Transmedia missionaris: Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is the director, Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. In this viral-info-snack he discusses the power of media in a 21 century trans-mediated world. A world where converging technologies and cultures give rise to a new media landscape.

[White Noise]

[Music and White Noise]

We're definitely at a moment of
transition, a moment where an old media

system is dying in a new media system is
being born. An era when spec tutorial

culture is giving way to participatory
culture, where a society based on a small

number of companies controlling the
storytelling apparatus is giving away to

a much more complex media scape where
average citizens have the ability to

seize control over the media technology, and tell their own stories in powerful new ways.

[Music]

If we go back over thousands of years of
human history, the most important stories

were retold many, many times around the
campfire. They belong to the folk.

As we moved into 20th century, those images
now belong to major media companies who
claim exclusive ownership of it.

What we're seeing is in the digital age, as
the public begins to take media in its

own hands and begins to assert its right
to retell those stories, the public are

taking media without the permission of
copyright holders and innovating,

experimenting, recontextualizing,
responding to those images in new ways.

[Music]

We take control of the media as it enters
our lives and that's the essence of Convergence culture.

Convergence culture is a world where every
story, every sound,

brand, image, relationship plays itself out
across the maximum number of media channels.

It's shaped as much by the decisions made in teenagers bedrooms

as it is by the decisions made
in the Viacom boardroom, so a discussion

list online or Wikipedia function according to collective intelligence, where the group as a

whole can put together knowledge in a more
complex way than any other individual is capable of doing.

[Music]

We are developing technologies around
collective intelligence which allow us

to monitor government produce data in
ways that would have been impossible before.

We're seeing human rights activists taking videos

recorded by torturers and turning them
around and using them

to call attention to the role of torture around the planet.

If George Orwell imagined the world where
Big Brother was watching us, what we

instead with little cell phone cameras are
watching Big Brother every moment of the day.

[Music]

At Transmedia project, the story or
experience is spread across a variety of

media platforms, not in a way that's
redundant but rather in a way that's

complementary so that each platform
contributes what it does best.

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us
even now in this very room.

Popular entertainment so far is been the best
at exploiting these core principles.

We might look at The Matrix as a story that
unfolds across three feature films,

a dozen animated short subjects, about 20 comic book stories,

about three videogames and continues to expand as the audience takes it up

and creates fan fiction, or fan art, or fan costumes, or fan theater.

[Audience noise]

The advantage of documentary filmmaker
has is that we're already depicting a world.

The reality is already cross-platform and the
reality is complex enough to allow us

to have many different characters or many
different stories on many different platforms.

[Music] It was a Creed written into the founding documents declare the destiny of domination.

Yes, we can.

So far, the biggest nonfiction success of Transmedia storytelling is the Obama campaign.

Here, we see this political figure relatively
unknown four years ago who exploded on

the national scene by exploring every
available media platform.

Social network spaces like Facebook and
MySpace, cell phone technology to connect to the voters.

YouTube is a platform for
distributing both official video and

allowing consumers to produce their own
grassroots video.

[Obama] We will respond with that timeless
creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes, we can.

[Music]

We're all governed by principles of
participatory culture, it has the potential

to be much more diverse in a world
controlled by a small number of media
producers.

As average people develop the
ability to tell their stories,

we're seeing different perspectives emerge.

We're seeing different groups gain
representation, we're seeing groups

challenge the dominant media images that
have been constructed for their lives,

and the challenge for those of us caring
about social justice issues is to make
sure that these tools get in the hands

of those people who have been the most
oppressed and most dispossessed to get

their stories out and get their stories
in the circulation.

As we expand, you have the power to tell stories.

We have the potential for stories to grab our
imagination, to touch our hearts that

come not from the entertainment
infrastructure, but from some average

citizen out there whose reality has
never been depicted on the screen before,

and I think that's the real excitement of our present moment of media change.

[Music and White Noise]