that content propagates by its own properties rather than by human decision.
