CITE AS: Jenkins, H. (2016). Henry Jenkins on John Fiske. In R. Hobbs (Ed.) Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative (pp. 138 - 152). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Chapter 10
Henry Jenkins on John Fiske
 
John Fiske can be described as the Johnny Appleseed of cultural studies, given the ways that his personal journey as an academic who worked in the United Kingdom, Australia, and finally, North America helped spread and reframe the cultural-studies approach to new generations of scholars. Fiske provides an important bridge between his mentor, the Welsh-born critic and novelist Raymond Williams, and the scholars of my generation, many of whom were Fiske’s students, who helped to adopt a British-based approach to the particulars of U.S. culture. Read together, our story represents one trajectory in the relations between cultural studies and media literacy.

Starting with a strong belief in the critical agency of “ordinary” people, the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies documents the ways in which everyday people create meaning and pleasure through their everyday practices. Media literacy as a movement has sought to ensure that everyone has access to the critical literacies that allow them to meaningfully consume, critique, produce, and—today—participate in the creation of media. One could argue that cultural studies is the theory and media literacy is the practice. We need look no further than “The Core Principles of Media Literacy Education,” published by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE 2011), which insist that the concept of literacy can be applied to a broad range of different forms of media and popular culture, that media content gets actively interpreted by individuals and groups based on local frames of reference, and that media literacy is fundamental to the promotion of active political and civic participation—all concepts that come, at least in part, from the British cultural-studies tradition.

Along with the historian E. P. Thompson, the literary critic Richard Hoggart and the theorist Stuart Hall, Williams is widely acknowledged to be one of the founders of the cultural-studies approach. More than any other essay, Williams’s “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958) set the tone for the British cultural-studies movement. In the essay, Williams offers a more inclusive model of culture, a concept he would describe in Keywords as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1976 76). Here Williams tells us, “culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing itself into the land” (93). Williams’s conception of culture contrasts with that of Matthew Arnold, whose 1869 essay, Culture and Anarchy, had defined culture in terms of “the best knowledge, the best ideas of their times,” seeing the promotion of high cultural values to the general population as the best defense against what he saw as “harsh [and] uncouth” about modern industrial culture (Arnold 1960). Under Arnold, some aspects of human life—the most elevated or perfected aspects, those removed from immediate utilitarian value and from the harshness of a growing machine culture—were worth passing down to the next generation, while others were disposable. Those who embrace Arnold focus on the value they see as intrinsic to “great works,” while those who criticize the tradition focus on what it excludes—including most of what has been written by women, minorities, and those in the developing world, as well as media and popular culture.

Williams’s approach is expansive, embracing the arts and the sciences, the exceptional and the ordinary, the traditional and the emergent. For Williams, culture is at once the stuff of learning—an acquired set of skills and appreciations—and the stuff of experience. Perhaps the essay’s most radical element is the way Williams pits his own lived experience, growing up working-class in the Welsh countryside, against what his own mentors were teaching him at Cambridge: “When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them, as I did ask them, where on Earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see” (1958, 96). The cultural-studies discipline is committed to better understanding the ongoing struggle over what counts as culture and who gets to decide what culture matters.

