User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Reading/Theory/Jenkins Fans, Bloggers and Gamers

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

notes on Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers and Gamers 2006


  • First appearance of Blog This! in Technology Review, feb. 2001
-> just before blogging became recognized as a significant journalistic practice ("grassroots intermediaries")
-> the article was misunderstood by the blogging community because of unfortunate editorial decisions in the text (bloggers surviving the dot-com bubble ~ cockroaches surviving a nuclear holocaust)
Also, the subtitle (chosen by the same editor) of the interview is characteristic in it's denigrating way: Online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot coms.
  • Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution
  • Blogs are more:
- dynamic than older-style homepages
- permanent than discussion posts
- private/permanent than traditional journalism
- public than diaries
  • Blog as a tool for carrying out spiritual, political and social messages.
  • huge dot-com failure vs blogging success -> using the temporary commercialization stillness to increase cultural diversity and participation
  • Corporatisation of media: threat to democracy concerning freedom of speech, loss of shared values and culture.
-> consumer-society -> blurred 'uniformity' of messages/information
-> 'clever' blogging as a platform to offer more diversity in perspectives and guidance in informational differentiation.
  • Blogging as an evolution towards online Digital Renaissance: grassroots intermediaries that make extensive elaboration on different subjects possible by having loose network structures that offer space for diverse interpretation, criticism, ... -> participatory measuring table for significance of messages
<-> (linear) corporate media concentration: totalitarian one-to-many communication of messages -> authorized significance by broadcasting
  • In practice, the evolution of most media has been shaped through the interactions between the distributed power of grassroots participatory media and the concentrated power of corporate/governmental media.
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