Jenkins noted that the success of Youtube as a business owes as much to amateur contributors like the Chinese Backstreet Boys as it does to the founders — the value of a user-generated content business depends precisely on the popularity, if not the production quality, of content generated by users, and the willingness of these prosumers to alert their social networks to new cultural discoveries.

Then he moved on to “the basic premises of convergence culture.”

1. “Convergence culture is a cultural rather than a technological process.”

The flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties across media platforms has created new forms of “transmedia entertainment.” For example, to get all the clues and puzzle pieces to see the whole story and undergo the full Matrix experience, you need to see the Matrix movies, play the game, participate in the online discussions, read the comics.

It is not the “digital revolution” in the sense of a withering away of the mass media regime in the face of grassroots, peer to peer, vernacular media. The concentration of ownership of large media companies is as great as ever. But the media environment has changed radically from the days when mass media was the only choice. Top-down and bottom-up media co-exist in corporate boardrooms and teenagers’ bedrooms. Convergence culture, as Jenkins sees it, is “an ever more complex ecology of media cultures.” Mass media is still the biggest organism, but it is no longer the only species, and as digital media make new forms of cultural production, appropriation, re-interpretation possible, the properties of the system become as interesting as the properties of the biggest organism.

Jenkins cited Ithiel de Sola Pool as an important foundation for his own ideas about “the perpetual process of convergence and divergence, the dynamic churn of culture.” As examples of convergence coexisting with divergence, Jenkins pointed to the video iPod — “a dramatic shift of how television relates to consumers” — and to the mobilization online of fan communities to protest the cancellation of Stargate by the Sci-Fi channel.

(to be continued…)

Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Henry Jenkins, Howard Rheingold, at USC Annenberg Center — photo by Justin Hall.

Henry Jenkins was the guest lecturer for the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on January 17. Jenkins is Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including a central focus on DIY media as part of the larger flow he calls participatory culture. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

The title of Jenkins’ presentation and the theme of the ensuing conversation at ACC was “From YouTube to Youniversity: Learning and Playing in an age of Participative Culture”

Jenkins, whose online autobiography has a comment thread, walks the convergence culture talk he talks; he started his ACC presentation by alluding to the cover stories of Business Week on “The Power of Us,” Newsweek on “Putting the We in the Web,” and Time on “YOU are the person of the year.”

Jenkins then cited the Web 2.0 phenomena as an enabler of participatory media, “a resurgence of new companies and a period of economic churn associated with user-created content,” then mashes up the pop culture references with Yochai Benkler’s remarks on non-market and non-proprietary production: “we do well to complicate our models” of how and why humans organize cultural production. All this led up to his fundamental assertion, that “YouTube is the fullest embodiment of convergence culture.” Jenkins offered the explosion of vernacular digital video online as an example of the strong connection between popular culture media and pedagogical practices he has written about for years.

Two points in particular are evidenced by Youtube’s success: “Amateur content is getting global visibility. And fan communities are not just distribution channels, ” but the seedbeds of cultural creation, Jenkins stated, in a kind of “ecological relationship with blogs and grassroots communities that create cultural material and social networks that distribute it.” Examples: The deaf community using video of american sign language; people invade Walmart, use the equipment on the shelves to create video of Walmart and put it on YouTube; fan communities driving snippets of mass media moments to viral distribution through the online community (Stephen Colbert at the National Press Club dinner, for example); the famous OK Go treadmill video and the world of peer to peer grassroots music videos it represents (reminding Jenkins of vaudeville); lonelygirl15 (which reminds Jenkins of PT Barnum); the blurring of lines between real life and fiction in reality television; the emergence of YouTube as a political space with the tasering of a student at UCLA , George Allen’s racial gaffe, and the Saddam Hussein hanging going viral and effecting public opinion and election outcomes; the grassroots surveillance and sometimes vigilante action that mobile media afford.

(to be continued…)

“My time is being squandered online because I’m not getting experience points,” Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. He was speaking at the November 16 seminar on DIY Media.

I could see from long acquaintance with his proclivities that Hall had decided to find a way to combine his long-time personal obsessions with gaming, chatting online, radical self-surveillance, self-publishing, and self disclosure: the New York Times magazine called Hall “the founding father of personal blogging” until he retired in 2005, after more than a decade, at the age of thirty.

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day’s surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix — making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We’re already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? (”I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there,” Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)

Hall calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”

Here is a mockup of how a PMOG might look on a mobile phone screen, via Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku app:

In Helsinki in the summer of 2006, Hall described PMOG’s: Quicktime video.

Questions or suggestions, critiques, plaudits, brickbats for Justin? Want to push the design or question its premises? Post here and I’ll prod Justin to respond.

Robin Good, whose Masternewmedia is an excellent resource, has posted the text, audio, and a few screen captures from the presentation I made in Second Life for the New Media Consortium on Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Participation:

Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling.

Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn’t looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves.

