Henry Jenkins, media scholar

When the audience owns creative expression

Bernardo Parrella interviews Henry Jenkins

The power of crowdsourcing is transforming the way we perceive and use popular culture. Even more, it is a crucial engine for a new landscape of collaborative interactions that goes well beyond the online world. Along the way, such a process is questioning the complex relationship between media audiences and producers, users and content. But despite its many promises, argues MIT media scholar Henry Jenkins, the crowdsourcing model is still in its infancy, and its proponents should not underestimate its discontents.

Bernardo Parrella: How is crowdsourcing changing the way we perceive and use popular culture? Do you see it as a practice still limited to fans, bloggers, specific groups? Or is it becoming more mainstream and global?

Henry Jenkins: I have argued that what we are calling Web 2.0 is fandom without the stigma. By that, I mean that fans, among many other groups, have a long history of living in virtual communities and embracing participatory culture. They have long taken resources drawn from popular culture and transformed them into raw materials for their own creative expression, expression which is understood in shared rather than individualized terms. As they have done so, they have been an innovative force on popular culture — generating new meanings, focusing attention on emerging trends, educating the public for new approaches, creating models for alternative cultural practices — and thus have created new kinds of value. Fans appreciate the work in the double sense that they like it and they increase its value through their emotional investments in it.

I am struggling as I address these questions to understand how narrowly you mean crowdsourcing — whether you mean a specific process of innovation through the bottom based on the collaborative interactions and collective intelligence of users, or whether you mean it more generally to refer to all kinds of ways that users create value through their interactions with popular culture. But no matter how you look at it, the most creative energies begin with fans, bloggers and gamers. But, to bring us back to my opening claim, what were once seen as marginal practices are becoming much more mainstream. The creative industries are embracing the products of their fans and pushing them out to a larger public. More and more people are participating in the social production of meaning and taking media in their own hands. What once seemed cultish now seems mainstream. What once seemed alien now seems commonplace. And what once seemed kooky has lost its stigma.

Q: What are the effects of these commonplace creative energies on corporate media?

A: We are living in a moment of profound and prolonged transition. We are seeing contradictory responses on all sides. Take for example the case of "The Colbert Report." On the one hand, Stephen Colbert and his producers are actively encouraging viewers to sample and remix content from his program. They run a series of contests designed to encourage grass-roots appropriation. They play games with Wikipedia. And at the same time, Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, which airs the show, has sued Google to take down any program-related content off of YouTube.

The media companies are great big dysfunctional families where legal, creative and marketing aren't speaking to each other and don't share the same values. Companies are being pulled between collaborationist and prohibitionist poles, and consumers are rightly confused about how the media industries expect or want us to behave. It isn't even about resistance at this point. Consumers aren't resisting the rules; they honestly don't know what the rules are.

Q: If YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are the models of choice, what about the "walled gardens" they create and the high "exit costs" they require? How can we ask and make the rules of these platforms more transparent?

A: I am still struggling with this issue myself. On the one hand, I really do see great value in the creation of shared networks which enable all kinds of groups to upload and circulate their content. The power of YouTube comes from the fact that so many different groups are using it in so many different ways. On the other hand, I am really concerned about the "walled garden" effect — whether we are getting locked into a single corporate media platform that is very hard to leave and very hard to operate outside of. I am especially concerned by the vagueness about governance of these sites — again, a product of our current struggle over the terms of participation — and also by the ways that these sites profit from the creative labor of so many unpaid artists, not to mention from the value created by consumers who sort through these contents and determine what is worth paying attention to. There's a lot we do not yet understand about how such structures operate and how we can use them to generate more democratic forms of cultural participation. I am also concerned about how such systems might create mechanisms which encourage diversity and minority expression rather than allowing moderation to become simply a mechanism for majority rule.

Q: Is Second Life a more appropriate metaphor? Could it be viewed as a model for widespread crowdsourcing practices?

A: Second Life offers us another model for a participatory culture — one where the world is being built from the bottom up on the basis of the shared fantasies and ambitions of its users, and one where there is a fairly enlighted corporate leadership that has, for the most part, been responsive to its user base. It raises the question, though, whether we want social structures and infrastructures that are potentially so central to the way we lived controlled by any single entity, corporate or governmental, no matter how enlightened they may be.

I certainly see Second Life right now as an important site of experimentation and innovation. It may be more valuable as a fantasy ideal than as a lived reality, but it is worth spending a fair amount of time thinking about and debating the value of this concept. Second Life, per se, is probably not the future of the Web; multiverses will almost certainly be one aspect of the communications system of the future.

Q: What characteristics of a crowdsourced endeavor make it more or less likely to succeed?

A: All evidence suggests that collective intelligence is most effective when there are a diversity of inputs and where a broad array of different practices and expertise are taken seriously. This argues for the importance of inclusiveness — for bringing together people with different goals, values and knowledge and finding ways for them to collaborate together in the production of cultural value.

Q: Participatory practices and Web 2.0, technology and culture: Are they truly on a convergence path? What's next?

A: Web 2.0 emerged after a significant number of people from diverse backgrounds had spent enough time on the Web to know what they wanted it to do and how it fit within the contexts of their everyday lives. It represents a shift of emphasis from the newness of technological platforms to the embeddedness of cultural practices.

In some ways, Web 2.0 realizes much of the rhetoric of Web 1.0. It does so because a larger portion of society is connected, because more people have learned how to make things work, because more of our everyday practices have moved online. As we think about Web 3.0, then, we need to imagine this same practice playing out again, so that we become as comfortable with tagging, social networking, blogging, podcasting, downloading and so forth as we now are with searching, posting, and e-mailing.

It is hard right now to know what this looks like, in part because we are still in the early stages of innovation; we still haven't learned all of the things these new technologies and practices can be used for, and we have not yet begun to identify which uses are really valuable and which are simply failed experiments. Technological change is fast, but we only really understand its impact when that change has been worked through on the cultural level.

Read more about Henry Jenkins at his professional site.