Henry Jenkins and the Effects of Transmedia Works

We define ourselves by our stories. We have defined ourselves by our stories since the dawn of sapience in our species. Our stories are how we explain the world, and they are how we convince others to change the world, and how we explain ourselves to the world as well as how we explain the world to ourselves. Stories have always been a kind of universal thing, something that everyone does and can comprehend. While nothing else in our collective of societies and cultures could be called universal, the commonality of telling stories is all pervasive. Henry Jenkins, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, has studied how stories transmute and are used when subjected to multiple forms of media in a continuous whole. The official term for this is transmedia, and one of the most interesting aspects of it is how mutating and transforming as more and more it comes into the hands of normal people rather than specific artisans. One of the Henry Jenkin’s biggest contributions is to the study of transmedia in this manner. He is a public intellectual of the highest degree that has changed how we see the consumption of media and story telling in our new age of interactive and visual media.

Henry Jenkins is a public intellectual who focuses on the study of communications and transmedia objects and trends to explain how and why humans communicate with one another, both through study of stories and of how those stories are told. Henry Jenkins was born on June 4th, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a journalism and political science undergraduate at Georgia State University. He went on to earn his masters in communication studies at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in communication arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later married and went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally gaining a job at the University of Southern California, where he continues to teach at the Annenberg School of Communications. His achievements today include a number of books on the subject of transmedia including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It can be said that few, if any, public intellectuals have done as much as Henry Jenkins has for our understanding of how people communicate with one another through modern media.

Firstly, we must define what a public intellectual is. An intellectual is someone who is an educated, knowledgeable, expert on whatever it is he is talking about. Usually this means an academic though it does not have to. University professors are usually intellectuals on their own subject for example. A public intellectual is one who attempts to take knowledge that is codified in the slang and terminology of his own profession, and decode it for the general masses who do not have the same level of experience or background that the intellectual has, and thus require someone to explain the entire thing in far simpler terms than might normally be done. A public intellectual makes it their goal to explain to as wide an audience as possible their opinions and ideas, as well as educate them on the concepts that underpin those opinions and ideas. A normal intellectual would only write for people who have the basic level of knowledge required to personally understand and decode a profession’s slang and terminology, the public intellectual puts no such restrictions on his own writing.
    Henry Jenkins is most certainly a public intellectual. He has a masters in Communication Studies, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts, as such, it is almost indisputable that he knows his subject: communicating ideas and such through modern media, since that is the focus of both degrees. One need only reference his autobiographical page on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which he explains that in one of his books, Textual Poachers, he defines himself as an Aca/Fan(also the name sake of his blog) someone who is both an academic and a fan of various forms of media. He explains on his blog that through that book he was trying to bridge the gap between academics and fans of various types of media so they might better understand one another. This places him quite firmly in the realm of the public, since he was not directly addressing other academics alone, but attempting to explain things in terminology that both academics and laymen could understand so that his point might be delivered. From his credentials and the purposes of his work (and the majority of the works on his website) we can see that he is most definitely a public intellectual.

Now, most interestingly we can see how the world is transforming so that transmedia is becoming less and less an issue of corporations funneling money into new projects for an existing franchise of a particular setting or story to tap new demographics, and is more and more dependent upon consumer interaction and zeal. As Jenkins explains in his article, Transmedia Storytelling 101 (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html), transmedia is a method of media meant to be used in a collective. That is to say, it is designed with the very idea that networking will play an important role in the telling of the story and the aggregation of information about the story and the setting it is in. It lives and breaths on this idea and without a social network of some sort, whether it be Facebook, cell-phones, or even just random forums on the Internet, without a social network, transmedia cannot function in its entirety. This is an enormous prospect for our world as we know it, it is huge, important, critical even to our understanding of human communication. 

This reveals something both terrible and wondrous about the transformation of the art of story telling. With a transmedia work, the individual characters and plots become almost insignificant when compared to the world that is being built. Where in a single book the setting exists merely as scenery and is important for that reason alone, it is not the reason you are reading the book. You are reading the book because the plot grips you and the characters intrigue you on some level. While these reasons might be the reason you are initially introduced to a transmedia work’s world, it is usually not why you continue to explore and look into the rest of the works within the overarching transmedia work. Jenkins uses The Matrix franchise as an excellent example, since while it started as a movie, it now includes several comics, a line of toys and action figures, several video games, an anime, and several books written in the same universe, as he points out in "We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html). You do not buy or consume any of the other products because you found them fun, or enjoyable, or intriguing in and of themselves, though they might be all of those things, but that is secondary to the fact that they were related to the initial object of the transmedia work that got you hooked into the world of the transmedia work’s story. You don’t usually buy the action figures made for The Matrix because you saw them and thought they were cool in and of themselves. There are many other action figures with cooler features, more options to play with, and that may even be cheaper that you could just as easily buy if it were an enjoyment of playing with action figures in and of themselves. You buy The Matrix action figures because they are action figures of the characters in The Matrix, because it is related to the central work you enjoy, and suddenly, you are able to continue the stories with your own imagination by acting things out with the toys! And it is this last fact that has transformed our society in ways we could never have believed.

Something relatively new to the world, something that found its roots in one of the first transmedia works ever made: Star Trek, is fan-fiction. Never before in history did someone sit down, and decide to write a story about some other kids who lived in Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s home town and had interactions with both of Mark Twain’s iconic characters. No, that started when people began to be more interested in a setting than they were in plot of the work they were consuming. Now, it is hardly possible to find a work of any sort of media that has not had some sort of fan fiction written about it. A fan might draw pictures or make a comic, or, as is most common across the Internet, write a story. There are entire websites devoted to allowing people to expand and explain and talk about and write stories within the universe of a single particular setting. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are the works most famous for generating enormous amounts of layman, or fan, created fiction to add to the setting of the central work, but almost everything now has somebody making some form of extra media to add to the whole of a single works franchise in some way, shape, or form.

Suddenly, the art of telling a story has gone critical, it has fractured and fragmented and transformed into something strange and wondrous, and only recently have people even admitted this was a real phenomenon. Before Henry Jenkins’ research, the commonly held belief among academics was that audiences passively consumed media, rather than taking it a part and rebuilding it within the rules in place within the setting of the media. Suddenly, academics have to admit to the fact that there is nothing special in taking an interest in a particular work of media and deconstructing and reconstructing and analyzing it up and down for meaning, because it is something that is constantly done by audiences and fans to remake those works with their own imaginations. Academics cannot claim, as they so often do, a kind of elite status in this analysis of works of art and fiction and literature. (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?”, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2007/08/public_intellec.html) Normal people are taking charge of processes that we once thought had to be controlled and directed by someone who was an artisan, and while the artisans certainly put out cleaner, critically better works, we cannot say that they are absolutely necessary to the process any more once the ball has gotten rolling.

Without Henry Jenkins, we may never have learned this, or at the very least, it would have taken far longer. Jenkins’ work has transformed how we approach media, it has changed how we advertise, and how we actually make and distribute media. Without his research, would we have noticed that consumers want to participate more in their chosen works? Would we have developed the complex Alternate Reality Games that preceded works like the video game Halo 3, Nine Inch Nail’s album Year Zero, and the film District 9? By codifying and studying how audiences interact with settings that transcend a single form of media, he has set off an explosion of transmedia that, in turn, has unlocked enormous creative potential locked within the consumer populace who was once considered meek and passive.