Contemplating Jenkins

If Shirky's cognitive surplus theology was a bit rosy, then Jenkins' ideologies of media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence feel like they border on egocentric at times. Not that I could question the ideas themselves...Jenkins, the MIT professor, is undoubtedly much more clever than I am, and the ideas are interesting enough. It just seems funny to me that for a couple of millennium or so, people have been relating, learning, inventing, and educating without multi-modal media and without participating in global collaboration. Yet Jenkins can make these concepts sound almost messianic.

And side note: who's idea was it to fill the pages with extended, loosely related examples in the sidebars? His publisher should be sanctioned....

I was reading about media literacy today, and had issue with his fundamental comparison of Heather's right to co-opt Rowling's material for her own writing pleasure (or more broadly, fans' right to co-opt any published material they consume) to literacy as we know it. He asserts:

All of the above suggests that the Potter wars are at heart a struggle over what rights we have to read and write about core cultural myths—that is, a struggle over literacy. Here, literacy is understood to incude not simply what we can do with printed matter but also what we can do with media. Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.

More to come...