Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Jenkins: "Why Heather Can Write"

Or, how these new online outlets and identities can open new channels of creativity.



In chapter 5 of his book, Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars, Henry Jenkins hands us the idea of the online enhancing the creative process. "Storytellers now think about storytelling in terms of creating openings for consumer participation." (169) We learn of a young girl who, inspired by the Harry Potter Series, decides to create an online community catered to others who enjoy the series as much as she does. Among the social networks and various other websites that are geared towards being an extension of our personal selves, are these websites and message boards that are giving people chances they didn't have before the internet.

Today, anyone who would like to, can write their own story (like those of the Daily Prophet, the website that Heather Lawver created when she was 13) and share it with an online community; a bigger group of peers than a class could ever reach.

Without getting into the debate about what right the reader has to get involved in a story, I would like to focus on the idea of how websites like the Daily Prophet and other message boards, can enhance and add to the online identity. As a text, being able to write and share our ideas on the internet allows us to express a side of ourselves that may not come out in class or among our "real" lives. Creatively, this is an unprecedented situation where we're seeing many writers, most of them young, getting the chance to have peers view and critique their writings. As Jenkins' mentions, this is leading the way for younger, and more mature writers with highly developed text-based online identities. Of course, there are many reasons as to why things like blogs and message boards are bad for our online identities, such as sharing too much and filling up the internet with a lot of crap. But I like to believe that they're (the websites and the writers) are doing a lot to illustrate how important our online identities can be.

Blogs are one of the most common mediums to express oneself online. Websites like Blogger, WordPress, Live Journal, and Tumblr allow us, Digital Native both young and old, to post opinions about anything we may feel like talking about. With a few clicks of a mouse, I was able to create this blog to share my opinions on online identities. I also had another blog where I would post short stories and other writings online so that I could get feedback from others (but then I started thinking that since anyone has access to it, anyone could take my ideas or stories). It was a way for me to express myself through my writings and it is most definitely a part of who I am, online or not.

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