Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

This was a case of looking at the title rather then the book. I picked it up thinking it would be about games and blogging. It does talk about it but more in a study of participatory culture. The book is a compendium of Professor Jenkins articles through the years. It's not bad if you are studying this topic. The first chapter I didn't care about and in fact skipped it. But I should say that is me as I really don't care to read excerpts of an interview. In this case it was Matt Hill interviewing Jenkins. There were articles about the culture of Star Trek and the efforts of the Gay community to get a gay character on the show. Interesting if you hadn't heard about it but I had known about the effort and even remember some of the shows mentioned. There are articles about violence and video games especially after the Columbine affair. Jenkins made some rather valid points about the perception of violence and the fact that often overlooked is the amount of teenagers that play video games versus those that actually commit violence. The fact that the violence in Saving Private Ryan is ok but the fantasy sequence in Basketball Diaries is not. The notorious Grand Theft Auto 3 is mentioned as well. I found it interesting that he was ambushed by Phil Donahue in the manner of Fox News. As Jenkins mentioned Phil turned to the Dark Side of broadcasting. The final chapter involved and analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer between Jenkins and his son. It bored me but that is because this was not something I was expecting to read. Overall, it's not a bad book if you are into this type of study. It really didn't interest me overall. But, as I mentioned I was not expecting to read this type of topic.

Henry Jenkins provides an excellent step away from our normal expectations of media philosophers. Coming in between the doom-and-gloom media affect tradition and the corporate schlock Jenkins writes (and speaks!) for the fans. The book is a collection of articles set in three chapters: In the first, Jenkins lets us into the world of fandom (if you aren't there already) and more specifically his early focus- that of science fan-fiction. The second chapter, Going Digital, co-incides with his other 2006 book "Convergence Culture" in its mapping the flow of information and analyis of everyday Americans' change in their day-to-day. Finally, Columbine and Beyond (my favorite) looks at, esentially, the fear our elders have of new media and youth culture.