If you don’t know who Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture) is, you should. Get to know him here. Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad is Good For You. A great read.

From the Henry Jenkins/Steven Johnson SXSW Keynote, a summary (Questions by Johnson, Answers by Jenkins):

Q: Will there be a backlash towards youth’s inolvement with technology?

A: We are probably overdue for one. Young people are adopters. They are engaged with it. Parents fear it. Moral panic sets in when you stop asking questions.

Q: Are there any provocative findings about whether or not learning is suffering as a result of technology, video games, etc.?

A: We need to know a lot about a lot, but need access to group-edited information like wikipedia. No one person should be allowed to write an encyclopedia entry. The kids in a classroom need to work together. They need to collaborate. Until we’re able to develop tests about how we process knowledge and collaborate vs. regurgitating information, we won’t be able to advance learning measurement. We need different models than standardized tests.

Q: Do you ever look at a piece of technology and say ‘that’s stupid’?

A: As a knee-jerk reaction sometimes. But people don’t normally do, or create, meaningless things. New technology, when it catches on, is engaging. And we need to understand what it means to the people it means a lot to. People do things for a reason. We just don’t all understand them.

Q: Which is better. Lost or The Wire?

A: TV is many different things. The Wire may be the best show inside the box. Lost may be the best one outside the box. Much of the Lost experience happens online. It makes it deeper. The Wire may be the last gasp of old television (Hill Street Blues on steroids). Lost is probably the future of television. One with an in-depth online experience.

Q: Why do people spend so much time with this stuff?

A: What’s wrong with America, in that they are not given enough creativity to apply in their workplace? Why is creative energy so underutilized? Their jobs represent only a small subsection for applications of their creativity. They need these outlets. How do we turn all that creativity into something that solves the problems of society?

Q: Fan Fiction. Talk about it. And We Are Wizards the documentary about Harry Potter fan fiction.

A: This is a generation that learned how to write because of Harry Potter. How to social network. How to play music. How to be political. How to organize. How to become a transformative force. It’s representative of things we do in play, that will eventually allow us to change the world.

Q: When people talk about this generation as being the dumbest generation. Do we have a crisis, or do we have an incredible opportunity? How does it apply to politics — especially Obama?

A: Jenkins loves Obama. And the phrase ‘Yes we can’. Young people online say ‘we’. Adults say ‘I’. Young people say, ‘what can we do together’. Collective intelligence (the recurring theme here, btw) is what creates this phenomenon. Obama is a community organizer. Clinton is a litigator. Obama’s platform is like a stub on wikipedia — it’s one we are going to flesh out together. He’s built a movement — not just a campaign. He’s brought a generation of young people together. To social networks it’s not just a campaign for a candidate, it’s providing shared ownership of the campaign.

Q: What about civic media?

A: MIT created the Center for Future Civic Media which seeks to figure out how to enable civic engagement. There’s a civic connection taking place through games (as Putnam states in Bowling Alone). The idea is to explore what a culture of democracy looks like. How does it become a lifestyle that connects us to each other as part of the same community? The social connections we invest deepest in are online connections. How do we learn from that to make it easier to connect with each other?

News Item: Steven Johnson’s outside.in will be launching On My Radar which is like the Facebook News Feed for geographically relevant information, i.e. what’s going on not in my network, but in my area? In the few square blocks/miles around me?

Jenkins hopes that we can continue to give young people the tools to express their ideas about themselves and their communities.

Questions from the audience ensued, with attention being paid towards letting children be creative and have a voice, while also guiding their safety.

Also, collective intelligence was also challenged, with Jenkins explaining that diversity is needed to come to an acceptable consensus. There’s no mechanism in YouTube to support diversity, so majority (i.e. white middle-class males) rules unlike with Wikipedia. It’s not the hive mind we’re talking about. It’s about a democratic society processing information and coming to a consensus.

Jenkins explained that the Internet is what enables us to maintain social connections in spite of the mobility of our society, that began in the 1950s and 1960s (as Toffler and Putnam argued).

In response to what we can do to hold companies accountable for their challenging of intellectual property issues, Jenkins stated that we can’t just think that participatory culture is an eventuality ro something we’re entitled to. We need to fight for it. It needs to be a platform to critique these kinds of companies.

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