Gaming Industry - Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins

• He is an influential media theorist.
• Interested in the online world - 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 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is particularly important.

Media 2.0:

• it refers to the way media has transgressed into a new realm of engagement.
• the current state of the web, the new 'version' in comparison to what it used to be.
• it now considers how the web allows.
  

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 "story world's" secondary characters; producing content to expand of the timelines of a story world; or filling in missing scenes in the story world'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”

Key Terms

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."

Fandoms - fandoms turns to a community where people share the same passions to things.

a way of marketing and distribution and new technology is the #wandanaforever on social media.