| Henry Jenkins |
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| 1958 births | |
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| postmodern theory | |
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| massachusetts institute of technology faculty | |
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Henry Jenkins (born June 4 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia ) American Scholar, currently Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program with William Uricchio . Professor of literature and author of ''Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture'' and ''What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic''. One of the first scholars to seriously study the effects of audience participation in media culture and its effects, and recognized as an expert in the influence of digital popular culture on behavior, including political behavior in a participatory media age. One of Jenkins' earlier arguments was that the boundary between text and reader has broken down, not merely in the way the reader "constructs" the text (see Deconstructionism ), but in the growth of fan cultures. These could be seen by how "fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do." More recently, Jenkins' research has been focused on the concept of "Media Convergence", arguing that the simple technological-focused view that was once hyped was short sighted and that an understanding of how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources offers a far richer understanding of the relationship between different media forms. This research led to his 2006 book ''Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide'' and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999 . This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. He was featured in Electronic Gaming Monthly , where he was asked about the effects of violence in video games. He offered a very different perspective from Jack Thompson . Jenkins earned his MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and his PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He did his undergraduate work at Georgia State University, where he majored in Political Science and Journalism. ON WIKIPEDIA Though nothing on this page seems controversial, Jenkins contested some of the facts on this page during a recent lecture at Dartmouth College . He believes Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and says the higher trafficked articles, such as Abortion , are highly reliable, but lower traffic pages, such as this biography, are less so. Out of respect for the democratic process behind Wikipedia, Jenkins is torn between anonymously editing his own page and leaving it alone. He implied that so far, he has done the latter. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS |
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