1. Interactive Audiences?
The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans
Henry Jenkins
Jianwei Zhang
308111893

3. • New tools and technologies enable consumers to
archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate
media content;
• A range of subcultures promote Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
media production, a discourse that shapes how
consumers have deployed those technologies;
• Economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated
media conglomerates encourage the flow of images,
ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels
and demand more active modes of spectatorship.
Participatory Culture

4. Page  4
What is Collective Intelligence?
• According to Pierre Levy (1997)
• It is a form of universally distributed
intelligence, constantly enhanced,
coordinated in real time, and resulting in the
effective mobilization of skills.
• The basis and goal of Collective Intelligence is
the mutual recognition and enrichment of
individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or
hypostatized communities.

5. What is Collective Intelligence?
• Levy’s initial premise is based on the notion of
a universally distributed intelligence.
• No one knows everything, everyone knows
something, all knowledge resides in humanity.
There is no transcendent store of knowledge
and knowledge is simply the sum of what we
know.

6. Cosmopedia
• New “knowledge space”– self-organized groups
• The new knowledge communities will be voluntary,
temporary, and tactical affiliations, defined through
common intellectual enterprises and emotional
investments.
• Members may shift from one community to another
as their interests and needs change, and they may
belong to more than one community at the same
time.
• They are held together through the mutual
production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge.

7. Cosmopedia
• Online Fan communities
• Memberships <= affinities
• Fandoms: virtual communities
“imagined” & “imagining”
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=sV7741jTOHc

8. Cosmopedia
• Early Science Fiction Fandom:
Informal postal network—circulate letters and
amateur publications
Conventions facilitated the face-to-face
contact between fans from across the country
and around the world
• Fans were early adopters of digital
technologies

9. How Computers Changed Fandom
• New digital environment increases the speed of fan
communication, resulting in “just in time fandom”
(Matthew Hills).
• The digital media also alters the scope of
communication.
=>Fandom becomes much more effective as a platform
for consumer activism.
• The speed and frequency of communication may
intensify the social bonds within the fan community.

10. Fan Production in Digital Environment
• Fanzine transformation: print=> digital
• New forms: Photoshop collage
mp3s of fan-generated music (filk)
Amateur film and video
• World Wide Web becomes a powerful
distribution channel of fan production

11. Photoshop collage

12. Knowledge Culture Meets Commodity Culture
• “The distinctions between authors and
readers, producers and spectators, creators
and interpretations will blend to form a
reading-writing continuum, which will extend
from the machine and network designers to
the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain
the activities of the others” (Levy, 1997)
• Room for participation and improvisation are
being built into new media franchises.

13. Marketing in an Interactive Environment
• “Marketing in an interactive world is a
collaborative process with the marketer
helping the consumer to buy and the
consumer helping the marketer to sell.”
(Peppers,1999 )
• “permission-based marketing”
• “relationship marketing”
• “viral marketing”

14. • Copyright issue
fansub groups
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=xdTqQh4fz3g

15. Reference
• Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in
Cyberspace (Cambridge: Perseus, 1997)
• Don Peppers, Introduction, in Seth Godon, Permission Marketing: Turning
Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers (NewYork: Simon and
Schuster, 1999)
• Henry Jenkins, Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media
Fans, Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2006)

16. Thank you ^_^