Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part One)

The white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago. This document, prepared by Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers at MIT, offered an important reframing of media literacy which reflected the shifting realities of the digital era -- new affordances, new practices, and new opportunities were leading to new forms of informal learning that were playing an important role in the lives of many American youth. Educators were often slow to recognize the value of these new spaces as a site for developing new skills or the ways literacy changed in a world where young people were creating and sharing media with each other in record numbers. 

Across this series, we are going to provide an oral history of how that report came to be written and what its impact was at the time of publication. In this opening segment, we speak to Connie Yowell, who headed the Digital Media and Learning Initiative for the MacArthur Foundation; Mimi Ito, who was a second pillar of the initial research for the Digital Media and Learning Initiative; and Henry Jenkins, who was the primary author of the Participatory Culture White Paper. Long time media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls conducted the interviews.

Connie Yowell:  In 2004, we were coming out of a $30 million initiative and district reform that was focused on teacher professional development and evidence-based approaches to teacher professional development. It was state of the art. It was a really thoughtful, forward looking set of commitments we had made revolving around the notion that the teacher was going to be the core unit of change in transforming schools and that we needed to focus on professional development. We were in three districts doing district wide reform, and within three years, we cycled through 11 superintendents and made almost no progress. 

The MacArthur Board was paying attention. They said, there’s got to be something different we can do. We had John Seely Brown on our board, the former head of Xerox. John said we should be looking over the horizon and thinking about the impact of digital media, and these new tools that are coming out, and what they mean for learning. I was like, well, I don’t do that. I’m a hardcore educator. I don’t believe in technology making a difference.  I’m out of here. 

What we decided in the meantime was to split the difference, because MacArthur didn’t want me to leave, which I appreciated, and to do three exploratory pieces of work. Henry’s piece was one of the three. Another one was Mimi Ito’s research. We asked her, with her group of 25 researchers, to do an ethnographic study of how young people were using digital media outside of school. We had Nicole Pinker in Chicago, who’s a computer scientist, and we just said, “you’re in our backyard”. It allowed us, the staff, to be able to come and spend some time with teachers and kids to see how they were doing intervention with technology.

Great. But neither of those was the conceptual piece. Neither of those pieces were really grounded. In reading Henry’s stuff, I was really coming to understand the transformation in the culture. We needed somebody who really understood the relationship between culture and media and what it means for thinking and production and creativity and all the things that Henry focuses on. Then, the third piece was for Henry to really dive deep conceptually to help us and to help the field understand what was happening both from a theoretical and a more practical perspective. He was able to understand the media in a much different way and explain a new set of literacies. We were looking for Henry and his team to really conceptually, intellectually drive that work I mean, he’s got all those literacies. His team has all those literacies. He’s deep in it, but to have him start writing about it and really make explicit what the combination of these new digital tools plus culture was going to create. 

That was the genesis of the work. We had brought Henry with Mimi and Nicole to be our consultants to help make us be smarter. It really became clear that we needed him to be our intellectual center, and his team to really push that thinking to the world of education, because this new thinking wasn’t going to come out of the world of education. 

Tessa Jolls: I think that’s a really important point and something that I don’t know how we can shift education easily. I mean, it’s a real challenge, but I always felt that this work was really important in terms of holding up this mirror for where we were and trying to help educators see that we needed to move in a different direction. 

Connie Yowell:   Yes. In order to do that, educators, we all do, need a conceptual frame. We need to know the categories and the buckets that matter in this new world and why they matter. A big piece of the work that Henry was doing and his team was doing, from my perspective, was coming up with those key conceptual categories that are grounded in pop culture.  In our vision of innovation, we needed to go deep on the adjacencies to education. We weren’t funding directly within the education space; instead, we were funding all of the adjacent places where new ideas were coming to life then figuring out what they would mean for education and for learning. Henry’s work is clearly a core adjacency that needed to become infused inside education. 

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

Henry Jenkins: This was my very first opportunity to work with the MacArthur Foundation. We've been working with them continuously for the last 15 years since the report was written.  I was midway through my time co-directing the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We had launched the program with the goal of providing a new kind of master's program in media studies, one that was committed to preparing people to go out in the world and make a difference in industry, journalism, public policy and academia. It was a program that would have a very strong applied logic to it. We wanted students to take what they were studying in their classes and to apply that in an immediate way to pressing problems in conversation with real world stakeholders. Project New Media Literacies was one of our major research initiatives but one among others. We were also researching games-based education, games and innovation, global media policy, civic media, and the creative industries. Each of those projects allowed a mix of students to engage in an active research process based on their own career goals and commitments. 

