for young people this means very much about class, about contamination, about the
politics of who's safe and who's not in America today and they created a very
very powerful video using hip-hop that translated Poe's story from the 19th
century into a story of a very contemporary society and our young
people and especially latino neighborhoods in the United States are
at risk from a variety of causes that richer kids are protected from.
In addition to the use of communications media and the digital world in education,
audio visual literacy is another important main area of work
developed by Jenkins. -So that was a process of taking literature and playing
with it.
Not seeing literature as something we simply critique or interpret but as literature
as a starting point for our own creative activities and that's very
much what we mean when we talk about bringing play into the schools. I think
ultimately it's about citizens. I think ultimately participatory culture is
about moving us from being consumers of culture other people are produced to being
full participants in the media environment. Now the word "citizen" is
very loaded right now in the American context because some of the most
innovative users of new media are not citizens. We've been doing work at USC on
the dream activists. These are young people who are undocumented immigrants in
the United States. Many of them coming from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin
America and Central America and they're fighting for their rights to become
citizens. They're fighting for their rights to education in the United States.
Many of them don't have access to digital media at home. They're using
school libraries and public libraries to have access to media but they
in fact have been incredibly innovative in their use of this
technology. They're using YouTube to look directly into the camera and
come out as undocumented. They're tired of hiding in the shadows and they're
speaking directly to Americans about the experience of being undocumented through
YouTube.
They're using blogs, they're using cartoons, they're using web cast, Twitter to get their story out. In some cases they take
real risks. Some of them were being deported because they outdid
themselves through social media and told their story online but as they're deported
from the country they're still tweeting and telling their story. They're refusing
to go quietly into the night. So for them it's citizen, yes, a struggle for
citizenship. When new media is a tool that they're using to assert their claim
to become citizen in powerful new ways.
This is the construct. It's our loading program. We can load anything from
clothing to equipment, weapons, training simulations, anything we need. -Right now, we're inside a computer
program? -Is it really so hard to believe? You're clothes are different, the plugs in
your arms and head are gone,
your hair is changed, your appearance now is what we called residual self-image. It is
the mental projection of your digital self.
Is this real? -What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel,
what you can smell, you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals
interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the
twentieth century.
It exists now only as part of an neural interactive simulation that we call the
matrix.
You've been living in a dream, Neo. This is the world. This is the world as it exists today.
Welcome to the desert of the real. -In the words of Jenkins, this is a time of transition, the time in which the old system is
dying and the new media is at its advent. The possibilities are endless and if we
have reason to be concerned we also have cause to be enthusiastic about the future. -30 to 40
group. Take your places please. Right. Let's see which one of us can touch his toes.
Right over from the hips, brothers and sisters please. 121212
Smith. 6079 Smith W. Yes, you. Bend lower. You're not trying. Watch me.
There, brother. That's what I want. Anyone under 45 is perfectly capable of touching his
toes. I'm 39 and I've had four children. We don't all have the privilege of fighting
in the front line. Remember our boys of the men of our front. Just think what
they have to put up with. -If Orwell imagined in 1984 the world with Big
Brother was watching us through an infamous network of cameras reality, has
proved that in fact it is we who watch over Big Brother. It is we who build a type of
collective intelligence by the way we participate and communicate using
different sources of media available to us. -I'm an American so for me most of the
future is a really exciting place. Traveling through Europe I know
there's a tension between looking backwards and looking forwards. As an
American I'm trained to be optimistic, right, so for me I look toward the future
as a space where change is possible. I see myself as a critical utopian. People
often think utopians are naive, we believe we live in the best possible world. I don't
believe them. If we go back to Thomas More, utopia was no place. It was an impossible
place. It was an ideal. But the point of Utopia is we imagine a better future and
then we use that as a yardstick against which to judge the present. We know what
we're fighting for and therefore we can understand more fully what we're fighting
against. So I'm optimistic in the sense that I believe it is possible to win a
struggle to build a more democratic society and I know what a positive
outcome would look like. For me that's about bridging and extending
participatory culture until everyone has the ability to participate in the core
conversations of their society. And I look backwards and at where we're at and
say, what's preventing us from achieving that? What blocks our paths? What do we have to
overcome in order to get there?
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the
red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream. -So being raised in Atlanta and watching Martin Luther King and his I
Have a Dream speech, he says I have a dream of a better society. He doesn't say, we sit
back, do nothing, we'll get there, right. Technology will free us. That's not what
Martin Luther King said. He says, I have a better society. Let's fight to get there.
He also doesn't say, it's impossible. You're already screwed. Capitalism is
always gonna win. There's no possibility of changing anything. He says we can
change the world if we work together. So from there, King is able to say, this is
the problem. Segregation is the problem. Segregated schools is the problem. The
class structure in American society is a problem. How do we then build a plan to
overcome it? And so for me the future is something you build toward. Something you
work to achieve, not either a fantasy that we imagine will happen no matter
what we do, or a fear that something bad is gonna happen no matter what we do.
Optimism leads to complacency often and
skepticism leads to cynicism often. But in the middle, between the two, is what I call
critical utopianism which is the capacity to use our ability to imagine a
better world to critique the society we're in now and to forge plans that
allow us to change the society to something we think better serve the
needs of citizens.