Jenkins- Part 1

Henry Jenkins is currently the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Before that he created and directed the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. He describes himself as “prolific as hell.” He has a very active mind, which shows in his lengthy and frequent blog posts as well as his list of published work.

When reading his introduction, I had to keep reminding myself what class I was reading for. It is extremely similar in topic and theme to what I have been reading for my Writing for Social Media class. Towards the end of the introduction, when he explained what he would discuss in the chapters to come, it became clearer how this relates to DIY culture. The chapter we read focuses on the amateur filmmaker culture surrounding the Star Wars phenomenon- they are certainly a sub-culture or DIY culture.

One idea I find important is folk culture, which developed through sharing and interpreting. Ownership was not a concern, most folk songs for example cannot be traced to single songwriter. Our modern mass media was built on borrowings from folk culture and in turn this new convergence culture Jenkins is discussing will be built on material from the media conglomerates who have controlled the mass media in recent years. Of course, this will be difficult as these conglomerates are more about making money than developing a culture. As we have read in the chapter, they are not ready and willing to give up the rights to their intellectual property and on the rare occasion that they do so, it is on their own strict terms.

As for my project, I have finished up most of the prep work I needed to do. I have all my materials- a blank scrapbook, decorative paper, tape, markers, pens and of course photos. I have a general idea of how I plan to organize the content, so my next step is to fill in the details. In the next few days I plan to finalize the photos I will be using and work on my hand-drawn type. I want to assign each group of photos a page as well, I will probably paper clip the photos and decorative paper to the pages to help me organize it. Then finally I can get to the fun part- experimenting with layouts and gluing everything in place.