AALIYAH”S GROUP LEADER DISCUSSION FOR 2/17 CONVERGENCE CULTURE:

INTERACTIVITY WITHIN FAN COMMUNITES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF MEDIA LITERACY LEADING TO PARTICIPATION ON A LARGER SCALE

Henry Jenkins illustrates the importance of fan communities on the Internet as a means of education and media literacy by looking at the fandoms of Harry Potter. In the exploration of the different Potter communities there rises an issue of collective intelligence as a mode of learning. The emotional connection that Potter fans experience leads them to further explore the text, while improving their writing skills and the ability to understand themselves and others by engaging the Potter Text. This community created its own “knowledge culture” to evaluate the characters of the story and also allowed students to develop an emotional attachment to the text and their interaction in the community. In a sense the text creates a sense of authorship and ownership in the participants within the online community. Illustrating inter-connectivity, this case leads to larger issues of media literacy and the idea of intellectual property and the fair use of content on the web.

Literacy’s definition has to be expanded to include media literacy and how print is used within digital media. The print is used on the web to create a community where boundaries are broken down and people are able to function anonymously. Also it creates a place where many dynamics of culture and society intertwine: participatory culture, education, religion, corporate media, and producers. Students are given the opportunity to help teach each other within the context of transparency and interaction that does necessarily happen in real world classrooms. Also, these same students create and define the rules online versus real life where they do not have the power the boundaries of learning and writing.

The online community also gives children an opportunity to mobilize online to fight back against corporate media and the constraints that are placed upon them. This is also illustrated through Harry Potter, which contests the idea that children are helpless and not able to defend themselves. Jenkins makes the case that the community functions as a grassroots movement that only needs to be threatened in order to take action in society and it also fosters an environment where children engage with media to create a more collective idea of society and its participants. Heather Lawver used The Daily Prophet to help mobilize different Potter communities against Warner Bros. to broaden their rights of the fandoms and the use of Potter characters.


Jenkins explores the idea of “affinity spaces” and the draw of people to communities that spring up out of pop culture.

• Why do people learn when participating more actively in pop culture (emotional investment)?

• Can affinity spaces be translated to school? What would make it effective? Often fandoms have do not constrain themselves to a strict hierarchy but there is an established hierarchy in the classroom, are schools locked into an autonomous culture and power dynamics between students and teacher?

• Will affinity spaces discourage school and the rigid structure of school?

REALITY VS FICTION AND FANTASY

Parody and satire force people and analyze information and decide what is reality and what is not fact. It also creates an environment where participants are analyzing sources to define the truth. As seen in fandoms, there is an added dimension in which people define their own truth within the community. This leads to the development and mastering of critical analysis skills. Jenkins contents that participants are being flooded with so much information that there has to be a way to figure out what is valuable.

• In the context of fandoms and Harry Potter, there is an issue of whether not online interaction in fantasy world is a valid way of learning because it leads to another problem of whether fact and fiction can be differentiated.

• In regards to children, if the participant is so immersed in fantasy why would they want to participate in the “real world” or school?

CORPORATE MEDIA’S NEED TO REORGANIZE PARTICIPATION

Jenkins visualizes a dynamic role between corporate media and participants within media: they both need each other to survive and thrive in a knowledge culture. Corporate media is motivated by profit and are looking for ways to gage pop culture and participants’ consumption of media. At the same time participants want the attention of corporate media to reach people that may not look online for different information. This was the goal of the True Majority Action and The Apprentice parody. True Majority Action’s founders also used the guise of talking about ice cream to draw attention to a Frisbee outlining the federal budget.



On the other hand, Fandoms create an environment where fans are contributing to the expansion and popularity of a pop culture phenomenon but Corporations want to control how and to what extent this is allowed to happen. Jenkins contend that companies are entitled to protect their rights against commercial competitors but they need to distinguish what is true fan interaction.

• Do the participants in role-playing and fan fiction have some stake ownership in their work? Or are they allowed to use the characters in the story online as a form of expression? Can they publish their work? Do they want to?

• Is fair-use dead in terms of media on the net?

Applications of fan participation/ fan communities in the real world:

• Can media literacy and the model of the fandom translate to classrooms?

• Who participates online in fan communities?

• How does transparency help people to participate online while maintaining their anonymity? Do people need anonymity to truly be honest online?

• Is the Harry Potter community a form of “adhocracy”? Is this is where we are headed online?

PARTICIPATION AS A GOVERNING CONCEPT

Consumers participate on their own terms and Jenkins explores how participants impact current politics and their interaction with politics. Participation rests on audience investment and the emotional ties of media culture.

There are different forms of participation from fan communities taking on real world issues, like the HP Alliance, who use the loose context of Harry Potter searching for the truth and Justice and applying that to current global concerns. Participation can also include forwarding of clips that entertain but open up discourse and the search for more information creating a movement and community of people thinking and interacting together.

Participation has led to the movement away from the concept of the “informed citizen” to the more “monitorial citizen” who sits back and takes in all of the information and
decides the moment to participate in greater culture and in the knowledge culture.
Furthermore, participation allows consumers to contextualize mainstream media and add on to the ideas of others.

Redefining the informed citizen:

• For democracy to exist Jenkins states “ there needs to be a social contract between participants and a sense that their actions have consequences within the community”(239). Does this begin with children and arming students with the ability and skills to engage in different communities? If we want children to vote do we have to change the process by which they are socialized into citizenship?

NEW DEFINITIONS OF GRASSROOTS AND THE CONTEXT OF MEDIA

Historically, grassroots may be seen as coming together as a community and eventually taking a stake in an issue and trying to change the situation. Henry Jenkins sees grassroots beginning online and then impacting real world issues. The use of pop culture furthers Henry Jenkins idea that people are more willing to participate if they have some type of interest or emotional connection to an issue. Pop culture plays upon interest and eventually draws individuals in emotionally and it creates a means of mobilization by bringing people together to form communities. Not only has pop culture influenced political campaigns helping to court voters but it also shaped how the public analyzes political conversations, as seen in The Daily Show. Photoshop added to the political conversations by becoming a grassroots interpretation of political cartoons.

Jenkins believes that new media has changed the nature of the debate and why youth is more engaged in information. Blogging adds to this idea because participants on blogs often look up information and investigate thus intervening in the democratic process.

• “ Pierre Levy describes a world where grassroots communication is not a momentary disruption of the corporate signal, but the routine way the system operates." (226)
  
• Is blogging an expansion of “culture jamming” or is it a completely separate aspect of convergence culture?