Williams is at his most moving when he describes what reading and writing meant for his family: “My grandfather, a big hard laborer, wept while he spoke, finely and excitedly, at the parish meeting” (1958, 92), he tells us, while his father, a labor organizer, read through the lines of news stories to identify entrenched economic interests. He talks about the value his people placed on library books and tells us that many more would have gone to college were it not for the financial responsibilities they bore to their families and communities. He describes a visit home after time in college and discusses the tension he felt within himself as he looked at their culture through eyes shaped by formal education: “Now [my eyes] read, they watch, this work we are talking about: some of them quite critically, some with a great deal of pleasure{AU: It doesn’t seem clear what the phrase “this work we are talking about” and what “them” refer to. Can this be made clearer by providing more context or paraphrasing?}. Very well, I read different things, watch different entertainments, and I am quite sure why they are better. . . . But talking to my family, to my friends, talking, as we were, about our own lives, about people, about feelings, could I in fact find this lack of quality we are discussing? I’ll be honest—I looked; my training has done this for me. I can only say that I found as much natural fitness of feeling, as much quick discrimination, as much clear grasp of ideas within that range of experiences as I have found anywhere” (1958, 99). He contrasts this sense of a community eagerly engaged in conversation with the snootiness of the tea shop just outside his university, which taught him in the most painful way possible that some see culture as “the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people” (93). Williams suggests, “If this is culture, we don’t want it” (93). Through such images, Williams conveys his discomfort with the policing of cultural boundaries, the ranking of cultural products, and the dismissal of other people’s cultures. While he is critical of the “cheapjack” quality of the new industrially produced culture, Williams articulates a great distrust of the “directive” impulse in the Cambridge intellectuals who seek to “impose” their cultural assumptions on the unlearned masses. “There are no masses, but ways of seeing people as masses,” Williams writes (96). He also distrusts the anti-intellectual impulses in his own background, the ways that working-class critics dismiss “culture vultures” and “do gooders,” even when doing so cuts them off from resources that might improve the quality of their lives. Something vital is at stake in these struggles over culture, and his goal as an educator was to help people to better articulate their own cultural politics.

“Culture Is Ordinary” was published in 1958, the year I was born. I never knew Williams, heard him speak, or got to talk with him, but I first encountered “Culture Is Ordinary” when doing a directed reading with Fiske at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. When Williams writes about the experience of taking a bus through the mountains to go off to college, I trace my own drive across the Blue Ridge mountains to go to graduate school, although I see myself as perhaps several generations further into the process of cultural, economic, and technological change that Williams describes. I had been raised in Georgia, the son of a construction company owner, the grandson of a sheet-metal worker, and the great-grandson of a dirt farmer. Across three generations, my family had left the farm, moved to the city and then to suburbia, and our class status had shifted along the way. As an upwardly mobile middle-class youth, I had experienced with distaste the trappings of “redneck culture” that still found their way into my home: I wanted nothing to do with that “shit-kicking” bluegrass music my grandparents listen to, and I cringed when they used earthy language to describe themselves and their values. Yet I was also starting to make peace with my roots. When I was heading off to graduate school, my dirt-poor grandfather gave me some money—a small amount for most but a kingly fortune for him—to take with me on my journey. As I stood in his workroom, surrounded by rusty wire and scrap metal he had salvaged by the roadside, not to mention wooden crosses he had carved by hand, he told me about his own first steps away from the family farm when he went away to France during World War I. Despite having only a fourth-grade education, he had marked in the front of his King James Bible the number of times he read it cover to cover. And alongside it, in his desk, could be found his union card, a book of the collected speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a postcard depicting Will Rogers—each a marker of a particular form of grassroots politics that had shaped his worldview. I’ve come to hear some of that progressive politics expressed through the bluegrass music I once held in disdain; now, the twangier, the more atonal, the better. I’ve come to appreciate that my grandmother, who made quilts, was a remix artist who took patches of leftover cloth from the local textile mills and, working with other women, made them into pieces of art that could be used to express their shared joy when a new couple got married or a new baby was brought into the world. I don’t think I ever felt so Southern as I did when I left the South to pursue my education. And so when I first encountered Williams’s account of his struggles to reconcile what he had learned at the family dinner table with what he was being taught at Cambridge, I recognized myself in his conflicts. Through his eyes, I came to a deeper appreciation of who I was and where I had come from.

