Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins (born June 4, 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a highly renowned media scholar who now conducts research and teaches at MIT. He is the author of several books, including Convergence Culture which discusses the concepts of convergence, participatory culture, and collective knowledge within the context of old and new media.
In charge of the Comparative Media Studies Department at MIT, and avid blogger, and a prolific author, Henry Jenkins is particularly interested in how new forms of media can be critically and academically viewed in order to study how technology affects community, intelligence, and education.
One of Jenkins most notable early arguments was that the boundary between text and reader has broken down, not merely in the way the reader "constructs" the text, but in the growth of fan cultures.These could be seen by how "fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."[1]
Henry Jenkins visited Middlebury College on March 4 to give a talk about The White Paper, which outlines "new frameworks and models for media literacy".
