Henry Jenkins, Professor, MIT
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Andy Plesser: So where do you think things are going now in terms if user generated video and sharing and what am I gonna see in terms of the way those are shared, the environments that are shared, the content we’re gonna be seeing?
Henry Jenkins: Now, it comes back to a point that I’ve been asking a lot about, Time Magazine’s You as the person of the year, whether that’s singular or collective, whether the model is personalized media or socialized media. And my bet is that what matters in YouTube is content, it already has a community in place. A community of interest emerges around this. So whether it’s skateboarders, whether it’s fans of popular music, whether it’s political activists, whether it’s students, it’s the content that travels, is stuff that appeals on a very deep level to very specific communities of practice.
And so I do think it’s a communal space even though it’s often described as voyeurism, exhibitionism, as if it’s about individual self-display, individual expression. Most of the content that matters is actually content relevant to a much larger community of people that are watched because they recognize something of themselves in it. And they feel some stakes in its circulation.
Social networking is here to stay. Social networking is operating at every level from small children, you know, there’s experiments now in the developments of social networks that are safe for small children to do, through teenagers, through middle-aged business people into senior citizens. Social networking is gonna be part of the way the web works for the foreseeable future. Now in that space, those companies that appeal to young people are gonna be the most volatile because no one wants to be in their older brother’s social network. They want to have their own community.
And so MySpace will rapidly become oh so 20 minutes ago, to cite, to quote the movie Clueless. It’s gonna be surpassed by the next youth site and you just see this constant proliferation of alternative social networks. To some degree it’ll survive ‘cause it’s the best known. To some degree, it’s become the lightening rod for criticism of both those concerned about commercialization and those concerned about sexual predation, it’s the lightening rod. And whether it weathers those two storms remains to be seen. But something like MySpace will be part of how the web works for a very long time to come.
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