Monday, March 12 at SXSW

danah boyd interviewed her mentor Henry Jenkins in a panel entitled Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins with the adoration of one who truly had learned a lot in her studies with him and was adept at maintaining the flow of questioning even after one of his incredibly long pronouncements on fandom, convergence culture, or the transformation of pop culture over the last twenty years. jenkins now finds himself at the vanguard of an intellectual movement studying the transformation of what was fringe culture into the mainstream and it’s democratic potential for positive social change. While not being convinced that the investments in new media do not bring their perils, he nevertheless calls for the continuos participation of fans (and thus users) in the build-up of the greatest parts of the web and their nascent potential for transformative action in the real world (although where this has yet occurred he didn’t state).

Jenkins brought a critique against the new free speech movements around digital culture in that they almost always refuse to take up the fight when fan culture is under corporate attack. He believes they should be defending not only the technologies (bit torrent, etc.) but the transformers of culture and that this is fundamental to the movement toward “a more fertile, generative culture.”

Like the 18 and under panel, Jenkins sees huge problems with current legislation under debate in Congress regarding social netoworking and youth culture. Research is definitely needed to provide informed judgments, and he praised the $50m Macarthur initiative to study Digital Media and Learning as emblematic of the efforts that must be made.

The language of politics is not eternal

Political involvement is being reshaped as well, with the upcoming elections using the language of fan culture and relying on social networking to build support bases. However, voting is still regarded as a “special event,” instead democracy should be a lifestyle that is integrated with everyday life.

Evolving Media Literacy

boyd asked how people know what is real and what is not real in wikipedia and Jenkins postulated that the weekly “fraudulent” videos, postings etc. on various sites, not only wikipedia, are producing a new form of media literacy, one which calls for following the proclamation P.T. barnum placed outside the mermaid exhibit in the 19th c.: “The status of this exhibit is under dispute. Come see for yourself and find out.” During Barnum’s time these experiments with pusihing against reality led to early scientific education in the general population. People now must learn how to weigh things and discern reality as they did then. What is really valuable of sites like wikipedia is not the content necessarily but the way it is produced. And the reach is global. Whereas history books are often produced through the lens of the country in which they are published, Wikipedia offers a sea change: international collaboration which transcends locative beliefs.

Secondlife is carnival all year round

Again Jenkins is interested in historical antecedents to current situations and sees clear linkages with “digital culture” and the past, eg. LOL was in use well before IMing: it was in fact popular in 1850s print culture in the U.S. More far-reaching is the contention that secondlife resembles medieval carnival. The one day of carnival every year allowed peasants to be lords and the society to experiment with social relations (which sometimes led to political upheavals). Jenkins thinks there is value in secondlife and other virtual places if the experimentations and energies are brought back into the real world.

One of the last questions asked of Jenkins was about how would the planet pay for all of this digital virtuality. He thought again that energies for planetary preservation needed to be brought into the real world if they are produced in secondlife or elsewhere, but this question is truly one that wasn’t being addressed at this conference, with most panelists instead opting for a rosier view of technology that can be assumed to be apart from our ever-increasing environmental problems ( http://www.climatecrisis.net/ ).