Henry Jenkins, "Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars"
There are few scholars in the humanities who have forged multi-million dollar international collaborations with foreign governments [http://gambit.mit.edu/], fewer still who their peers would call “the 21st-century [Marshall] McLuhan.” Among these, there is only one who can be found mud-wrestling his wife at a two-day party called the Steer Roast every spring. Profiles of MIT professor Henry Jenkins in the press are invariably a patchwork record of his remarkable professional success, his formative influence on the field of media studies, and his colorful personality.
Jenkins, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Marx brothers and other comedies of the 1930s, was an unlikely candidate to shape the field of media studies, least of all at MIT, where the humanities take second billing to the school’s illustrious programs in science and technology. However, Jenkins immersed himself in digital culture and subsequently founded the university’s Comparative Media Studies Program in 1999, a decade after he was hired. That same year, Jenkins drew the national spotlight for his testimony before a Senate committee hearing on youth and media violence. Jenkins, who had co-edited the collection From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1998) the previous year, entered a personal testimony against censorship and in defense of video-game-playing adolescents. Calling violent video games “the symbols of youth alienation and rage—not the causes,” Jenkins defied legislators who sought to find an easy scapegoat in the increasingly complicated media landscape.
A leading expert on fandom and a self-proclaimed “aca-fan,” Henry Jenkins sees his scholarly study of fan communities and his own personal excitement about popular culture as residing on a continuum. He has traced the engagement of fans with popular culture across different media in over ten authored or edited books. “Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars,” is a chapter from one of these, a book called Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Meet (2006). In this book, Jenkins argues against the traditional story of new media emergence and old media obsolescence, suggesting instead that old media remain and form complicated relationships with new media in the lives of media consumers and practitioners. In this particular chapter, Jenkins tells the story of Heather Lawver, a precocious home-schooled student who launches an internet-based fictional newspaper revolving around the world of Harry Potter. Lawver’s story becomes a focal point for the tensions that emerge as new media and new stories come into conflict with some of the oldest existing institutions in American culture, among them schools and libraries (which seek to maintain their place in the promulgation of media literacy), corporations (which strive to maintain intellectual property laws), and cultural conservatives (who worry about the increasingly secular nature of education).
In the conflict among these groups, which have “competing notions of media literacy and how it should be taught,” Jenkins draws attention to what he terms the “discernment movement” occurring among certain Christians. These practitioners of discernment don’t simply reject cultural products that don’t completely represent their point of view, rather, they read critically and with an open mind, learning about their own values while finding redeeming qualities in the books, films, and songs that others reject outright. It is ultimately this lesson of engaged and critical cultural participation that animates Jenkins’s work and his own involvement with the proliferating new media productions.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Quotations are drawn from the following chapter, and from a Chronicle of Higher Education profile by Jeffrey R. Young. For more information on Henry Jenkins, please see his faculty web site or his blog.
Digital image drawn from Henry Jenkins's MIT faculty profile.
Link to Explore:
What Wikipedia can Teach us About the New Media Literacies: A podcast of a lecture given by Henry Jenkins.
Media Snackers interview: a podcast version of an interview with Henry Jenkins on the state of "youth technology."
What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy: Remix Culture and the New Media: Audio and video recordings of a keynote lecture given by Henry Jenkins at the New Media Consortium's 2008 Summer conference.
Question for Connecting:
- In “Why Heather Can Write,” Jenkins is concerned with describing the characteristics of the various affective communities that have evolved around the Harry Potter series. Are these affective communities examples of “self-organizing systems,” as defined by Steven Johnson in “The Myth of the Ant Queen”? Does convergence culture give rise to complexity or simple multiplicity? What exactly is it that is converging in convergence culture—individuals, groups, opposed ideas, self-organizing systems, or something else altogether?
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