If this profile of Henry Jenkins III were a YouTube video, it would begin with footage of the influential scholar mud-wrestling his wife at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If it were a podcast, the introduction would note that Jenkins has been called the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. And if this were an interactive graphic, it would trace the millions of dollars in research grants he has won from foundations, companies, and the government of Singapore.
Any of those media would be a fitting way to tell the story of a scholar who is at the forefront of exploring how digital technologies are reshaping popular culture. But just as Jenkins still reveres words on paper (and online), so too does much of his story lend itself to good old ink on paper.
So we begin in San Francisco, at the Hotel Nikko, at a conference on how to market Web sites to teenagers. Jenkins is a keynote speaker. It’s an unusual gig for a humanities scholar — he likes to joke that he “boldly goes where no humanist has gone before” — an event where one of the most popular sessions is “Engaging and Converting Youth Into Brand Advocates,” and where the goal is to turn fan enthusiasm into cold hard cash.
“My name is Henry Jenkins, and I’m a fan,” he tells the audience. Almost as an afterthought, he adds that he is co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program. His status as an active enthusiast of media, one who has attended science-fiction conventions since college, has always been as important to him as his role as a scholar.
It’s easy to picture the 49-year-old Jenkins staying up late reading comic books, as he does almost every night. With his pear-shaped frame; long, unruly, gray-white beard; and trademark suspenders worn, on this morning, over a dress shirt that has a faint yellow stain above the pocket, he makes no attempt to tone down the geek factor.
“Some years ago, I got tired of people telling me to get a life,” he says. “So I wrote a book instead.”
That was his first, written 16 years ago, when he was an assistant professor at MIT, where humanists are often marginalized, but where science-fiction references are a kind of second language. It was one of the first scholarly works about die-hard TV fans, the kind who love some shows so much that they attend conventions, write their own fiction based on popular characters, and endlessly hash out plot elements in online forums. For Jenkins, the book and the career that followed was personal — he grew up in suburban Atlanta as a follower of Batman comics and Star Trek, and hates the popular stereotypes of basement-dwelling fanboys.
He set out to show that fans are actually at the forefront of a new model of cultural and civic engagement, and he has succeeded wildly, helping to legitimize the study of fan cultures and becoming one of the first scholars to turn a serious eye on video games and other new forms of digital culture.
He is becoming best known for his exploration of how media consumption is changing at a time when media companies — and fans — use a variety of technological platforms to tell their stories. And his theories are being absorbed by media makers, not just scholars. Jesse Alexander, executive producer of the hit television show Heroes, cited Jenkins’s recent book, Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006), in an interview at a conference about Hollywood and video games. The book informed the show, he said: “You should read that if you haven’t.”
At the same time, Jenkins has cut an eccentric and popular figure on MIT’s campus for more than a decade as a dormitory housemaster and a resident media guru who is unafraid to mix it up with the generation that is most immersed in the world he studies. After all, mud-wrestling? “That is the essence of Henry,” says a longtime colleague. “Principled antic behavior.”
Indeed, he is a different kind of academic: a humanist who puts his theories — amplified in his 12 books and on his widely read blog (http://henryjenkins.org) — into practice in the classroom and the dorm, through corporate partnerships, and in speaking engagements. In the process, Jenkins is turning himself into something of a celebrity.
That business leaders like those at the San Francisco conference will now pay to hear Jenkins’s advice about fan communities is a vindication of his research. But he is not one to give easy answers in PowerPoint form.
“I’m not a futurist,” he says. “To predict the future is to assume that it’s inevitable. I believe that the future is still to be written, so it’s about giving people options and spelling out some possible directions that we could go — and trying to shape the outcomes as much as possible.”
In 1999 the Senate’s commerce committee held a hearing on youth and media violence. It was shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School, and government leaders seemed eager to place at least some blame on violent video games for the incident, in which two trench-coated students killed 12 peers and a teacher before committing suicide.
That’s where Henry Jenkins first grabbed the attention of many video-game fans, goth kids, and others who usually don’t follow speeches made by MIT professors. He was called to testify as an expert witness, in part because he had recently co-edited a scholarly book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, about video games.
Jenkins hardly mentioned video games in his testimony; instead, he challenged listeners to take a more nuanced view of how children’s lives are shaped by the media.