As a graduate student, I also felt a strange disconnect between what I knew as a fan{AU: Please clarify: media fan? Or a fan of specific types of media?} about the ways that everyday people might critically and creatively engage with media texts and what I was being taught by my own professors at a time when prevailing forms of media theory stressed the power of media texts to suture their readers into a powerful ideological system that always worked against their own interests. And this is the moment when Fiske entered my life. The first time I saw him, I was struck by his broad, toothy grin, the crinkle of his leathery skin, the wicked sparkle in his squinting eyes, and the Akubra hat he was wearing in the frozen wastelands of Iowa City. He entered our lives as “the Man from Down Under”—someone exotic, wild, and untamed, yet it did not take long to discover his gentleness, his modesty, and, above all, his care for his students. When Fiske came to the University of Iowa, he sparked a degree of intellectual excitement I have not experienced since. Every week, more students were showing up at his seminar, eager to learn what for us was a new conceptual framework, drawn from cultural studies that informed his work. Like Williams, Fiske offered us a way to see the world that was critical of inequalities of opportunity and the imposition of cultural hierarchies and yet was hopeful about the prospects for meaningful change and respectful of diverse forms of cultural experience.

Williams had been Fiske’s personal tutor when he was pursuing his B.A. and M.A. in English literature at Cambridge, so it would be hard to imagine a better guide to the British cultural-studies tradition. I was lucky to have studied under Fiske twice—first when he was a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa and second when he was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Like any great mentor, he empowered me to find my own voice, to draw on my own knowledge and experience, and to make my own original contribution to the field. I soaked up everything I could learn from this man and, in the process, absorbed vocabulary, concepts, philosophies, and ideological commitments that have become so deeply enmeshed in my own world view that I am still surprised to come across phrases in his writing that I had thought entirely my own. And my own commitment to media literacy is deeply bound up with the things I learned from him and, through him, from Williams.

When I wrote to Fiske, now long retired, and asked him about his relationship to the concept of media literacy, he stressed that the term was one that he never used directly, but that in retrospect, he now realized that he had been working through ideas about media literacy across his entire career:

I learnt the close reading skills of New Criticism while studying English literature at Cambridge, and soon realized that I wanted to apply them to popular media, television in particular, rather than literature. I had two interlinked aims. One was to show that TV was as multi-layered as poetry and thus worthy of equally serious attention, and the other was to equip “literate” TV readers with the analytic skills to protect themselves against the hegemonic thrust of mass TV. My later work on the active audience grew from evidence that teaching this defensive literacy was less necessary than I had believed. Audiences were already literate in their viewing and had little need of academics like me. They were using their literacy not just defensively but actively in a way that turned a hegemonic text into a subordinate pleasure. They taught me what actual media literacy was all about. (Fiske, personal communication, 2013)

Another way to map these transitions in Fiske’s thinking about what might make one an empowered reader of popular culture is to consider how his work addresses some of NAMLE’s core premises.

Media literacy education expands the concept of literacy (i.e., reading and writing) to include all forms of media. Fiske’s first book, which he wrote with John Hartley, Reading Television (1978) explores the relationship of contemporary mass media to historic notions of literacy and orality. Fiske and Hartley start with the assertion that “television’s customary output may be just as good in its own terms as Elizabethian drama and the nineteenth-century novel were to theirs” (13). Fiske and Hartley apply close reading practices to texts that were radically different in theme, style, and origins to the materials valued by the literature departments where they had trained. At the same time, the two young authors argued for the importance of medium-specific ways of “reading” works in other traditions: “Every medium has its own unique set of characteristics, but the codes which structure the ‘language’ of television are much more like those of speech than of writing. Any attempt to decode a television ‘text’ as if it were a literary text is thus not only doomed to failure but is also likely to result in a negative evaluation of the medium based on its inability to do a job for which it is in fact fundamentally unsuited” (15).

We learn to read literary texts through formal education, while the processes by which we learn to read television are taken for granted because they emerge from everyday, informal interactions with the people around us. Orality was reentering media theory as a concept at this time, thanks to groundbreaking research by Albert B. Lord (1960) and John Goody and Ian Watt ([1962] 1972), among others. Fiske and Hartley built on these ideas to describe television as a “bardic medium” (85), one that seeks to express the consensus beliefs or “common sense” of a community, often involves highly conventional forms of expression that build on (but also creatively rework) existing cultural materials, actively constructs and reproduces core mythologies, and remains popular, in the sense that it is “of the people.” Given this focus on orality, there is a good reason why Fiske and Hartley do not talk here about “media literacies,” but they remain very interested in understanding the processes of interpretation and discrimination through which we make sense of popular programs.