 As we were reaching out to identify what those research opportunities were, I was in a dialogue with danah boyd, who took some classes under me when she was a master's student at the MIT Media Lab. She was advising Connie Yowell at MacArthur, about the launch of some new initiatives around digital media and learning. Through her intervention, I was invited out to San Francisco for a conference at the old Exploratorium, where we were to present some insights into the current media environment, with the idea of impressing the MacArthur leadership, and hopefully getting some grant funds out of it.   As I was doing that first presentation, something went wrong with the PowerPoint. It was basically shuffling the slides randomly throughout the entire presentation. So I had a rich deck of stuff prepared to share, but on the fly, I was having to adjust my talk to reflect the images on the screen, with no sense of what might pop up next. No one ever dared to say to me, was that a random presentation or did you plan it that way? But it must have been strong enough because that launched one of the most important relationships of my academic career.

Connie had situated me next to the President of the MacArthur Foundation on the bus trip back to the hotel, and asked me to explain to him why media literacy should be part of their initiative. I did so. I don't remember anything I said in that conversation. By the time we got off the bus, he was sold on the idea that media literacy should be part of MacArthur’s agenda. Everyone, all the staff at MacArthur seemed really thrilled that I somehow convinced him of this. I was asked to both write a white paper and to do some proof of concept demos.

I was already dabbling in media literacy. I'd written the column for Technology Reviewthat you and a number of other people had seen and responded to. I was starting to get invitations to speak at media literacy conferences in the New England area. We had begun to do a series of conferences called We’ve Wired the Classroom -- Now What? They were designed for local educators to think about the next steps towards online education -- what kinds of curricular materials and professional development were required, what new projects were emerging.

Right now, we’re suddenly relying on online education nationwide, but a lot of the work we were advocating then never took place. Many of the challenges we now confront were being discussed at these conferences decades ago. 

Many of us saw a need for advocacy for the digital realm, something like National Public Radio or National Public Television that was going to generate content, develop curricular materials, take advantage of the experiments that were going on, and bring the teachers along. As the conference title suggests, it's not enough to wire the classroom and just assume that everything else falls into place because it doesn't. The wires are the least of it. The Clinton administration at that time was pushing them to wire all the classrooms in America, saying this would close the digital divide, and we knew it wouldn't.

The main thinkers of that period were passing through MIT— like Howard Rheingold who was doing groundbreaking thinking about the virtual community, and regularly speaking at MIT. Sherry Turkle was a colleague at MIT who was raising important questions about online conversations, identity in a networked world, and the blurring of reality and the imaginary online.  We had great students like danah boyd passing through MIT. She was shaking up our thinking because she was so grounded in the youth culture and what they were doing online. 

Part of our mandate from MacArthur had been to look across the research that had been done on learning and fandom and gaming spaces. This helped us gain insight into learning in other online communities and bringing that back to schools. Throughout that report are signs of the conversations we were engaged with MIT on games-based learning. Alongside the work we were doing for MacArthur, we were doing Microsoft-funded research making the educational case for how games might serve educational purposes.  We called that initiative Games to Teach and as we expanded our funding, it became The Education Arcade.  Kurt Squire, the original Research Director for Games to Teach, left MIT and ended up at University of Wisconsin-Madison with James Paul Gee. It’s no accident that two of James Paul Gee's students are on the team that wrote the Macarthur white paper with me. So, there was a cross-pollination with one of the major centers for thinking about games-based education. I am still seeing the importance of that pioneering work even as I fear that this language of gamification has rigidified a lot of the creative experiments that were going on into the narrowest possible version of what games-based education could look like. I am very pleased to see this new book Locally Played by Benjamin Stokes who was, at the time, one of my foundation officers at MacArthur and later became my PhD student at USC. Ben’s new book stresses how games played in real world spaces can enhance community building. 

 I don't think that report could have come out of any place other than MIT. Being at MIT left us ahead of the curve in the midst of ongoing conversations about the social and cultural impact of emerging platforms and practices. I was housemaster in an MIT dormitory, and I could walk up and down the halls, and just see what students were doing online. That was part of my night job, so it wasn't even necessarily formalized research. But there were lots of insights that made their way into that report that grew out of just living in an MIT environment with those students.

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, and I think that's fascinating how all of that came together at this special time. How then was that connection made in terms of, hey, we need a report, we need this theoretical framework outlined?

Henry Jenkins:  As Connie Yowell describes in her interview, she was working with Nicole Pinker. She was working with Mimi Ito. She was working with me. There were conversations amongst us about how we were progressing. I certainly was following Mimi Ito’s research. She invited me to participate in discussions with her research groups at multiple points along the way, and vice versa. I think it was very clear that we needed a shared vocabulary to talk about learning in this environment. I also felt that we needed to make the case to educators for why the kinds of informal learning that were taking place in young people's lives outside of school were in fact pertinent to what teachers did in their classrooms. 

