1. Henry Guy Jenkins III was born on June 4,1958 and is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Henry Jenkins has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education.
Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Henry Jenkins has served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.
Henry Jenkins' media studies scholarship has focussed on several specific forms of media - vaudeville theater, popular cinema, television, comics, and video games - as well as an aesthetic and strategic paradigm, transmedia, which is a framework for designing and communicating stories across many different forms of media.
Henry Jenkins' interest in vaudeville theater and popular cinema was an early focus of his research career - his Ph.
Henry Jenkins' approach was partly inspired by cultural commentators who believed that early cinema was unfairly treated by skeptical commentators of its era because it was a rising new popular culture medium.
Henry Jenkins, long a fan of comics, is a scholar of the medium and it continues to be one of the key topics of his academic writing and speaking.
In December 2015, it was reported by Microsoft Research New England's Social Media Collective, that Henry Jenkins was working on new book focused on comics.
Henry Jenkins brings a humanist interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on, for instance, cultural studies and literary studies.
Henry Jenkins has called for a culturally focused pedagogical response to these issues.
Henry Jenkins' views criticizing theories that video games depicting violence cause people to commit real-world violence have been described in mainstream video game publications such as Next Generation, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer magazines.
Henry Jenkins has emphasized that transmedia is not a new phenomena - ancient examples can be found in religion, for example - but the capabilities of new internet and digital technologies for participatory and collective audience engagement across many different media platforms have made the approach more powerful and relevant.
Henry Jenkins emphasises that Transmedia storytelling can be used to create hype for a franchise, in Convergence Culture, he argues that The Matrix-movies, comics and video-games is an example of this phenomenon.
Henry Jenkins has described the creative social phenomena arising from as participatory culture and is considered one of the main academics specializing in this topic - see, for instance, his 2015 book Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics co-authored with Mimi Ito and danah boyd.
Henry Jenkins has highlighted the work of media scholar John Fiske as a major influence, particularly in this area of participatory culture.
Henry Jenkins has described himself as an "aca-fan", a term that first gained currency in the early 1990s that he is credited with helping to popularize more widely to describe an academic who consciously identifies and writes as a fan.
In 2016, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, a book co-authored by Henry Jenkins and based on the work of Civic Paths and MAPP, was published.
Henry Jenkins argues that convergence represents a fundamental change in the relationship between producers and consumers of media content.
Henry Jenkins argued that his critics confuse interactivity and participation.
Henry Jenkins countered that there has been a significant level of acknowledging the broader context of offline power structures throughout his scholarship.
Henry Jenkins argues that as convergence is "a crucial element to the logic of capitalism," the democratisation of creative capacity that has been enabled by media convergence, through platforms such as YouTube, serves a commercial purpose.
However, Henry Jenkins agreed too that his original conception of participatory culture could be overly optimistic about the possibilities of convergence.
Henry Jenkins suggested that the revised phrasing of 'more participatory culture,' which acknowledges the radical potential of convergence without pessimistically characterising it as a tool of "consumer capitalism [that] will always fully contain all forms of grassroots resistance".