“We are afraid of our children,” he told the senators. “We are afraid of their reactions to digital media. And we suddenly can’t avoid either.” He urged the lawmakers to understand the complicated relationships that children have with popular culture, and to avoid making policy on the basis of fear. “Banning black trench coats or abolishing violent video games doesn’t get us anywhere,” he argued. “These are the symbols of youth alienation and rage — not the causes.”
Part of Jenkins’s motivation to testify was personal — he, too, had worn a trench coat in high school and had displayed symbols of adolescent alienation. “Hell, in elementary school I wore a black vampire cape and a medallion around my neck,” he wrote in an e-mail message he sent to friends and colleagues soon after he testified. “I was picked on mercilessly and I spent a lot of time nursing both emotional and physical wounds.” The message was published on several e-mail lists and later in Harper’s.
Some observers dismissed Jenkins’s testimony as too personal.
“I found it irritating,” says L. Rowell Huesmann, a professor of communications and psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who also testified that day. Jenkins “doesn’t have a shred of evidence to support that view” that video games are not the cause of violence in children, Huesmann says. “On the other hand, there are innumerable studies that show time and time again that you put children in front of Power Rangers and then the children will do karate chops and so forth.”
“It’s like he was talking perpendicularly to what the scientists were trying to say.”
But many of Jenkins’s colleagues in media studies praised his testimony. They said it would have been much easier for him to decline the invitation to testify and avoid the inevitable attacks. “He was doing the field of media studies a service and giving us an incredible gift by getting these ideas out there,” says Janet Staiger, a professor who teaches film and television at the University of Texas at Austin.
And the testimony made him a hero to many who read it online after thousands of people e-mailed it to their friends. A techno artist remixed it into an upbeat song called “Goth Control.” The online video-game publication Penny Arcade called Jenkins “the last line of defense against the hordes of irrational, knee-jerk parents’ groups and anti-game zealots.”
His Congressional appearance also helped bring his work to the attention of pop-culture creators. Cory Doctorow, a science-fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, says Jenkins is the only media-studies scholar he takes seriously. He follows the professor’s blog and essays, and he draws from some of Jenkins’s ideas in his novel in progress, which is about kids who fight the Department of Homeland Security.
“There’s a great deal of contempt within science fiction for academics,” says Doctorow. “None of them are engaged with practitioners the way that Henry is. All they care about is inconsequential theory without application.”
For all his scholarship, Jenkins has always had a playful side. Just ask his brood at MIT’s Senior House, known as a home for those who might be considered misfits elsewhere. “At Senior House, it isn’t an insult to be called ‘weird’ — it’s a compliment!” says a welcome message on the dorm’s Web site. “Residents are comfortable in their skins. We are straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or poly. ... Tolerance is the one virtue we value even more than individuality.”
This is where Henry Jenkins lives — and he’s the one who wrote that message. He and his wife, Cynthia, have served as housemasters here for more than 12 years, and they seem well suited to lead this unusual community.
“Henry is very good at keeping an eye on the pulse of Senior House and stopping things that are particularly dangerous before they get out of hand without crushing all creativity and spirit in the house,” says Laura Boylan, a senior in his program. Jenkins has intervened to stop residents from hijacking a construction crane and from rewiring the dorm’s electronic locks, she says (MIT students are known for their elaborate pranks), but he is “hands-off about things that are going to end up fine.”
The dorm is best known for its springtime Steer Roast party. It starts with a flaming roll of toilet paper zipping down a wire from the roof, igniting fuel-soaked kindling in a pit below. Enormous slabs of meat cook over that flame all night, while rock bands play and students and alumni frolic. Some wear elaborate costumes, or dress only in body paint.
Jenkins is protective of Steer Roast, a 40-plus-year-old tradition. He has fended off administrators who want it toned down, and refused to let an Academic Life reporter or photographer attend, citing a “policy” of not allowing news coverage. But it’s easy to piece together details of the gathering from student blogs, photos posted on Flickr and other photo-sharing Web sites, and videos on YouTube.
One of the main attractions of the two-day festival is mud-wrestling. A homemade ring is set up in the dorm’s courtyard, under the shadow of a giant black banner that reads: “Sport Death: Only Life Can Kill You.” Announcers provide amplified color commentary, as pair after pair of wrestlers face off. Every year one of the first matches is Henry Jenkins vs. Cynthia Jenkins.