Mimi's work was really documenting youth digital practices out in the world. She ended up using youth vernacular to frame her theories. She talks about “hanging out, messing around, geeking out”. Those are terms that emerged organically from the young people she interviewed. My task was the opposite: to take what we knew from research on informal learning, fan communities, gaming communities, and write it up in a way that would speak to teachers, to principals, the school board members, the state policymakers, grant funders. So I was giving academic terms to practices that probably would have been described rather differently by the young people themselves. 

As we got into it, it was also clear that young people were being taught to devalue their own experiences, to devalue the ways they were learning and what they were learning in these informal spaces. I've come to recognize the importance of helping young people think about why it's important to take seriously those opportunities, as alongside helping teachers think about how to incorporate those skills and practices into the schools. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, absolutely. You really were at this confluence of all of these ideas swirling around. Fortunately, it seems, like, I know and talking with Connie and with Mimi, they saw a need to really articulate more of the theoretical foundations and then turn to you. It was just incredible timing, well, not really coincidence, but definitely you were the man of the time and that really made all the difference.

Henry Jenkins is currently Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California and is the Principal Investigator for the Civic Imagination Project (funded by MacArthur).

Mimi Ito: Henry was focused on writing a more conceptual summative piece and then around the same, we had started fieldwork on what young people were doing in the digital landscape. We were looking at kids who were on Myspace and instant messenger primarily and had not really made the leap to text messaging, which is hard to believe.  The US was very late to text messaging compared to the rest of the post-industrial world. The US was an outlier, so kids were still using a lot of instant messengers around then. This is pre-iPhone. Sometimes I get my chronology wrong ... yes, it was definitely pre-iPhone. MacArthur deciding to look at the online world as an arena for understanding learning was ahead of the time. John Seely Brown had just joined the board and it was a bold move at that time. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, it certainly was. It was interesting, too, because the emphasis was certainly on the education, but not education in schools. It was really centered around the technology and, of course, that was rapidly developing. We didn't even have a clue about what was coming, but I guess that isn't quite fair. We did have some clues, but nevertheless, when we really didn't have, as you said, the adoption of the social media and so on, but what did you feel then was your major challenge in terms of the research you were doing? 

Mimi Ito: I was in that post-doctoral phase when all of this started. I had been studying how kids learn with video games and socializing and other things.  I was an educational researcher as well as a cultural anthropologist by training.  I wrote the first dissertation about digital culture in our anthropology department, but a lot of the perspective came from youth culture studies and so on. 

I was very familiar with Henry's work because there weren't really many people doing work in the States. Henry had written an early paper on videogames and had been one of the few senior media study scholars who would look at video games at all. At that time, I don't think Henry was that deep into learning and education.  I was delighted that he was brought into the MacArthur initiative and was writing the paper around literacy, which is obviously a great bridge to the education side. I was always the black sheep of educational research because I looked at what kids did for fun, like play videogames. I had just finished the study of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a post-Pokémontrading card game and I described what kids learn from playing those kinds of complex games.  Early networks, multiplayer games, text-based games were really the only environment at the time that I could see kids connecting socially via digital media because none of this other stuff had taken off yet. I had done research on mobile phones and texting in Japan, but the MacArthur Initiative kicked off right at that time when those things were starting to converge.

Henry was writing his book on convergence culture and suddenly you were at the beginning of seeing rich digital media in a social environment and games turned into real-time multiplayer network for the first time. ... there was a five-year period when all of that was converging, which was also that period that this paper that Henry was working on was pulled together and our digital youth study started. 

For me, it was very much an extension of work I had already been doing theoretically and conceptually, but suddenly, it became a big thing in the world… I had just spent two years in Japan studying the birth of camera phones and the mobile Internet and these weird videogames that were very social and then suddenly the rest of the world got interested.   That was when MacArthur stepped in, yes. I was starting to write about this stuff, suddenly the whole world was interested. I had already seen how youth culture was an incubator of trends around the digital. By 2004, people were paying attention to the mobile internet. It wasn't just high school girls in Tokyo. 

I was pretty confident in the topics I was choosing that they were going to become global phenomena that transcended ages. If you were an observer of the digital environment, you knew this was going to explode. That part was not surprising. I think the question of whether educators would pay attention, that was not preordained. MacArthur had important influence supporting a counter-narrative. Henry's paper was really instrumental in that. 

Tessa Jolls: Interesting, yes. Again, the impact on the different audience, splinters, educators versus the technology people and so on is really interesting because traditionally the education segment has always lagged and not necessarily been there. It was really important to have some impact on that particular audience and I think these reports did. That was something very different. 

Mimi Ito:  MacArthur’s choices of scholars were not in the educational mainstream. Bringing people like Henry into the conversation around education was an interesting move because Henry has credibility within the media and gaming space. That helped knit those worlds together, I think, in an important way. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Next time, we will check in with Henry’s co-authors on the project to see how they are living with those insights in their professional and personal lives today.