This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

Henry Jenkins has posted on his blog about the paper he and his colleagues have written for the MacArthur Foundation, about participatory culture and media literacy. I have followed Jenkins’ lead in my attempts to learn how to link DIY media skills with civic engagement, and agree that this is about more than just entertainment — it’s about an entire approach to culture, which Jenkins calls “participatory culture.”

We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

Play — the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.

What happens when you look at the future of teaching and learning through the lens of DIY media and participatory culture? At the most recent DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center on October 19, Todd Richmond’s presentation on open educational resources and Bob Stein’s preview of a toolset that will enable people to add multimedia annotation to online texts, offered two glimpses of a possible future upheaval in education. (The slides from Richmond’s and Stein’s presentation are available as a Quicktime movie.)

(This post complements and expands on the report Adrienne Russell posted immediately after the event. Although Richmond and Stein presented as a tag team, going back and forth between their presentations, I’m separating this post-seminar report into two different posts. I hope this will afford two different conversations in the comment threads.)

Todd Richmond is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled “Viral University Education” which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.

In his presentation on October 19, Richmond compared the future technology-triggered transformation of educational institutions to the “perfect storm” that hit the music industry when several different factors intersected to disrupt the existing institutions for making, distributing, and monetizing music: millions of people acquired broadband connections and used sufficiently powerful personal computers, the MP3 format made it easy to encode, transmit, and decode music via the Internet, digital tools for capturing and editing audiovisual content made “studio quality” production widely available, online social networking made p2p and viral distribution possible. Richmond included one more technical factor, “common metastructure.” In music, the common metastructure of bar, beat, and temp made remix and mashup media possible.

The same forces that disrupted the music industry can be applied to education, and the content that could drive a transformation in teaching and learning — and the institutions through which it happens — is becoming available as other universities, including Rice and Johns Hopkins, joined MIT, which in 2001 began to make its “open coursware available.” Richmond sees another factor at work here, the same “commons-based peer production” at work in Wikipedia. The challenges to a wave of change in education are, Richmond enumerated, “IP, IP, IP…uptake, IP, and tools.”

Open educational resources, Chinese Backstreet Boys video, viewed one and a quarter million times on Youtube, as an example of “going viral.”

The availability of DIY media production and distribution tools changed the asymmetry between the producers, distributors, and distributors of music, Richmond pointed out, referring to that changing power asymmetry as “the delta.” With Wi-Fi in the classroom and lecture videows online, and student familiarity with laptops, remix, mashups, blogs and wikis, together with the power that “Googlepedia” teachers and learners, the delta in education is changing: the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.

“Resistance is futile,” believes Richmond: although existing educational institutions are not generally embracing a digitally transformed future, “the educational sector will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming by the next perfect storm.”

In education, there may be good reasons for maintaining the role of teacher, where the roles of middlemen in the music business may not be necessary. “Optimizing the delta,” Richmond calls it: how do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?

In the discussion that followed the presentations by Richmond and Stein, and the smaller seminar after lunch, discussion turned, as Adrienne noted, to the way institutions can react to the forces for change that new technologies and social practices might enable. The existing university classroom has to change, but how? What might be the event or new driving forces that produces the storm Richmond predicts? Will the extensions of copyright law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, technical barriers such as digital rights restrictions, and politically-sanctioned shifts in net neutrality become insuperable barriers to educational change? Will the non-educational reasons for schooling — a place to park the kids while parents work and boot camp behavioral trainingfor industrial-era employees and consumers — prove to be the immovable object that stops the irresistible forces Richmond foresees?

I recently spoke in Second Life about The Pedagogy of Civic Participation. Podcast available soon at the New Media Consortium site.

The USC Annenberg Center for Communication has announced Mimi Ito’s research program, part of a new initiative by the MacArthur Foundation:

Mimi Ito, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication was named among a distinguished group of researchers awarded grants through a major new research initiative on “Digital Media and Learning” announced by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on October 19.

The five-year, $50 million initiative aims to support research which helps determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

“Digital media are no longer experimental technologies that live in special laboratories and classrooms; they are part of our everyday lives, inhabiting our living rooms, backpacks, pockets, and cars,” says Ito on the MacArthur Foundation’s “Digital Media and Learning” blog site for the initiative.

“We need to understand how digital media has changed how young people play, learn, relate to others, get information, and create knowledge and culture.
Ito’s research, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, includes a large-scale ethnography of young people that will provide a broad portrait of the digital generation: technology’s influence on their social networks and peer groups, their family life, how they play, and how they look for information. It will be one of the most significant attempts yet made to explore the influence of digital media on youth.

“One goal of our project is to unpack what it means to be “fluent” and “natural” with digital technology, and document the technical, social, and cultural environments that support this kind of lifelong learning and literacy,” says Ito. “Configuring an iPod, exchanging IM with friends, or posting a question to a fan bulletin board are all learning moments. Taken as a whole, these informal and everyday moments can have a longer and lasting impact on young people’s learning and development than their exposure to educational technologies in the classroom.”