October 27, 2006 (2): Jenkins' List

As a result of my regular reading of Confused of Calcutta, I found myself looking at the Executive Summary of the Macarthur Report, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," written by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The basic thrust seems to be a shift of "the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." In other words it is all about "social skills developed through collaboration and networking;" but what are those skills? Here is the list that the Jenkins group compiled:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

What fascinates me about this list, however, is how asocial, if not antisocial, it is. I do not see anything in the list that explicitly addresses the ability to engage in intersubjective communicative actions. Put another way, everything on the list (including Negotiation) is basically content-based. (Yes, that also includes the reduction of Play to problem-solving.) After all, if we are going to be talking about "media literacy," we have to remember that the "media" are just that: the channels through which communication, in all of its intersubjective glory, may be allowed to take place. Somehow or another, we need something on the list that honors Isaiah Berlin: Differing opinions should lead to dialog, but dialog does not have to lead to convergence of opinion. The intersubjectivity is a matter of each side reaching enough understanding to acknowledge, if not honor, the other’s point of view. This is the ultimate social skill for which we must all strive in an age of too many trigger-happy people with the power to end it all with a bang (not a whimper)!