The king of pop

CAMBRIDGE -- Last semester, Henry Jenkins's MIT class "Media Theories and Methods" met to discuss New Journalism icon Hunter S. Thompson . Jenkins had been traveling the week before, as he frequently does, and had arranged for a substitute lecturer. As class began, students teased Jenkins about being "a creation of the Comparative Media Studies Program" -- which he codirects -- and not a real person.

Joining in the laughter, Jenkins led a discussion of Thompson's stylistic echoes in Jon Stewart and today's political bloggers. "What's at stake here," he asserted, "is the nature of truth and how to get at it."

What Jenkins might have added is that he's staked his own career on the same proposition. For when it comes to cutting-edge media issues -- how we absorb, influence, and generate pop-culture content in today's multiplatform marketplace; how the entertainment industry keeps pace with changing behaviors and technologies; how educators might approach teaching media literacy; how fan communities are rewriting the rules for all of the above -- few observers are digging harder into what's really going on than Jenkins.

His latest book, "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," examines three recent developments: media convergence, a term used to describe various phenomena such as content flow across multiple platforms and the migratory nature of today's audiences; participatory culture, in which consumers are actively creating and distributing new content themselves; and collective intelligence, a group method of processing what we watch, read, listen to, and play.

If all this sounds rather esoteric, consider Jenkins's examples. Chapter 1 looks at "Survivor" spoilers, online groups that identify winners and losers on the show long before viewers learn about them. Chapter 2 examines "American Idol" in the context of brand-name advertising, while Chapter 3 considers the "Matrix" films as transmedia storytelling: stories that unfold across multiple platforms (film, video games, etc.) simultaneously.

"Star Wars," the Harry Potter books, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential run -- all are grist for Jenkins's new-media-paradigm mill. Academic he may be, but nobody can fairly accuse Jenkins of ignoring mainstream pop fare. The title of his new blog, "Confessions of an Aca/Fan" (posted at henryjenkins.org) , mirrors how Jenkins positions himself: as part serious intellectual, part popcorn-munching fan like the rest of us.

"I've always embraced both roles," Jenkins says during a lengthy interview at his campus office. Asked what he means by calling his new book's theme "serious fun," Jenkins says it's about how pop culture, however frivolous, can have a serious impact on social issues.

"Not because it does something to us, but because we do things with it," says Jenkins. "Not because it makes us think in certain ways, but because it provokes us to think about topics we might otherwise avoid."

He offers two examples not in the book. One is "Survivor" having begun this season by dividing its cast into four ethnic groups. (The groups have since been reconfigured.) The other is "Snakes on a Plane," a movie that not only benefited from prerelease chatter, but was actually reshot in response to fan expectations.

"My reaction to 'Survivor' is it's already forced a conversation about the place of race in society," says Jenkins, whose opinions have made him a sought-after commentator among journalists, legislators, and game manufacturers as well as academics. "It's what we do around the show where the real importance lies," he adds.

When "Snakes" opened this summer, he continues, "Aca/Fan" readers were invited to report on what happened in their local theaters. Many noticed a strong Internet-fueled impact, Jenkins found, whereas others saw little. Yet for cultural disconnect, it was hard to top the experience Jenkins had in rural Georgia.

"Everyone had come to see Samuel L. Jackson," he recalls with a smile. "I was wearing a rubber snake around my neck like I was going to a fan thing, and people thought I was from Mars."

It's that combination of rigorous intellectualism and rubber-snake fandom that makes Jenkins unusual, according to MIT associate provost Philip Khoury , who calls him a public intellectual in the tradition of a Lester Thurow or Paul Krugman.

"Henry's a great champion of understanding what drives youth in our society, for good or bad," Khoury says. "In an institution like MIT, with a lot of brilliant people around, he's unusual. Even if not everyone gets what he's trying to do."

Jenkins, 48, grew up in the Atlanta area, where his father ran a construction firm. Among his formative influences were Mad magazine, comic books, and science fiction movies. A paper he wrote in seventh grade on the history of cinema became a template for most of what's followed. "My father used to joke that I've been rewriting the same paper my whole life," says Jenkins, who earned degrees from Georgia State University, and the universities of Iowa and Wisconsin.

Hired in 1989 to teach literature at MIT, he was already determined to approach media studies in a more fan-centric way. As his course topics (comic books, science fiction, children's literature, Alfred Hitchcock films) and published works ("From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games," "Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture") suggest, Jenkins's interests have been wildly eclectic. He was among the first scholars to write seriously about video games and game culture, too. Indeed, one sturdy thread has been the sociology of fan communities.

In 1999, a US Senate committee held hearings into whether pop-culture violence had played a role in the shootings at Columbine High School. Jenkins testified as a father (his son was then in high school) and house master (which he still is) as well as a scholar familiar with subcultures from geeks to goths. Jenkins found himself debating former Education Secretary William Bennett over whether the violence in "Saving Private Ryan" was acceptable but the blood-letting in "Casino" was not. "Meanwhile," Jenkins later wrote, "the senators are making homophobic jokes" about singer Marilyn Manson, comments that struck him as "precisely the kind of intolerant and taunting comments" the Columbine killers must have been subjected to. Jenkins's unwillingness to brand all pop violence as a negative influence may have irked Congress, but it made him heroic in the eyes of many marginalized -- and misunderstood -- fan communities.

His new book is not as controversial, Jenkins acknowledges.

"Entertainment companies need to think of consumers as social networks," he says. "A lot of what the advertising industry does upsets me, but we can't think in terms of evildoers versus defenders of freedom. This is a new terrain. If there's anything controversial in the book, it's this shift toward relationship-based marketing that I'm describing."

"It wasn't my goal to dummy down an academic book," he continues. "But I've also tried to use terms and examples the fan community is familiar with. And the blogosphere is talking about."

Media-literacy education is his next big crusade. Under the aegis of the MacArthur Foundation, he's helping develop curricular materials to promote media literacy and is an adviser to the Education Arcade, a group working to promote the educational use of video and computer games.

"Students are already using new media channels," he avers. "To teach art and literature without anything about remixing is to not teach how art is realistically created. It simply doesn't allow kids to talk about their own creative processes."

Restricting a child's TV or computer time is fine, he continues, but banning it is an overreaction . "Kids use media in productive and destructive ways. Why not help them become empowered participants in the new media landscape, not victims of it?"

Jenkins spent last summer at his cabin in rural Georgia. Without access to broadcast TV or a high-speed Internet connection, he says, it was hard to launch a media-centric blog with a worldwide readership. Yet he did.

"I started it on the most sluggish dial-up in America," he says. "That shows that even someone in the North Georgia mountains can have an impact on the blogosphere, if you have the patience."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.