MIT’s Henry Jenkins on the characteristics of the new media landscape
“Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies.”
“Our focus,” argues Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies programme, “should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition.”
“These properties cut across different media platforms and different cultural communities: they suggest something of the way we live in relation to media today. Understanding the nature of our relationship with media is central to any attempt to develop a curriculum that might foster the skills and competencies needed to engage within participatory culture.”
Jenkins’ article, which was published on the blog of Rome, Italy-based Robin Good, contains eight sections, each entitled with an adjective (innovative, convergent, everyday, appropriative, networked, global, generational and unequal) that together, according to him, describe the contemporary media landscape.
