Henry Jenkins is currently a professor at USC and has previously worked at MIT. He has mostly focused his body fo work on the gaming industry, but has researched and written extensively on all forms of participatory internet culture. He has depicted four types of participatory culture in his works: Affiliations,
Expressions, Collaborative Problem-solving, and Circulations. These types of participatory culture are the nexus of much of Jenkins’ writing.
In his blog “Confessions of an Aca-Fan” Jenkins uses real life examples to explain some of the concepts he writes about. In fact, the very first post is about the “hit film” Snakes on a Plane. He notes that the movie made such a buzz before its release primarily because fan-made media hyped it up to such a great extent. This is Jenkins’ way of describing how fans andmedia interact to create a sort of participatory culture in which a movie that is widely understood to be a “bad movie” can make such a huge media splash.
In 2007, Jenkins posted “Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube” in which he adapts a ten-minute speech he made regarding social networking and the Web 2.0. The proposition that struck me was #6.
6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple’s “1984″ advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy
Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.
Jenkins assumption about YouTube playing an important role in political culture has become all too real in the most recent elections. Not only has the presidential campaign gotten out of hand, but the “other forms of bigotry” that Jenkins described have trickled into the political arena in many facets.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK5pDrDXZlM[/youtube]
This ad gained a lot of media attention, including an interesting article from NPR. This was released by John Dennis in his bid to defeat Nancy Pelosi in the race for California’s 12th District Congressional Seat. John Dennis’s home page reads “John Dennis – Not a normal Republican” and this is something he has once again proved to be true. Not only is he an “anti-war libertarian who supports Texas Rep. Ron Paul, gay marriage and medical marijuana”, but he is also willing to semi-humiliate himself with such a ridiculous campaign strategy. John Dennis is a perfect example of Jenkins’s prediction that YouTube would play a vital role in politics.