Friends Talking Podcast

I had the good fortune of chatting with Henry Jenkins about convergence culture earlier this spring. Dr. Jenkins is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and Faculty Investigator at the Convergence Culture Consortium.

He’s the author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, a great introduction to how things are changing in our media world. Some have called him the new Marshall McLuhan. While his peeps are media studies scholars, he writes in a way that makes the changes happening in media understandable to lay people, even Joe Six Pack in marketing. He’s an expansive thinker who makes it clear why understanding fans are important to understanding our society and how fandom is changing how media is produced and “consumed”.
In this interview, we talk about:

• the impact of social media on society
• how we’re moving towards a more complex media culture.
• TV, corporate media living side by side with blogs, amateur film makers, Second Life entrepreneurs, etc.
• how your view of engagement is a clue to whether you’re stuck in the old media framework.

Wondering what happens when “old” media like broadcast TV meets “new” media like blogging? Listen as Henry talks about the profound effects media has on our culture.

This interview is part of a series I did during my last days at GSD&M. We had the idea of interviewing GSD&M’s Best in Class Partners and making those interviews into a podcast. I did the interviewing and editing; it’s my voice you hear on the tape. GSD&M owns the copyright on this material, not I, so contact them with questions. You can find out more about GSD&M’s Best In Class Partner Program at Free Radical.

(28:26 39.1mb mp3 file.)

Links:

• Henry Jenkins’ blog.
• GS&M’s Free Radical Website.

A Selection of Henry Jenkins’ Other Books