Media literacy education affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages. By the time he wrote Television Culture (1987), Fiske’s perspective had been informed by a growing body of work on media audiences, much of it inspired by Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” (1980). Early on, Fiske tells us, “A text is the site of struggles for meaning that reproduce the conflict of interest between the producers and consumers of the cultural commodity. A program is produced by the industry; the text by its readers” (1987,14). Whereas others saw popular media as appealing to the lowest common denominator, Fiske argues that television texts are valuable for their polysemy, their capacity to yield multiple meanings and pleasures as they get taken up by diverse audiences. While Fiske does not refer to media literacy per se, he does talk about “cultural competence”: “Cultural competence involves a critical understanding of the text and the conventions by which it is constructed, it involves the bringing of both textual and social experience to bear upon the program at the moment of reading, and it involves a constant and subtle negotiation and renegotiation of the relationship between the textual and the social” (1987, 19).

Fiske’s conception of popular readerships differs from the NAMLE principles in a core way: NAMLE emphasizes “individual skills, beliefs, and experiences,” whereas Fiske is interested in the collective dimensions of meaning-making. Fiske writes, “A ‘viewer’ is somebody watching television, making meanings and pleasures from it, in a social situation. This social situation is compounded of both the social relations/experience of the viewer (class, gender, etc.) and of the material, usually domestic situation (which is also a product of his/her social relations) within which television is watched. . . . Viewing television news will be quite different for the woman who is cooking the family meal than for the woman slumped in an armchair in front of the set” (1987,17).

Fiske’s interests in the ways different groups read led him and his students to embrace what he would describe as ethnographic approaches—that is, the qualitative documentation of the diverse contexts within which people engage with media. In this way, Fiske, for example, opened space for the study of fan communities as sites for popular interpretation, discrimination, and production, a path I followed in my first book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), which Fiske edited. Fiske had challenged me to try to write an insider’s account of how fans create their own sets of cultural norms and productive practices. Earlier accounts had often depicted fans as hyperconsumers who were more or less passive and inarticulate, lost in awe of commercial texts that had little value when read against traditional cultural hierarchies, such as those associated with Arnold. Inspired by Williams and Fiske, my work depicts fandom as a subculture whose participants not only produce alternative readings of shared texts but also use mass-media content as raw materials for constructing their own stories, songs, artworks, or videos. I describe fandom as born of a mixture of fascination and frustration: if people were not fascinated, they would not engage so intensely with favored texts, but if they were not frustrated, they would not need to actively appropriate and rework them to speak to their needs and pleasures. In the case of the fans in Textual Poachers, they were female fans of a male-driven action-adventure series who often needed to reclaim characters or themes that were marginalized in the original works. Fiske, in turn, drew on my early writing to help support his accounts of active audiences in Reading the Popular (1989a) and Understanding Popular Culture (1989b). Fiske saw writing as an extension of his role as a teacher, so you can find in his books many traces of the intense exchanges we used to have in his seminar room.

Media literacy education develops informed, reflexive, and engaged participants for a democratic society. In his later writings, Fiske becomes increasingly interested in the relationship between what he calls “Micropolitics” (perhaps best summed up as “the personal is political”) and “Macropolitics” (which is sometimes described as institutionalized politics). Something of that emphasis is expressed in a passage in Understanding Popular Culture, in which Fiske draws a link between Madonna’s music videos and her young fans’ entry into what we today might call Third Wave Feminism: “The teenage girl fan of Madonna who fantasizes her own empowerment can translate this fantasy into behavior, and can act in a more empowered way socially, thus winning more social territory for herself. When she meets others who share her fantasies and freedom there is the beginning of a sense of solidarity, of a shared resistance, that can support and encourage progressive action on the micro-social level” (1989b, 104).

