Technology

(WBZ) Join host Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research and some of the leading thinkers in digital media who reveal their insights and predictions into how changes in people's behavior are rewiring the media world. In this series, local leaders share their perspectives on how technology has transformed the media landscape, how consumers are leading the charge with social media, and what the media world should do to stay on top.

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The Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX: "my-techs") is the region's premier industry and professional organization dedicated to support and promote technology and innovation in New England. MITX focuses at the intersection of technology, marketing and digital media and its community is comprised of individual and companies that work in the digital industry.
Watch individual segments of Henry's interview below:

How a science fiction fan became a MIT Professor?
How fans will contribute to the change in media
Will media companies give up on copyright lawsuits?
Are companies ready to let consumers define their brands?
Will blogging blur the idea of news?
Should journalists be bloggers?
What does media look like 5 years from now?

Josh Bernoff: Hi I'm Josh Bernoff from Forester Research. We're here with Henry Jenkins, he's the co-director of the Comparative Media Studies a program at MIT and also the author of Convergence Culture. A new book about how consumer viewers are actually contributing to the world of media; Henry I have to start with this; can you tell me how a science fiction fan got to be a respected professor at MIT?

Henry Jenkins: Well science fiction is the national literature at MIT everyone from the president on down reads it. Whenever we bring a science fiction writer in we pack the largest auditorium. The bigger question is how a humanist has been so involved in the life of MIT. But I've become an expert on all things geek and that certainly allows me to communicate effectively at every level at MIT

Josh: So let's get directly to it, I mean you are certainly the most knowledgeable person there is about how fans are actually contributing to the media experience. So in just a few sentences can you help us understand how that's changing the world of media to have fans participation in the creation of media?

Henry: Well I've been studying fans for almost 20 years now and when I started fans were absolutely marginal to the way the culture operated. Hidden from view is the stereotype when they we reliving in their parents basement. The reality is now fans are essential to the way media operates. We just did a Future of Entertainment Conference at MIT and the discussion of fans there among network executives suggests and studio heads suggested that there is a growing understanding of the value fans bring to things. To put it in a nutshell historically we will see fans depreciated things. They work intellectual property out, they did damage out, by their public activities. Now there's a growing understanding that fans appreciate things. Both in the emotional sense, they like it, they create new value around it, they are niche marketers who get marginal projects into greater visibility. They are the loyal viewers who sustain programs through thick and thin. Their passion can create secondary markets. Their ranks will become the recruiting ground for the next generation of talent that works in a particular media property. There are any number of media properties that have sustained through difficult times and have flourished because of viewer participation.

Josh: Well that sounds extremely optimistic but in my work with media companies the idea that they would relinquish control of their properties is sort of difficult to believe. I mean you've talked some, for example, about how the spoilers in the world of survivor obviously for CBS or for any media company, having control of what media gets out there is pretty important to them.

Henry: Well it is no longer about loss of control; they lost control a long time ago. I and any other fan can do with their media anything they want and as publicly a way as we want at the present time. There's very little they can do to stop us as a group. They [could] send me a cease and desist letter but someone else would take my place. It's no longer about losing control it's about renegotiating a moral contract. It's about renegotiating; the term moral economy is a useful one. It comes out of anthropology peasant societies in which you discover that peasants only revolted in historic times when they felt that their moral agreement with the land class was in violation, with the terms that were uniformly believed to be commonsensical were trampled on. Right now we're in a period where media companies are suing their consumers. By any business standpoint, suing their consumer doesn't make any economic sense. What it's done is eroded the moral contract between fans and producers. We now need to renegotiate and part of what my book and the work we're doing through the convergence culture consortium through MIT and other sort of activities we're involved with is helping companies re-imagine what a relationship with fans and consumers will look like, in a world where fans are more public and where everyone assumes were going to live in a more participatory culture. The dispute right now are the terms of participation but the idea that our culture is going to be more participatory is inevitable.

Josh: So do you think these media companies are ready for this? Are they ready for a lawsuit? Or are they pretty much resistant?

Henry: I think we're seeing a range of positions. In my book I talk about collaborationist and prohibitionist logic. The prohibitionist who see rigid control if IP is the only way into the future and those are the ones who's suing their consumers. The other end of the spectrum are collaborationists, so we might think about game companies like MAXIS where Will Wright argues that 80% of the content of the SIMs in the end will come from the consumer rather than their design team. And he talks about the companies competing to find who can create the most creative audience, not only who could hire the best designers. So we have a spectrum from prohibitionist companies, say the recording industry, to game companies, which are embracing collaboration. In between are companies are who are speaking through both sides of their mouth. The legal department thinks one way, the marketing department thinks another way, their creatives have a different set of feelings. They're big dysfunctional families that can't figure out. They will charge us to buy the right to put their logo on a t-shirt but will sue us if we put it on our website. It's like; it's a total jumble at the moment as companies are grappling with these changes.

Josh: I certainly think you're right in a world where YouTube can create a value of 1.6 billion dollars simply by creating a place where people can share. Clearly there's a lot of value there. I wonder about this from the perspective of brands. What you've said about logos is interesting to me, do you think a global brand like Nike, or Proctor and Gamble with Crest, are they ready really to allow consumers to define what those companies mean and do they have the choice whether consumers define it or they do?

