What are the social forces at work behind "Web 2.0" — what’s with all this social networking, why are young people displaying the personal information and images in public — what does this mean to the future of society? How can the mainstream media remain relevant? These are many of the questions we try to understand in our daily explorations on Beet.TV
To find these answers, I visited the MIT campus earlier this week and was extremely fortunate to spend time with Professor Henry Jenkins, who many consider the leading thinker on media convergence. He heads MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and has written a much anticipated book on this subject which will be published this summer titled "Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide."
We will be posting several excerpts of my interview over the next few days. In this first clip, he talks about high school kids as an unprecedented generation of "content creators" — and explores the implications.
(Hey, I was a "content creator" when I was 17 years old growing up in the suburbs. I made a film in 1969 about sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and alienation using a 16mm film camera on black & white film. I just digitized it and it’s turning into a big hit these days on YouTube!)
– – Andy Plesser
Coming Clean: MIT’s Technology Review (part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV
