SXSW: Henry Jenkins, guru of convergence culture

Henry Jenkins, the author of a bunch of books on new media culture and an MIT media heavy, gave the  keynote interview today along with Steven Johnson.  Not only is Jenkins full of interesting insights, but a lot of them tend to be optimistic about digital culture revolution (unlike, say, Lee Siegel's) -- which is one reason why all these SXSW geeks (me included) think he's the lolcat's pajamas.  Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

On whether the digital culture is 'troglodyzing' our kids:

Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.  We see our children at their worst moments in the course of their lives ... it’s very easy to imagine our children as failures -- and because they go into worlds that are unfamiliar from our own childhood, we see them in some ways as threatened.

That creates a context where as a parent you’re looking at young peoples' engagement with this technology and there’s a sense of fear ... because as a parent you fall back on -- in these moments of crisis -- the things you were taught and the world you grew up in.   And that sense of a conservative reaction to things that were alien to your experience is a very real-world one.  It only takes one instance — a Columbine or a Virginia Tech shooting -- and what comes out of that is the beginnings of a moral panic. A moral panic is what happens when you stop asking questions because you assume you know the answers.

There are new literacies that are emerging in this generation that are so powerful, but that parents don't understand. 

On why standardized tests don't make sense anymore:

The problem is that the whole structure of assessment has been wrong for the kinds of skills that we're talking about.   We're still starting from the assumption of the individual learner, the autonomous learner ... the person who knows everything.  And as you move toward an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together -- to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources ...

That's a very different model than how we process information in school.  It starts from the assumption that every young person has some kind of expertise -- [not] that every young person needs to know everything that's in the textbook.  No young person ever did -- that dooms us to failure.

If we're measuring for total mastery over an ever more complex body of knowledge, we're going to end up with disappointing scores.  If the challenge is to figure out the skills we have that allow us to communicate with each other and process information together, then something different occurs.

It's like the difference between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. I had a great respect for expertise until I was asked to write an entry for Britannica.  And then I realized that no individual should be allowed to write for an encyclopedia. The process that Wikipedia produces, where large numbers of people who know diverse things and put their information together, is going to be much more satisfactory in the end for compelling information.

On which is better, "Lost" or "The Wire":

"The Wire" may be the best television show inside the box, and "Lost" may be the best show outside the box.  By which I mean, "The Wire" has created a phenomenon of layered complexity, season by season, which allows you to really get inside the world of these characters ... but it's all on television.

Whereas with "Lost," much of the phenomenon takes place online, through the transmedia extension of "Lost" -- through the ARGs, through the fan communities that grow up around it ...

"The Wire" may be the last gasp of an old style of television that is pushed to its ultimate limits -- it's "Hill Street" on steroids.  Whereas "Lost" may represent the first glimpse of a kind of TV we're going to be seeing more and more of.