Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins (born June 4 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia) American Scholar, currently Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies.

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 the influence of digital popular culture on behavior, including political behavior in a participatory media age.

Jenkins most famous argument is 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."

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.

See also

• Critical theory
• Media theory
• Digitality

External links

• Homepage