March 22, 2012
Dean's Open Forum: One School, One Book
Annenberg Room 207, 12 noon | |
USC Annenberg is pleased to announce the inaugural book in the new all-school reading series: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, by USC Annenberg faculty member Henry Jenkins.
One School, One Book is a program designed to bring together members of the USC Annenberg community in a common experience of reading, interpreting, discussing and debating one book that highlights issues and questions that are important to scholars and practitioners across the school.
We are calling on all ASCJ students to read and discuss Convergence Culture this year, in preparation for a special panel discussion featuring Jenkins, Dean Ernest J. Wilson III and graduate students representing his research on participatory cultures and learning, including aspects of his work on fan cultures, transmedia entertainment, new media literacies, and civic media.
The discussion will take place Thursday, March 22 at 12 noon in Annenberg Room 207. RSVP requested, click here to register.
To access the book:
- Kindles loaded with Convergence Culture can be checked out for one week through the Department of Web Technologies in ASC 103.
- Copies of Convergence Culture are available on reserve in Leavey Library. Ask for the book by name, listed under course number "COMM 100."
- Order copies from USC Bookstore.
- Buy the paperback or e-book edition from Barnes and Noble.
- Buy the paperback or e-book edition from Amazon.
From Henry Jenkins' official weblog, "Confessions of an Aca-Fan":
Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts -- media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide returns to [the] question of media audiences and participatory cultures at a moment where fans and fan-like activities are absolutely central to the way the culture industries operate. At all levels, the assumption is that consumers will become active participants, but there is widespread dispute about the terms of our participation. We are seeing enormous experimentation into the potential intersections between commercial and grassroots culture and about the power of living within a networked society. At the same time, the media industries are struggling to keep up with these changes, issuing contradictory responses out of different divisions within the same companies. Convergence Culture was designed as a public intervention into this situation, trying to help both consumers and producers understand the changes which are occurring in their relationship.
Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, and Education and chief advisor to the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a member of the USC Annenberg faculty, Jenkins has launched the New Media Literacies Project which seeks to equip young people with the necessary skills to navigate through the emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.
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