Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 39

ARG 2.0 (Part One)

The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) remains a topic of great interest to me and to my students at MIT and USC. Through the years, we've discovered that the ARG falls at the intersection between our recurring interests in participatory culture, collective intelligence, new media literacies, transmedia entertainment, and civic engagement. In my Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 graduate seminar last spring, Jeff Watson wrote a provocative essay which reviewed and challenged the current...

Civic Media: A Syllabus

Over the past few terms, I've been sharing here the syllabi of the new courses I am developing at the University of Southern California, courses which build upon my own research interests and are intended to open up space for students to pursue their own projects. In the fall, I am going to be teaching two classes, both graduate seminars -- Civic Media for the Journalism School and Medium Specificity for the Cinema School. I am sharing my Civic Media syllabus here and will share the Medium...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part Three)

Science fiction media offers us a chance to envision the future of news. What images have surfaced there most frequently?

Journalists of the future apparently have the same problems as journalists in the past. In a TV Sci-Fi series called Dark Angel, created by Jim Cameron in 2000, a journalist, crippled by the enemy, broadcasts news and revolutionary information by hacking into government television. He is a traditional hero in the future. So are Max Headroom and the TV staff around him...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part Three)

Science fiction media offers us a chance to envision the future of news. What images have surfaced there most frequently?

Journalists of the future apparently have the same problems as journalists in the past. In a TV Sci-Fi series called Dark Angel, created by Jim Cameron in 2000, a journalist, crippled by the enemy, broadcasts news and revolutionary information by hacking into government television. He is a traditional hero in the future. So are Max Headroom and the TV staff around...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part Two)

What do you see as some of the recurring themes in the popular representation of journalism? How much do these myths change over time and how much do they remain constant?

The surprising thing is that the image of the journalist hasn't changed much throughout the centuries. In Antigone, Sophocles summed up the popular opinion more than 400 years before Christ was born: "None love the messenger who brings bad news." About the same time, another popular play told the story of a herald bringing ...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part Two)

What do you see as some of the recurring themes in the popular representation of journalism? How much do these myths change over time and how much do they remain constant?

The surprising thing is that the image of the journalist hasn't changed much throughout the centuries. In Antigone, Sophocles summed up the popular opinion more than 400 years before Christ was born: "None love the messenger who brings bad news." About the same time, another popular play told the story of a herald...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part One)

If USC's Nonny de La Pena is exploring new tools and platforms that will shape the future of journalism, another of my new Annenberg colleagues, Joe Saltzman, is using new media tools to make it easier for us to research journalism's history. Specifically, Saltzman has launched a data base which indexes a vast array of films, television series, comic books, and other media texts which include popular representations of journalists. Saltzman has long been at the center of a growing academic...

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part One)

If USC's Nonny de La Pena is exploring new tools and platforms that will shape the future of journalism, another of my new Annenberg colleagues, Joe Saltzman, is using new media tools to make it easier for us to research journalism's history. Specifically, Saltzman has launched a data base which indexes a vast array of films, television series, comic books, and other media texts which include popular representations of journalists. Saltzman has long been at the center of a growing academic...

Designing the Futures of Journalism: An Interview with USC's Nonny de la Pena (Part Two)

You are especially interested in issues of bodily presence and affective immediacy that arise in response to immersive environments, qualities which make our experiences in such worlds expecially intense and memorable. Yet there's a long tradition of science fiction writing which worries about the use of such devices for propaganda and social control, suggesting that we may find it hard to separate virtual and real experiences. What do you see as the benefits or dangers of this level of...

Designing the Future of Journalism: An Interview with USC's Nonny de la Pena (Part One)

My Journalism colleagues at USC's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism are on the cutting edge of national and international conversations about the Future of Journalism. Our school is a site of experimentation and deliberation, sketching and testing new models, which see the emerging media environment not simply as a challenge to traditional forms of news but also as an opportunity to expand resources available to reporters. The School has the right mix of vision and pragmatism ...