Jenkins-Isms?
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on "spreadable media" with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
Jenkins-Isms?
As I mention the other day, I am currently posting this blog from Singapore. I was invited here as a guest of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation which hosted a public lecture at the National Library's Drama Center on Friday night which was attended by some of the country's political, economic, and intellectual leaders and was designed to focus public debate around the issue of Media in Transition. The talk has received enormous interest here -- I think I have been interviewed at this point by pretty much all of the English language media in Singapore. (I am starting to feel like Noam Chomsky!) The first interview came on my first morning of the country and went up on line almost immediately. It was with AsiaOne and resulted in this story.
They asked for my photograph, having no time to get a photographer over to my hotel, and wondered if they could take some images from my blog. I was amused to see that they went with a picture of my Mii, created by Alice Robison, and the photograph of me reading a Polish comic book outside the Warsaw train station. In this context, the Mii looks a little bit like the kind of artist renderings a police might circulate about a crime suspect but I suppose it does drill home my attitude towards game and digital technology.
The article ran with the provocative headline, "The Youtube of Tomorrow Will Come from Asia," and discusses in some depth my interest in the flow of Asian produced goods into the west and my belief that Singapore as a nation may be posed to become a key broker in that relationship.
On Saturday, I opened up the Straits Times over breakfast and found a full page article about my talk, including a side bar on "Jenkins-isms" which included the following tidbit about my recent visit to Teen Second Life:
"Prof Jenkins himself went into Second Life and met a young girl from Mexico City. Despite their age gap, they could talk freely about many things."
So, Mariel, it looks like our encounter the other day is making international news!
It's pretty scary when people start naming "isms" after you!
