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Reflections on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century by Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins’ (2006) paper entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century, presents a radical, but engaging, pedagogical framework that integrates new media into the training and teaching strategies targeting America’s youth. The paper promotes a series of exercises, exemplars, and modes of expressions that introduce young students to a range of skills and knowledge sets and motivates them to engage in media content creation and appropriation as a form of learning, while raising ethical questions that highlight the need for continual evaluation of the new information age’s impact on culture, tradition, and societal values (p.59).

Jenkins (2006) frames his approach by foregrounding pervasiveness of a participatory cultural approach to knowledge processing that marks the learning preferences of conventional American youth. He defines participatory culture as “a a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (p.3). He adds that members of a participatory culture value social relationships and are sensitive to how their colleagues mediate their contributions.

Jenkins (2006) identifies four forms of participatory culture that mark the ways in which youth interact with new media, namely: affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving, and circulations. The term Affiliations refers to the memberships of online communities that use different media applications to establish some form of shared identity and interaction. The concept of Expressions embraces the creative energies and interests stimulated by these new media, and collaborative problem-solving explains the dynamics of youths’ engagement with new media through groups and teams to complete tasks or advance learning, while circulations refer to how these interactions influence the dispersion of such media (p.3).

Jenkins’ paper also recommend that young people should be functional in eleven key groups of skills and competencies, if they are to fully benefit from this rapidly evolving participatory culture.  These eleven skills sets are as follows: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, and networking (p.56). Jenkins’ disturbs traditionally concepts of play by considering as a form of experimentation in which players interact with their surroundings to solve problems. He notes, “While, to date, much of the discussion of games and education has considered games as a tool to motivate youth to learn other kinds of content, there is a growing recognition that play itself, as a means of exploring and processing knowledge and of problem-solving, may be a valuable skill children should master in preparation for subsequent roles and responsibilities in the adult world” (p.23).

The paper also sees an important role of simulation in contemporary education, because of its potential for interpreting, constructing, and reconstituting, malleable real world scenarios. Jenkins writes, “New media provides powerful new ways of representing and manipulating information. New forms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies of information, to experiment with more complex configurations of data, to form hypotheses quickly and test them against different variables in real time” (p.26).

Simulation aligns closely with performance, the practice, in game play, of adopting optional identities as a mechanism for experimental improvisation and discovery, in which young people develop basic literacy capabilities in manipulating culture. “We have thus far focused on game play as a mode of problem-solving that involves modeling the world and acting on those models. Yet, game play also is one of a range of contemporary forms of youth popular culture that encourages young people to assume fictive identities and through this process develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles,” Jenkins argues (p.28).

In identifying appropriation as a requisite skill, Jenkins defines the concept as a process of deconstructing and reconstructing the constituent parts of media culture.  He notes, “Art does not emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, it emerges through the artist’s engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, are inspired by, appropriate and transform other artists’ work. They do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists often undergo an apprenticeship, during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other, more established artists. Even well established artists work with images and themes that have some currency within the culture” (p.32).

Jenkins’ upends traditional theories of multi-tasking, transforming it into a positive process. He considers it as one’s ability to simultaneously traverse different aspects of one’s environment, sporadically extracting relevant details from them. He admonishes educators to refrain from attending to the importance attention in binary opposition to the dynamics of multitasking, noting that they can coexist effectively.  He writes, “Whereas attention seeks to prevent information overload by controlling what information enters short-term memory, successful multi-taskers seek to reduce demands on short-term memory by mapping where different information is externally stored within their immediate environment” (p.35)

From Jenkins’ perspective another key skill that marks the gap in the ways in which young people attend to information as opposed to that of their previous generation is the concept of distributed cognition, a term that explains the degree to which new media users engage with media tools to develop their mental competencies. This view of technology use is heavily embedded in the belief that intelligence is acquired rather than congenitally constituted.  “Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand and augment human’s cognitive capacities. These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a database, or they can be devices that externalize processes (Shaffer & Kaput, 1999), such as the widely used spell checker. The more we rely on the capacities of technologies as a part of our work, the more it may seem that cognition is distributed,” Jenkins asserts (p.37).

Jenkins also believes that critical thinking is also important in effectively attending to new media, noting, especially in game play, that judgment is the cornerstone by which users gauge information that is reliable or credible. He notes, “Although it is exciting to see players harness collective intelligence to successfully solve problems of unprecedented complexity, this process also involves a large number of errors. Misinformation emerges, is worked over, refined or dismissed before a new consensus emerges. We are taught to think of knowledge as a product, but within a collective intelligence, knowledge is also always in process” (p.43).

Jenkins’ nomenclature, transmedia navigation, refers to new media users’ comfort and efficiency at attending with information from a diverse range of platforms and sources. He argues that this is now the most common means by which information is processed and shared. He writes, “Storytellers exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling; advertisers talk about branding as depending on multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their intellectual properties across many different channels. As they do so, we encounter the same information, the same stories, the same characters and worlds across multiple modes of representation. Transmedia stories at the most basic level are stories told across multiple media” (p.46).

This concept also directly relates to the process of networking, which explains how these new media users search, synthesize and share information, particularly referring to search engines and databases like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Jenkins writes, “A resourceful student is no longer one who personally possesses a wide palette of resources and information from which to choose, but rather, one who is able to successfully navigate an already abundant and continually changing world of information. Increasingly, students achieve this by tapping into a myriad of socially based search systems, including the following popular sites.

The final skill that Jenkins refers to is that of negotiation, which points to the heart of the multicultural temperament and sensibilities of these new media users, registering the unstable potentially conflicting dynamics of cross cultural interaction. He notes, “The fluid communication within the new media environment brings together groups who otherwise might have lived segregated lives. Culture flows easily from one community to another. People online encounter conflicting values and assumptions, come to grips with competing claims about the meanings of shared artifacts and experiences. Everything about this process ensures that we will be provoked by cultural difference. Little about this process ensures that we will develop an understanding of the contexts within which these different cultural communities operate” (p.52).

Jenkins emphasizes these processes because he believes that they create spaces that nurture affinity, a phenomenon that many scholars argue promote healthy learning environments. Referencing Gee (2004), Jenkins notes, “Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others” (p,9).

Despite is advancement of this pedagogical approach, Jenkins warns that it should not be taken for granted, a position he terms, the laissez-faire approach, but interrogated. He points to three major problems of taking such a stance. “The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people’s access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap).The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem).The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children, on their own, can develop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online (the ethics challenge). Any attempt to provide meaningful media education in the age of participatory culture must begin by addressing these three core concerns” (p.12).

Generally, I found Jenkins’ paper very enlightening and it definitely provided me with a clearer framework to understand why many young people may not succeed academically, but may develop sophisticated analytical and processing skills, from engaging with new media, particularly computerized games. Alternatively, the article left me depressed at how it points to the increasing disadvantage of young people in the developing world who may not have adequate access to new media. It indicates the need for the redeployment of the NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) debates of that marked the 1960s and 1970s. If not, this new media will be just another means of separating the haves from the have-nots.