Jenkins once published a scholarly paper arguing that professional wrestling was a form of melodrama aimed at men, allowing “a powerful release of repressed male emotion.” He demonstrated a fan’s knowledge of the subculture’s colorful characters, analyzing the moves and costumes of the Mountie, the Million Dollar Man, and the late “Ravishing” Rick Rude, among others.
Jenkins doesn’t wear a cape or costume when he appears at Steer Roast, but last year he scripted his match with the help of one of his students, Sam Ford.
“The game plan we came up with,” Ford says in an interview, was to have Jenkins fake a knee injury early in the match. “Then, when Cynthia turned her back, Henry got up on his knees and held his finger up and said ‘Shh,’” signaling to the crowd that he was unharmed, while a concerned Cynthia turned to look for help. “One of the other grad students comes out of the crowd and jumps up and pushes Cynthia’s shoulder,” and she trips over Henry, who pins her to the mat.
“It was the first win of his mud-wrestling career,” Ford says proudly.
Jenkins’s academic career was born, in part, out of his frustration with the state of media scholarship in the 1980s.
He thought academics treated media audiences like couch potatoes whose relationship to events on the screen was akin to that between zombies and their masters. That wasn’t the way Jenkins and his friends consumed media, he felt, and he argued that something more complex was going on inside the minds of those couch-bound spectators.
At first even Jenkins looked down on some of the most enthusiastic types of fan behavior, mainly the way fans remixed content by writing their own short stories. One popular genre of fan fiction, called slash, depicts sexual encounters between same-sex characters from popular television shows, like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. “I was, initially, dubious about fannish reading and writing practices, unable to break with my respect for authorial intention, unsure what to make of all this time and effort put into amateur production,” he wrote in the introduction to his first book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, in 1992.
It was a romance with a fellow student as an undergraduate at Georgia State University — it was Cynthia — that led him to pay more attention to fan cultures. “When we first started dating, one of the formative early conversations was about Star Trek and about the very different ways that we read it,” he says. He focused on the behind-the-scenes trivia, while she was more interested in analyzing the characters’ motivations.
While Jenkins was getting his master’s degree in communication studies at the University of Iowa, he found a sympathetic mentor in John Fiske, who at the time was challenging the prevailing view of audience reception by applying the perspective of cultural studies and focusing on how fans create their own playful interpretations of popular shows.
That approach was “quite disreputable” at the time, says Fiske, but Jenkins persisted even though he didn’t have many peers urging him on. “As a graduate student he worked on his own,” Fiske says. “He was a leader without followers. He had a manner that said, I’m going my route, and if you want to come with me fine, and if you don’t, don’t.”
Janet Staiger, of Texas, recalls that several other scholars were starting to write about pop-culture fans at about the same time Jenkins came out with Textual Poachers. His book became a “touchstone in the field” in part because it was written in such a fresh and accessible style, she says. (Before graduate school, Jenkins wanted to be a journalist, and he is proud of his writing.) Besides, she adds, “the title was provocative.”
When Jenkins was hired at MIT, in 1989, as an assistant professor of literature, the choice was controversial, recalls David Thorburn, a professor of literature there. “Jenkins did not have traditional literary credentials,” Thorburn says, noting that the young scholar’s dissertation had been about Marx Brothers films and other 1930s comedies, and that it was clear he wanted to work across popular media. “This was something that many of my colleagues were very uneasy about at first,” says Thorburn.
“It wasn’t love at first sight” for either party, Jenkins acknowledges. “As a humanist with a math phobia, it’s a very strange place to be.”
Thorburn says he tried to convince Jenkins that MIT was a place where he could try new things. In the end, Jenkins says, he took the job because his only other offer fell through.
MIT turned out to be an ideal fit, one that would shape his research. “I suddenly was immersed in digital culture,” he says, “and was able to get a firsthand perspective on the next generation of technology before it hit the general public.”
He would make his mark at the university by helping to create the Comparative Media Studies Program, in 1999. It is still fighting for money to support its 19 graduate students. At MIT, that means finding external grants, even in humanities departments. “The only way we could be doing what we’re doing here is to be entrepreneurial,” says Jenkins.
