Henry Guy Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

[2] Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder[3] and co-director (with William Uricchio) of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.

A key argument of Jenkins' scholarship here was that vaudeville placed a strong emphasis on virtuoso performance and emotional impact which contrasted sharply with the focus of classical Hollywood cinema on character motivation and storytelling.

This approach would later help shape Jenkins' scholarly appreciation of video games as another rising popular culture medium attracting much criticism.

His academic publications includes work on comics by Brian Michael Bendis, David W. Mack, Art Spiegelman, Basil Wolverton, Dean Motter, amongst others.

Jenkins also 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.

This participatory engagement is seen as increasingly important given the enhanced interactive and networked communication capabilities of digital and internet technologies.

[37] 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.

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Building on his work on participatory culture, Jenkins helped lead Project New Media Literacies (NML), one part of a 5-year $50 million research initiative on digital learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation which announced it in 2006.

[46] NML's aim was to develop instructional materials designed to help prepare young people to meaningfully participate in the new media environment.

This framework guides thinking about how to provide adults and youth with the opportunity to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies, and to explore the transformations and possibilities afforded by these technologies to reshape education.

Since his work on fan studies, which led to his 1992 book Textual Poachers, Jenkins' research across various topics can be understood as a continuum with an overall theme.

This research theme addresses how groups and communities in online & digital media era participatory culture exercise their own agency.

As described in this book, convergence culture arises from digital era post-broadcast media landscape where audiences are fragmented by the proliferation of channels and platforms while media users are more empowered than ever before to participate and collaborate – across various channels and platforms – in content creation and dissemination through their access to online networks and digital interactivity.

(This led to his 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green).

Jenkins' account of the dynamic of traditional mass media, and subsequent passivity of the audience is criticised as simplistic because he overemphasises the virtues of interactivity, without considering the real-life power structures in which users exist.

[61] In his 2014 response, Jenkins rejected these critics' characterization of his work as techno-optimistic or techno-determinist, stressing that the outcomes of current social and technological change are still to be determined.

[56] Nico Carpentier's argument in the special Cultural Studies issue was that what he sees as Jenkins' "conflation of interaction and participation" is misleading: the opportunities for interaction have increased, but the conglomerated and corporate media environment that convergence has both facilitated and come about in, restricts the capacity of users to genuinely participate in the production, or co-production, of content, due to the media systems' logic of commercial gain.

In 2012–3, Carpentier and Jenkins had an extended dialogue which clarified that their perspectives actually had much common ground, leading to their co-authoring of a journal article about the distinctions between participation and interaction, and how the two concepts are tied up with power.

[68] In this account, users become workers and the vast majority of convergence-enabled creative output, by virtue of the profit-driven platforms on which it takes place, can be seen as a byproduct of the profit-imperative.

In contrast to Bratich's and Banet-Weiser's perspectives, in Jenkins' 2014 response to the critical special issue, he wrote that "These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily provide key educational resources, and do not ensure that anyone will listen when groups speak out about injustices they encounter."

[56] Catherine Driscoll, Melissa Gregg, Laurie Ouellette, and Julie Wilson refer to Jenkins' work in the 2011 special issue as part of their challenging of the larger framework of media convergence scholarship.

They argue that the willing submission of the user to the corporate interests fuelling media convergence is also gendered as the logic of convergence, which is, to a large extent, informed by the logic of capitalism, albeit in an online environment, perpetuating the ongoing exploitation of women through a replication of the 'free' labour built into social expectations of women.

Furthermore, Maxwell & Miller argue prevailing discussions of convergence have attended to the micro level of technological progress over the macro level of rampant economic exploitation, through concepts like 'playbour' (labour freely provided by users as they interact with the online world) resulting in a dominant focus on the Global North that ignores the often abhorrent material conditions of workers in the Global South who fuel the ongoing proliferation of digital capitalism.

[73] In his 2014 response to such criticism, Jenkins acknowledged that "My experiences at intervention have tempered some of the exuberance people have identified in Convergence Culture with a deeper understanding of how difficult it will be to make change happen....I have also developed a deeper appreciation for all of the systemic and structural challenges we face in changing the way established institutions operate, all of the outmoded and entrenched thinking which make even the most reasonable reform of established practices difficult to achieve..."[56] In Jenkins' 2014 response to the 2011 special issue, he countered arguments such as Turner's above by stating that while we may not yet know the full extent of the impact of convergence, we are "better off remaining open to new possibilities and emerging models".

[56] He also 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".