Henry: Well again, I don't think they have a choice, but I also think they are probably not quite ready; I mean I think they are very nervous about the move of those brands. The reality is people gather in grocery stores talked about those brands all the time. The housewife says to her friend that this detergent has turned my shirt green, don't buy it. That's always been part of the interaction amongst consumers; the scale is just much bigger. The ability to be able to talk about it has become much bigger. The ability to talk about it has become much greater and it's closing the gap between corporate top-down expressions of brands and the sort of popular understanding of those brands. Now a good brand executive knows how to negotiate that, starts by understanding what the public's perception of the brand is and shapes it, nudges it. Doesn't try to create a diversion of the brand that's radically at odds with what the public already thinks, and builds on that. That's classic definition leadership. The guy runs around in the crowd and says follow me. So it's about all the stuff becomes more visible it can shift out from under you very easily, but it's also much easier to monitor public perception of your brand and respond to it with a more precise and rapid fashion. You have more information about how the public perceives you than ever before and a smart brand executive knows how to use that information. To continually reshape the brand that serves their purposes.

Josh: So I think an interesting example of this would be to talk about Blogs. Were now in a world where you have accepted journalistic sources of information, the New York Times even cites CNET and then you have blogger like Michael Arrington at Techcrunch who define the rules their own way, not necessarily bound by the same conflict of inters rules(?), basically saying whatever they want. Is this going to really blur the idea of what news is in a world where half the people are playing with one set of rules and consumers are playing with whatever set of rules they feel like?

Henry: Well I think part of the challenge is to figure out whether they are doing the same thing or whether they are doing something slightly different. I mean right now we talk about citizen journalists and that may be a misnomer. And I think citizens are thought leaders, they're shaping opinions, they're sometimes tracking down information and fans played very important roles in reporting stories that effect popular culture. And business advocates play an important role in helping sort out the players in the business space. But I think they are doing something that is fundamentally different and I think the public is gradually coming to understand the different roles and functions they play. It is challenging the response of some of these powerful bloggers who don't necessarily follow the same roles who think in the same way as established media is. I think it's as important to negotiate a relationship with those bloggers as it is to court the guy at the Wall Street Journal. The companies have long seen it as the value to do or talk to people from the various research companies who play an important role in shaping public opinion. I think all of those are thought leaders in the industry today and it's a now a larger dialog with different constituents.

Josh: So we've seen even now journalists being required to blog, they're doing it at business 2.0 magazine and it's being encouraged at a lot of other organizations. Do you think that journalists should all be bloggers now or is that really blurring the distinction too much?

Henry: I'm not convinced every journalist in America needs to be a blogger nor am I convinced that every powerful person in the United States needs to be a blogger. I'm reminded of is in Star Trek V where Kirk asks why does God need a space ship? When you've got powerful media companies that already speak in a unified space to the public, it's not clear they need a spaceship, it's not clear they need a blog to travel throughout the cyberspace. There are ways to engage the viewer and readers and I think soliciting opinions from them are very important, but I want reporters to be doing journalism. Now companies are a slightly different matter and I think there is a difference between a corporate blog and creating within your company sort of public figures who can respond to the public. Again tapping upon as a fan, fans have always embraced the creative artist behind the show, and dislike the powers that be. Americans don't fall in love with companies; they fall in love with individuals. So the networks are the powers that be, they are the ones that cancel your favorite show. The producer is the one who generates a personal relationship with their fans. So companies did the thinking a similar way. The company can't speak to me from a blog and achieve anything that works. Individuals within the companies who represent different perspectives on what the companies are doing can play a very important role. But it means hiring people you trust as public communicators and giving them enough latitude to even occasionally say the unspeakable that the company has made a mistake. I mean most of us from the top level of the country on down would like to see chief executives who say when they were wrong and acknowledge a mistake and try to make it better. It's about saying we're trying to make it through this confusing time, a period of transition and we're going to make mistakes, but we're also listening to you and we're trying to figure out the best way to serve your needs.

Josh: So let's try and get to the point here as we get close to the end of this conversation. Media has traditionally been thought of as a one-way activity. We talk, you listen. We broadcast, we publish, we put films in theaters and you watch and you pay us money or generate value. Clearly now with participatory culture it's not a one way conversation so what does media look like 5 years from now? What's the world of media like in a participatory kind of environment?

Henry: Well I think it probably looks a bit like YouTube, a space where commercial content and amateur content coexists, a space where not only are consumers generating new ideas that bubble up to the top and become part of mass media content, as we have seen in many examples in YouTube, but also the filtering of mass media content, and getting people to pay attention to things that might have slipped their notice. It may also look like Amazon. Amazon's associates program where it monetizes the value of people's grass roots communication. If I talk about a book on my website and I link to Amazon get a percentage of returns from the sale of the book. In fact as an author it's a better deal than my publisher gives me. I think as we move to more TV content online, fans will play the same role as associates to their favorite programs; niche marketers drawing the public in to watch particular episodes or particular programs they might not otherwise pay attention to. In my ideal world they get some return off of that because they are producing part of the value, part of the economic value of the property. The question is now you look at YouTue and its monetization what does YouTube owe those Chinese kids who lipsynched the Back Street Boys and what does it owe LonlyGirl15.

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