Fiske stops short of describing how this process might fuel political change or how fandom can become a form of activism, yet this passage anticipates today’s growing academic interest in participatory politics. Linda Herrera (2012), for example, interviewed young Egyptian activists to map the trajectory of their involvement with digital media prior to becoming revolutionaries. For many, their point of entry was through recreational use, downloading popular music, trading Hollywood movies, gaming, or sharing ideas through online discussion forums and social-networking sites. As Herrera concludes, “Their exposure to, and interaction with, ideas, people, images, virtual spaces, and cultural products outside their everyday environments led to a substantial change in their mentality and worldview” (343). Such practices involved forms of transgression against government and religious authorities, and these shared experiences led them to understand themselves in collective terms—as a generation that has had developed distinctive cultural and political identities through their engagement with each other through an ever-evolving array of digital platforms. My current research explores these forms of participatory politics as they are taking shape among American youth. For example, the Harry Potter Alliance is a large-scale network of fan activists committed to fighting for human rights and social justice around the world as an extension of the shared love for the world depicted in J. K. Rowling’s popular fantasy series. They have, for example, campaigned to get Warner Brothers, the studio that produces the Harry Potter movies, to shift its chocolate contracts to companies that follow fair trade standards banning exploitative child labor. Undocumented youth fighting for educational and citizenship rights (sometimes referred to as DREAMers because they are potential beneficiaries of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) have deployed metaphors drawn from the superhero genre to describe their own experiences of having to hide their “true identities” in order to avoid deportation. These groups and networks, along with many others, deploy metaphors drawn from popular culture, practices drawn from fan communities, and a range of media technologies to get their messages out and mobilize their supporters, with each representing spectacular examples of critical media literacies in practice.

Most of Fiske’s writings were produced in response to television culture and only peripherally address the dawning of an era of networked computing. Fiske’s final book, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, expresses some optimism that shifts in access to the means of cultural production and circulation would allow more diverse voices to be heard and official truths to be challenged through the creation and spread of “counterknowledge” (1994). His primary example was the use of pirate radio as an alternative communication system within the African American community. Fiske explains, “A hierarchical society will always attempt to control the documentation and distribution of knowledge; the need to contest these attempts become more urgent as the diversity of the society increases. We can make our society one that is rich in diverse knowledges, but only if people strive to produce and circulate them” (p. 238). Skills at reading and creating media, thus, becomes core to political struggles, which, Fiske hopes, may make America a more equal and more diverse culture as it undergoes profound demographic shifts in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, Fiske was skeptical that access to technology alone would achieve these goals: “Technology is proliferating, but not equally: its low-tech and high-tech forms still reproduce older hierarchies, and although it may extend the terrain of struggle and introduce new weapons into it, it changes neither the lineup of forces nor the imbalance in the resources they can command” (1994, 239). Greater access to technologies, Fiske suggests, will not achieve the desired results if people do not acquire the skills to use them in the service of their own interests. Fiske’s approach in Media Matters paves the way for current discussions of the digital divide, which typically describes technological obstacles, especially those concerning access to networked computing, and the participation gap, which has to do with unequal access to the skills, literacies, competencies, and sense of empowerment necessary for full participation. As we’ve broadened access to the means of digital production and circulation, work on digital media and learning needs to focus more on social, cultural, and educational barriers that make it difficult for many to fully enjoy the potentials for active citizenship that some believed might emerge as a result of the digital revolution.
 
Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture
Fiske had difficulty documenting the tactics for audience resistance and transgression that he theorized in his work and had trouble showing the routes that might lead a young Madonna fan into participation in a public demonstration for, say, equal pay for equal work. Today, we do not have to look far to see the explosion of grassroots creative production that constitutes the dominant content of YouTube, that forms the basis of exchanges through social media, that generates millions of Wikipedia entries, or that yields the stories housed in the top fan-fiction archives. As we have tasted what it means to participate within our culture, we’ve seen more and more grassroots movements arguing for our collective right to participate, whether directed against the terms of service on social-networking sites, debates about network neutrality, or struggles over intellectual-property law. At the same time, we are discovering the many diverse forms that participatory culture may take, and we are seeing what happens when diverse communities are brought together through shared media platforms and, in the process, learn from each other.