It was Howard Rheingold who called Jenkins “the 21st-century McLuhan,” a quote touted on the book cover of Jenkins’s Convergence Culture. “There really haven’t been a lot of people looking at specific media products and deriving some kind of big-picture idea of our culture and where it’s going since McLuhan,” says Rheingold, who has written several popular books about the impact of the Internet on society. McLuhan became a media celebrity in the 1960s for his catchphrases about how television and electronic media were reshaping mass culture. He coined the term “global village” and his “the medium is the message” has reverberated ever since.
Jenkins finds the comparison “vaguely uncomfortable,” because “McLuhan approaches theory from almost the opposite direction I approach theory. He wrote in very broad abstract claims that only gradually relate to specifics. I tend to start from the specifics and work outward.”
But he has always admired McLuhan’s public approach: “He was finding ways to break out of an academic ghetto and do work that touched the public in a more immediate way.”
McLuhan and Jenkins probably wouldn’t agree on much, since Jenkins argues that the medium is not the message. “Convergence does not depend on any specific delivery mechanism,” he writes in Convergence Culture. Media convergence does not mean that consumers will one day buy a single “black box” to watch all forms of programming, he says. Cellphones, laptops, televisions, and other devices can be involved. The convergence will happen in the minds of consumers who pull together elements from all those formats, and then remix the images to create their own fan-made creations.
Jenkins often mentions the various ways in which his own image has been remixed, and it seems clear that he’s delighted by the attention. The artist Christian Jankowski took a cast of Jenkins’s head for a project called “The Violence of Theory,” in which the busts of several academic theorists were placed in glass cases at a New York gallery. Young designers created a 3-D character made to look like the Henry Jenkins that appeared in a panel discussion held in Teen Second Life, the online virtual world. Someone even wrote a fan-fiction short story in which Jenkins is a main character.
Jenkins is, in effect, putting theory into practice. He is encouraging people to spread and remix his ideas. In the process, he is building what amounts to an academic brand.
Media companies, especially in the video-game industry, are attracted to Jenkins’s brand. They like his take on the promise of digital media and his stance against government restrictions on media content.
“No matter how insightful or articulate someone in the industry might be in putting together an argument against censorship, the bottom line is, we are of the industry, and so we are seen as being self-serving,” says Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association. As an academic, he says, Jenkins has more credibility.
In fact, it was a video-game lobbying group that recommended that Jenkins testify before the Senate committee back in 1999. He insists that he was not there as a mouthpiece for corporations. “I really saw myself speaking not for the games industry but for young people whose relation to popular culture was being demonized and pathologized at the time,” Jenkins says.
Still, he has been able to convert that industry good will into research sponsorships. For starters, soon after his testimony, Jenkins began working with companies to encourage educational uses of video games, which attracted new sources of money for his graduate program. In 2001, for instance, he worked with Microsoft Research on the Games-to-Teach Project, and he later helped establish a research consortium called the Education Arcade.
His program also started a research group called the Convergence Culture Consortium, which has an unusual relationship with its corporate financers. Companies pay $70,000 per year to join at the “partner” level, with a minimum commitment of two years. Partner companies get exclusive access to research papers written by professors and students before publication. Partners also can have “priority recruitment opportunities” to hire graduating students, and they are allowed two annual visits to MIT “that provide a window into the research process and an opportunity to shape research priorities,” among other benefits, according to the consortium’s Web site. The five corporate members include MTV, Turner Broadcasting System, and Yahoo.
Some people have criticized the model as giving too much corporate control to the department’s research. “One of the dangers of this is that the money can drive the program,” says an MIT professor familiar with the consortium, who asked not to be named.
Sam Ford, who worked as a media analyst for the consortium until he graduated in June, is now a full-time project manager there. “Our job is not to give the thumbs-up to everything they do and explain why these companies are great,” he says.
“What frustrates me is this idea that academia should study something but be completely removed from it. What I admire most about the consortium and this department is this idea that we should engage with the industry that we study.”
Jenkins, too, disputes those who say he is too closely tied to industry. He emphasizes that he does not personally profit from the program’s corporate sponsorships. “I’m certainly sensitive to these charges that I’m a paid corporate apologist,” he says. “The problem is, I’m not being paid. Most of the money that comes into MIT comes into graduate-student support. I’m donating my time to make sure we have enough money to support all the students the program needs to support.”
As for his many public appearances, “a lot of time I’m out of pocket for money on this stuff rather than raking money in,” he says. “So I’ve got to be the worst business person in history.”
Not long ago, I visited the Jenkinses at home — their spacious apartment is at one end of Senior House.
The living room is decorated in grad-student chic, with beat-up couches and pop-culture artifacts. Jenkins points out a replica of a crescent-shaped Klingon blade weapon, a bat’leth, that was featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And there are vast shelves of books, videos, ‘zines, CD’s, and comic books. “This space definitely gives you the sense of the full range of media that we regularly consume here,” he says.
The room is also the emotional heart of Comparative Media Studies. Nearly every Thursday, students in the program are invited over after a colloquium by a visiting speaker in the early evening. Over catered dinners, they often continue conversations well into the night.
Jenkins says he believes in integrating his personal and professional lives: “I think it allows you on some level to give more to both, instead of less to both.” And he likes to stay in motion, according to a post on his blog headlined: “How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life ... Or the Secrets Behind My Success.”
Cynthia Jenkins occasionally works part time grading papers at MIT. These days she is learning glass blowing. But she is in many ways a partner in her husband’s work. She edits most of his writing, and they have co-written articles about fan cultures. It’s hard to say which one of them is the bigger fan. When the latest Harry Potter book came out this summer, the Jenkinses hit the campus bookstore at midnight to pick up their preordered copies. They stayed up all night reading, by flashlight, on a hammock in the dorm courtyard.
They encouraged their son, Henry Jenkins IV, to be an active fan like themselves. “From the time that I was about 4 years old, my dad had me writing fan fic,” he says in a telephone interview. “I would dictate to them, and my parents would type them up on the computer and send copies to everyone they knew as a Christmas present from me.”
The younger Jenkins, who is 26, recently graduated from the University of Arizona and plans to go to graduate school to explore the same intellectual territory his father has pioneered. For now, though, he’s working in the marketing department of a professional wrestling league. “They hired me as a full-time person to worry about brand expansion” and how to use new media to encourage fan participation, he says.
Maybe the annual mud-wrestling bout isn’t so out of place after all.
“I don’t know if every housemaster would do it,” says Cynthia Jenkins. “We find that it’s a good way of not taking ourselves too seriously, which I think in the end winds up helping our relationship with the students.”
In his talk to marketers at the conference in San Francisco, Henry Jenkins was energetic but not always sunny. He described what he calls a “participation gap” when it comes to digital media, arguing that more needs to be done to get diverse audiences involved. And he gave an example of a company, FanLib, that upset its customers by building a Web site to share fan fiction and then claiming control of the homemade content.
“I wasn’t up there telling them how to market to kids,” he tells me after the speech. “I was telling them how marketers have gotten it wrong.”
“I see myself most as an activist when I’m talking to corporate groups,” he adds. “They’re paying me to bite the hand that feeds them.”
It’s time for Jenkins to catch his plane, but he doesn’t have a watch or an electronic organizer. He has a cellphone with him, but it is switched off. “When I’m talking to someone, I’d like to be talking to them” and not be interrupted, he says. Earlier he joked that he’s the guy who accidentally takes a picture of his ear with the cellphone’s camera while trying to answer it.
I tell him that for someone praised for having his finger on the pulse of digital entertainment, he’s surprisingly low-tech.
“A lot of my friends are pushing me to do more with the mobile culture,” he replies. “I’m struggling to understand it.” He admits to some concern about losing touch with the latest trends as technologies change rapidly. But he’s always been someone who followed his own passions rather than track something just because he thought it would become the next big thing.
“My style is in fashion right now — what can I say? I’m the flavor of the month. Whether it will still be in 10 years. ... “
Jenkins is confident that fan studies will be a fruitful field for much longer than that. “Fandom is the future,” he wrote in the afterword of a recent academic volume on fan studies. “Fandom represents the experimental prototype, the testing ground for the way media and culture industries are going to operate in the future.”
Video: Watch a video of Henry Jenkins mud-wrestling his wife.
Audio: Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, talks about why scholars should look beyond their academic fields in their work.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Academic Life Volume 54, Issue 3, Page B20