Henry Jenkins and Participatory Culture

From Poacher to Participant

In the last lesson we met Henry Jenkins as the author of Textual Poachers (1992), a celebration of fan creativity in the pre-internet era. Between 1992 and the mid-2000s, the web changed everything. Mailing lists became forums. Fanzines became websites. Slash pairings became AO3. What Jenkins had described as a niche activity of dedicated fans became, on his analysis, the default mode of media engagement for a generation. In Convergence Culture (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2006) and Spreadable Media (2013, with Sam Ford and Joshua Green), Jenkins set out the framework AQA now asks you to know: participatory culture, convergence, transmedia storytelling and spreadable media.

Jenkins is an AQA named theorist. You should be able to attribute each of these concepts to him and apply them to CSPs.

What Is Participatory Culture?

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (2006), Jenkins defined a participatory culture as one with:

1. Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.
2. Strong support for creating and sharing creations with others.
3. Informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass knowledge to novices.
4. Members who believe their contributions matter.
5. Members who feel some degree of social connection with one another.

Notice that participatory culture is not simply a description of the internet. It is a set of social conditions that can exist online or offline. Punk DIY culture, amateur radio, home-movie hobbyists and fanzines were all participatory cultures before the web. But digital tools massively lower the barriers described in point 1, which is why participatory culture has exploded.

Pre-digital participation	Digital participation
Fanzine, mailed by post	Blog, seen globally
Convention (annual)	Discord (daily)
VHS bootleg	YouTube upload
Letter to producer	Tweet to creator

Convergence Culture

Jenkins's Convergence Culture opens with the claim that "convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes". Crucially, convergence is not a single process — it is a bundle of changes that interact.

• Technological convergence: multiple media types now flow through the same device (the smartphone is camera, TV, newspaper, radio, cinema, console).
• Industrial convergence: media companies merge, acquire and cross-subsidise (Disney owning Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar).
• Cultural convergence: audiences combine and mash up content across platforms.
• Social convergence: audiences gather, collaborate, critique and create in networks that cut across traditional divides.

flowchart TD
    A[Convergence Culture] --> B[Technological:<br/>one device]
    A --> C[Industrial:<br/>conglomerates]
    A --> D[Cultural:<br/>audience mashup]
    A --> E[Social:<br/>networked fans]

Jenkins insists that convergence is not a story of old media dying. Old and new media interact. TV did not kill radio; radio did not kill newspapers; the web will not kill cinema. Instead, each medium adapts to the others, taking on new functions and shedding old ones.

Transmedia Storytelling

One of Jenkins's most influential concepts is transmedia storytelling. A transmedia story "unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole". The novel is not the same as the film adaptation; the game is not the same as the comic; each extends the storyworld in ways the other media cannot.

Jenkins's canonical example is The Matrix franchise. The three films tell part of the story. The Animatrix anime short films add back-story. The game Enter the Matrix tells events that run parallel to the second film. The comics fill in characters' histories. Reading, watching, playing and discussing all contribute to a larger whole.

Transmedia has since become the dominant mode of blockbuster storytelling. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the clearest current example: films, Disney+ series, comics, tie-in books, games and theme-park rides combine into a storyworld no single text can contain.

Property	Transmedia	Old-style adaptation
Relationship	Each text extends the world	Later text retells same story
Audience role	Active gathering and inference	Passive re-consumption
Industrial logic	Multiple revenue streams	Single IP licensed
Risk	Continuity complexity	Redundancy

Transmedia storytelling demands active audiences, because no single text delivers the whole. The committed fan who collects every element is the ideal consumer of a transmedia franchise.

flowchart LR
    A[Film] --> E[Story World]
    B[TV Series] --> E
    C[Comic] --> E
    D[Game] --> E
    E --> F[Audience Sense-Making]
    F --> G[Wiki, Theory Videos,<br/>Fan Fiction]

Spreadable Media