Over the past three decades, Dr Henry Jenkins has popularised concepts such as participatory culture, media convergence, trans-media storytelling and spreadability. His research explores the boundary between text and reader, the growth of fan cultures and the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development — one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others.

He introduced a range of social skills and cultural competencies that are fundamental for meaningful engagement in a participatory culture. In the first part of a series with cat.a.lyst, Dr Jenkins traces the evolution of social media .

Concepts like text messaging took off earlier across Asia than they did in the West. That’s a reflection of a culture. You can witness people gathered around street corners having conversations in countries like India. That in some way is your earlier version of social media.

You can picture information travelling from one to the next. So the neighbourhood soon knows about it. That’s the Indian scenario.

Building roots

To some degree, in North America, social media has been about reconnecting people. The people I went to high school with were scattered across the US after we left school. We are now finding our way back together on Facebook. Those connections in a state, village and neighbourhood can maintain the links and use social media to build on them.

The average American moves home every seven years and hence needs technology to provide an infrastructure to connect communities. Alvin Toffler, in his book Future Shock in the 1970s, said that at the rate at which Americans moved, they would stop investing in friends in any great degree. He talked about why they would not invest in a friendship, as they were going to live for just two-three years in any given locality. What is happening instead, as we embrace technology, is that it allows us to carry our friendship system with us wherever we go — something like a turtle carrying its children on its back. For my generation, the connections that were lost over the 20th century are being re-forged. I don’t know what that means to India, with thicker ties to begin with at a local level.

Wider world

In the case of Facebook, we are connecting with people we already know in some way or the other. But in the case of Twitter, the people we connect with are most ones we may never have met, as we engage in conversation with a larger section of people outside of our existing communities.

Research in the US suggests that people on Facebook only engage with people that they already know. I don’t know if that’s true here.

The technology of Facebook seems designed to create a network of your own friends, rather than Twitter, where the hashtag allows you to connect with people randomly.

In America, Twitter is to a large degree used for public or political speech.

There are top down campaigns here like “Selfies with Daughters” to connect the government with families. It will be interesting to see how this pans out here.

Selfie paradigm

Afro-Americans in the US have been using social media to bring attention to racial attacks by policemen.

This is where cultural dimensions come to play — like, what are the political dynamics of a particular society, who will be marginalised, who are the central figures in a society and so on.

In the US, Disneyworld has banned selfie sticks while taking rides, as people were taking them really high and getting caught in ride equipment.

Selfie is a global phenomenon. But the density with which it’s done here seems distinctly Indian in that regard.

When I was speaking to India’s future leaders, I realised that the selfie is such a phenomenon here, in a way that’s much bigger than the US.

comment COMMENT NOW