Interview with Professor Henry Jenkins

The interview was made by Ali İhsan Akbaş, student at the Master Programme in Social Sciences, specialisation Digital Media and Society.

As a master student of media studies, having an interview with such a brilliant scholar was a great opportunity. For 35 minutes, we talked with Professor Jenkins about media creation and consumption, digital movements, his latest book ‘By Any Media Necessary’, and the fun to both consume and study media.

Professor Jenkins thinks that people have always had a desire to shape culture. According to him, the participatory culture was always there, but the new media has opened new ways for it to evolve and spread. While discussing the potential of new media on political issues, he highlighted that the online media is turning to be a space in which more and more people gather and register their voice. His latest book, ‘By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism’, employs numerous examples regarding the reflection of popular culture on the new ways of protests performed by youth connected via the online media. Young people from Hong Kong, India, or the United States are producing more and more creative ways to voice their dissatisfaction about certain really important issues, such as immigration.

Professor Jenkins states that when we talk about change, we should also consider the concept of civic imagination. Popular culture is becoming increasingly effective in shaping the way that people think and explain their ideas. This shows itself on various protests aiming at social and political change. In this sense, civic imagination becomes closely related to popular culture as it becomes a shared framework with which people, especially young people, perceive the world. Social media is becoming a general platform for young people all over the world to create stances which are potentially hard to show with the patterns of already existing political structures. In fact, Professor Jenkins gives the example of President Trump and his active usage of social media, especially Twitter and YouTube, to point that even the existing structures of politics are, in a way, significantly engaging with the online world.

While discussing people in the digital world, we should be careful in the sense that an important portion of the world population has not direct access to the internet. There are important gaps to close among the populations of the world, and certain actors such as libraries, schools, and civil society seem to be important in this regard. However, it is also striking to see that people experiencing lack of opportunities in accessing the online world are able to find ways to get into the digital environments. Professor Jenkins reminds his visit to the slums of Mumbai, and implies that people, especially the youth, always find ways to connect.

Finally, Professor Jenkins has two major pieces of advice for media students who pursue successful academic lives. He suggests, firstly, that media students should consume as much media as they can. Videogames, movies, series, and TV programmes are all great ways for students to interact with media. Secondly, he proposes that media students should be able to make media content. There are numerous ways to do it, such as through podcasts, or blogs, and else. This would, not surprisingly, be an eye-opener for anyone who tries to understand the way that media interacts with others. At this point, Professor Jenkins reminds us an interesting but fun fact that regards all of us as media students. What others do for entertainment becomes work for us without losing anything from its degree of entertainment!

Listen to the interview with Professor Henry Jenkins at Soundcloud