Henry Jenkins Quotations

No academic is going to know these books half as well as the fans that will be gathering.

What's exciting about this (symposium) is the total fusion of fan and academic discussions. That's a breaking down of the walls that hasn't occurred in many other places.

Social connectivity, creativity and learning take place through these various media-related experiences.

When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves

That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending...The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?

Hello. My name is Henry. I am a fan. Somewhere in the late 1980s’, I got tired of people telling me to get a life. I wrote a book instead

Piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers.

...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.

Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers.

From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media - where old and new media converge by involving fans - is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator - or the brands that back them.

In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public.

We want to raise a generation of kids who have a mouse in one hand and a book in the other,

Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.

The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a game is it's too easy.