(New) media - You're powerful ... very powerful

Sunday Times, Jan 7, 2007
You're powerful ... very powerful

By Cheong Suk-Wai, FACES IN THE MEDIA

USE OR ABUSE: Prof Jenkins says people are trying to blindly figure out how to use the new power given to them by the Internet. -- CAROLINE CHIA

THE Sarong Party Girl scandal here in June 2005, in which a 19-year-old Singaporean blogger posted nude pictures of herself on her website, has caught the eye of American media expert Henry Jenkins.
Professor Jenkins, 48, is the world's leading thinker on media convergence and co-directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) comparative media studies programme.

In town for a week or so, the affable professor says: 'I've been reading a little about Sarong Party Girl, and it's a classic example of how things highly suspect are produced because young people want to share their thoughts with the world in ways adults aren't prepared to see.'
He adds: 'The world has suddenly developed a printing press for every person on the planet, but has not prepared its culture to be responsible or imagine the consequences of suddenly becoming media makers.'

Thus has freewheeling digital media produced a rash of controversies, the latest being the online circulation of a video of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's dying minutes captured on a cellphone, and American soldiers' ongoing mobile phone transmissions of live battle footage from Iraq.

Dubious or otherwise, such avid user-generated content on the Internet has led to Time magazine making you, the consumer in the street, Person Of The Year.

But, as the professor points out: 'The interesting thing about the word 'you' is: Does Time mean 'you' as a person or 'you' as a community?'

'So,' he continues in a chirpy, rapid-fire throttle, 'young people are torn between two versions of what's going on, between 'I can say whatever I want, if it hurts people so what?' and 'this community is larger than myself and I am accountable for my actions'.'

The author of 12 books, including, most recently, Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide, will also launch an online gaming innovation project on Friday with some Singapore partners that, for now, is still under wraps.

Last Friday, he gave the inaugural talk in the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation lecture series titled Media In Transition: Social And Economic Impact.

He is now flexing his muscle on a media literacy project, part of a US$50-million (S$77-million) drive over five years by influential private American group, the MacArthur Foundation, to pool the best minds in the United States to study the Net's effect on society.

Among other things, the film and comics buff is designing exercises, casebooks and digital films to help children learn how to use and assess digital media well.

As for how exactly the cyberage is changing the way kids learn, he says: 'I call it collective intelligence, a new way of thinking where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something and what any person knows is available on a moment's notice as the group needs it.'

That, among other things, has teams coming together just long enough to solve a problem.


Playground perils

IN THIS brave new world, he is also helping society tussle with the three main new media worries confronting it.

Top on his list is what he calls 'the participation gap', or the difficulty in giving children everywhere an equal headstart to the skills, experience and lessons afforded by cyberspace.

Once the kids can log on, there's the transparency gap to work through, that is, guiding them to glean and assess the many - often hidden - motives of information purveyors online.

Last but not least, there is the ethics gap, where kids may master Net how-tos, but not care about the consequences of what they unleash online.

That said, he admits readily that society cannot decide between two myths about youths today - that is, if they are the 'Columbine Generation' or the 'Digital Generation'.

Columbine refers to America's Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, when two students went around machine-gunning many of their schoolmates to death.

'The truth is, it's a messed-up version of both myths,' Prof Jenkins says. 'It's essentially feral children playing the Net as well as kids who have hopes of creating the Next Big Thing.'

Being a father himself, he admits to having been 'terrified' of the prospect of getting his only child, also named Henry, up to speed with new technology while keeping him on the straight and narrow.

So he and his wife Cynthia, who is 49 and a glass-blower, worked out a deal with their then four-year-old son. They would read him a bedtime story the first night, and the next night, the toddler had to read them a bedtime story that he had written and drawn himself on the family computer.

'That way,' he says, 'we could learn about his thoughts and fantasies, and at the same time, teach him proper values through our storytelling and discussions about his stories.'

His son is now 25 and a writer.

He rues that many parents are still so frightened of the Net that they 'either shut it down or shut it out'. Neither, he says, is the right response. 'Kids do not need parents peering over their shoulders, they need them to watch their back.'

Exciting times

SO WHAT about digital media excites him the most these days? 'Oh, my, which day of the week is this?' the self-avowed optimist joshes.

'Well, I'm currently excited about the power of YouTube, which is stuff made for sharing, and Second Life, which is a virtual world built totally by its players.'

The explosion in both sites' popularity last year, he says, is a result of society's pent-up craving to create and share its creations, compared to the mass culture of 20th century 'which suppressed the voice of the individual'.

He says such avid interactions form the 'folk culture of this century', like the barn square dances and neighbourly quilting meetings of yore.

Indeed, as he puts it: 'The Web is a giant quilt, really, where people are taking scraps of media and stitching them together to make something new.'

Such homespun analogies are perhaps a throwback to his Southern Baptist roots in his hometown of Atlanta in Georgia.

His late father, Henry Guy, owned a construction company and his late mother, Lucile, taught vacation Bible school. He has a younger brother, Russell, who works in a furnace company in Georgia.

Prof Jenkins' first degree was in journalism - 'my first love' - and political science from Georgia State University.

He was a reporter at a small newspaper in Smyrna, Georgia, for two months, but when the paper downsized, he went back to college, where he did his master's in communication studies at the University of Iowa and then got his PhD in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

MIT had set its sights on hiring him when he was in Iowa, and snapped him up the moment he got his degree. This year will be his 16th at MIT.

He writes for Technology Review Online and Computer Games Magazine and also keeps a blog (www.henryjenkins. org) which is six months old and has had about 4,000 hits so far.

'I write before I go to bed so my readers get the morning edition,' he quips.

How democratic is the Internet, though, you wonder. Isn't it powered by tribes with various, and often hard-to-discern, self-interests?

Pat comes his answer. 'The Web doesn't exist in a vacuum but in relation to mass media. Left on its own, the Web might evolve to anarchy. The mass media in its natural state might become an autocracy.'

The balance, then, comes in bridging the two and that, he says, can be achieved by getting new media to respond to old - and vice versa.

In fact, if you buy his reasoning, new media continues to survive thanks only to old media. 'If you look at YouTube or what people talk about in their blogs,' he points out, 'it's often about what's published in newspapers. So it's not blogs against newspapers, but the interplay between them.'

He adds: 'I believe firmly that the newspaper will survive. Will it do so as a printed publication that you read on the subway? I don't know.

'But will professional news-editing and gathering survive? Almost certainly, because the more voices and issues you have on the Net, the more we will want to turn to some trusted people whom we know will bring the voices together, exercise editorial judgment and weigh facts to provide the most reliable information.'

But, he stresses, bloggers are valuable because they push and pull mainstream media, and also police the authorities, to get them to do their jobs better.

Case in point: Talk show comedian Stephen Colbert lashing out at President George W. Bush's foreign policy at a recent Washington, DC state dinner - with the President seated 1m away from him. But the man in the street got wind of it only after Colbert's tirade was uploaded on YouTube to such buzz, mainstream media had to report it.

Is mankind prepared for more to come?

'Oh, we're never prepared,' he says, with a chuckle. 'But were people prepared for the phone, the car and the airplane? Probably not. But they survived and so will we.'

suk@sph.com.sg