My white paper “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture” (Jenkins et al. 2006) was written twelve years after Fiske published Media Matters. The Pew Center of Internet and American Life had found that more than half of American teens—and 57 percent of teens online—had produced some form of media content, and roughly a third had circulated that content beyond friends and family. Yet my colleagues and I knew that technological access alone would not be sufficient to ensure that everyone would be able to meaningfully participate in the practices and processes that were shaping contemporary culture. We write, “Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends” (Jenkins et al. 2006, 8).

We did not directly reference Fiske anywhere in this white paper, and yet his spirit, his influence on my intellectual development, can be felt on every page. For example, you can see the legacy of the cultural-studies tradition in our insistence that literacies be understood as social skills and cultural competences rather than as individual capacities and that the end goal of literacy is to empower the public to meaningfully participate in the core institutions and practices of our culture. I had honestly forgotten, until I sat down to write this essay, that Fiske had written about “cultural competences” —no wonder that phrase seemed so right to me as we were refining the white paper’s language. Many accounts of twenty-first-century skills stress those required for the workplace. While we certainly want to broaden economic opportunities for all, our white paper, again inspired by work in cultural studies, stresses the value of such skills in expanding the civic and expressive capacities of grassroots communities, thereby presenting the new media literacies as a means for fostering social change rather than simply integrating students into existing social structures.

We argue that the key changes here are social and cultural, not technological, and that the skills we want to foster might be taught through low-tech as well as high-tech means, ideas informed by Fiske’s sense that people will deploy whatever technologies were available to them as they struggle to articulate their own interests. We can also see here a legacy of Fiske’s contention in Media Matters (1994) that powerful institutions—including educational institutions—tend to promote high-tech standards that are difficult for people with low incomes and limited access to formal education to achieve. There is a wealth of cultural-studies writing behind the argument that while some young people may acquire these new media literacies outside of formal education, those skills that are most greatly valued inside the culture are those that conform to the language of the classroom. Fiske and Williams had both argued for the importance of being attentive to the forces within the culture that worked to value some forms of culture over others and stressed that opportunities for participation should be available to all.

Six years—and much research—later, we now have a much deeper sense of how many different forms of cultural divides exist that work against our efforts to ensure that all people have the opportunity to meaningfully participate in their cultures. These concerns with inequalities of access and participation have extended into subsequent documents in the digital media and learning movement. Consider, for example, a recent MacArthur Foundation–issued report, Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design (Ito et al. 2013). Many of the authors, like myself, come from a cultural- or critical-studies background. The report acknowledges the many different sites where informal learning takes place yet also stresses that many youth are unable to meaningfully identify opportunities for productive engagement without some form of adult mentorship, that many have difficulty bridging what they learn on their own and what they are taught in schools, and that schools fail to effectively supplement and expand the competences{AU: Not “competencies”?} young people bring with them into the classroom. At the same time, the report resists an assimilationist agenda in favor of one that still values diverse forms of knowledge and cultural expression. Williams would have certainly recognized the report’s recognition of the family as a location where informal learning takes place, having described his own home as one that was deeply invested in “the shaping of minds, the learning of new skills, the shifting of relationships, [and] the emergence of different languages and ideas” (1958, 93). Williams would have insisted that what young people learn in these other contexts needs to be respected within schools as a source of distinctive knowledge that carries deep personal and collective values. That sense of respect for the critical literacies of “ordinary people” may be ultimately the most valuable thing that media literacy could take from the cultural-studies tradition.
 
References
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———. 1976. “Culture.” In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 87–93. London: Croom Held.