Last week I attended Games, Learning, and Society 6.0, a small conference about learning and games. One of the highlights was the Henry Jenkins keynote (and definitely the David Wiley keynote, which I’ll talk about in another post). In his white paper, Jenkins talks about the new skills required in our emerging participatory culture. Some time has elapsed since the publication of that paper and we are beginning to see the consequences (both good and bad) of participatory culture.
Jenkins said something that I want to think about more. He said that the connections made from becoming part of a network leads to a sense of empowerment. I want to think about this idea in two separate contexts: learning, which he discussed in the white paper, and political activism, the topic of his keynote. First, activism. Are we becoming a more activist society? Jenkins claims that the networks enabled by the internet allow people to come together around popular culture, and that what we choose to consume in popular culture says something about us politically. This convergence of fantasy and reality enables groups to leverage popular culture in order to get media attention for their causes. Check out this video he used as an example:
So, networks are empowering groups to take political action, and often, popular culture helps either emotionally connect the participants or facilitate the movement. Jenkins went on to talk about the ability of networks to mobilize a discourse and cause us to rethink the relationship between power and technology. Of course all this talk made me think about Cass Sunstein and his principle of polarization. So, on behalf of LIT 6934, I asked Jenkins what he thought of the Daily Me idea and the risk of further polarization of our society, this time around popular culture. I thought his response was pretty good but maybe a touch optimistic. He claimed that such polarization happens around political sites but that pop culture sites can actually mediate these tensions. He cited WOW (world of warcraft) as an example; in the 2008 election, WOW members were interviewed about their political affiliation (if you’re interested, check out this video). They swung for Obama, but there were a fair number of McCain supporters as well. In the end, a lot of political discussion happened on the forum, but in a less heated context. Despite this optimism, Jenkins did recognize the tendency toward polarization and indicated it was a problem that does not yet have a solution.
Jenkins did a good job of showing that networks are at least empowering for some people and can inspire political action. But I want to see if networks can be empowering in learning environments and inspire students to seek knowledge. Yet it seems impossible to equate the two. At least for now, we are talking about small movements of political action, and in education, small groups of empowered students (while perhaps inspiring) do not solve some of the deep-rooted issues of student participation. Jenkins states, “today’s children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later” (p. 10), but a number of studies indicate that transfer of learning from play spaces is actually much more complex. We want to avoid creating a false sense of empowerment where students feel like they are mastering a certain set of skills only to find those skills are irrelevant offline. I think Jenkins is absolutely right that networks can be empowering, and I think that sense can be leveraged in educational settings, but I think we need to be careful about the claims we make, ensure that we are using technology in a way that truly fosters learning, and recognize that when we talk about participatory culture, we are excluding an important part of that culture.
