Henry Jenkins > Quotes

“The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a game is it's too easy.”
― Henry Jenkins

“...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
― Henry Jenkins

“Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.”
― Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by folk.”
― Henry Jenkins

“Hello. My name is Henry. I am a fan. Somewhere in the late 1980s’, I got tired of people telling me to get a life. I wrote a book instead”
― Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age

“Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentration, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception". Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.”
― Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) examines the very thin line separating a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something a community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn’t want to consider.”
― Henry Jenkins, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

“When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement.”
― Henry Jenkins, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology

“Computers,”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.
Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:
The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12
This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more:
young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“By discussing “spreadable media,” we aim to facilitate a more nuanced account of how and why things spread and to encourage our readers to adopt and help build a more holistic and sustainable model for understanding how digital culture operates.”
― Henry Jenkins, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

“their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Kurt Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game Civilization III
into”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“pedagogical”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“The”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“Richard Dyer (1985) tells us that entertainment embodies “what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised.”
― Henry Jenkins, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change

“ensure”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“traditional”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment. "By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, present findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“succeed”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“MacArthur Foundation as part of its $50 million initiative in digital media and learning. They”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“Learning, published by the MIT Press, present findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The Reports result from research projects”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio and found herself in the center”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“development”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“million initiative in digital media and learning. They are published openly online (as well as in print) in”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“Digital Youth Project by Mizuko”
― Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

“You can think about Robin Hood as a classic poacher, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. And, essentially, what I see taking place in fandom is that process, where we steal the cultural resources that belong to the networks and we remake them, to speak to what we as fans want them to be, be they concerns as women, or racial concerns, sexual politics questions or whatever. That‘s what I think happens most of the time, when people are engaged in fan writing, in one way or another.”
― Henry Jenkins

“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies, but on emerging cultural practices.”
― Henry Jenkins

“What do Fans produce? Fans produce meanings and interpretations; fans produce art-works; fans produce communities; fans produce alternative Identities. In each case, fans are drawing on materials from the dominant media and employing them in ways that serve their own interests and facilitate their own pleasures.”
― Henry Jenkins