Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 2:00PM
Abstract:
Henry Jenkins was one of the most popular speakers at last year’s SXSW Interactive Festival, so we are very excited to have him return to the event in 2008. His foil in this conversation is best-selling author Steven Johnson, who served as the Keynote Speaker at the 1998 event.Henry Jenkins - Co-Dir of Comparative Media Studies at MIT
Steven Johnson - CEO, outside.in
Johnson: What about the coming, second backlash to the gaming culture.
Jenkins: Never underestimate the power of parents to see their children as threatened or dumb. Moral panic can occur when we stop asking questions about how our children are learning and we assume we know the answers based upon the way things were for us.
Johnson: Where is the documented evidence of the skills that are imparted by this new environment?
Jenkins: The foundation of our traditional assessment is wrong for an era of collective intelligence. We pool resources. Knowledge is ad hoc and just-in-time from the pool of everyone. Total mastery measures will becomes more and more disappointing if we only consider the individual. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this. Pooling knowledge is how we work and play. It should also be how we teach and test, but it currently is not.
Johnson: Do you ever think of a new technology as just stupid?
Jenkins: The challenge is to find out why some activity is meaniful to the people engaged into it? It may not be meaningful to me, but we must assume that people as a whole are not idiots. They act in a certain way for a reason. Conjecture that assumes people are idiots should be questioned.
Johnson: Lost vs. The Wire … bring it.
Jenkins: Lost lives very much outside the box. Much of its activity is online and creates its complexity of engagement. The Wire is Hill Street Blues on steroids and may be pushing the limits of television that resides in the box.
The quesiotn is not what is wrong with these fans who have so much time on there hands, but, rather, what is wrong with America that does not tap into these people’s intelligence?
People are building skills and competencies in their play that makes them more able to face the problems of our society.
Johnson: “We are Wizards” documentary about Harry Potter features you. Can you tell us about it?
Jenkins: Fan fiction via the Harry Potter universe has exploded in this space (e.g. HP Alliance). A hunting society plays with bows and an information society plays with information.
Johnson: What are these young people actually like? Is there an actual crisis here? Is the interactive generation in worse shape? The evidence tends to say no.
Jenkins: Young people tend to speak in the “we” belying a collective purpose and intelligence while adult politicians speak more predominately “I - you”. Example: Obama. Obama’s lack of experience is seen by people not as a large reliability and more like a stub on Wikipedia which we will flesh out together. What we need to do is take that commitment to one’s WoW guild and bring it back into the places where we live, face-to-face, with others.
Jenkin’s new book: Convergence Culture
He references Toffler and Putnam