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.
