Digidave's Quickies

I will try and write more about what Henry Jenkins has fleshed out (time permitted). I love thinking about generations and what defines them. I'll have to read Jenkins' piece. There might be something to it - but I also think it's really easy to look at a generation or two behind you and characterize how they interact with culture as devoid of meaning. It happens all the time.

P.S. Before you read this - turn that racket down!

Henry Jenk­ins riffs on He-Man and other 80s-era action fig­ures, offer­ing a read­ing that starts out as largely char­i­ta­ble but ends up some­where that’s actu­ally quite beautiful:

When I speak to the 20 and 30 some­things who are lead­ing the charge for trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling, many of them have sto­ries of child­hood spent immersed in Dun­geons and Drag­ons or Star Wars, play­ing with action fig­ures or other fran­chise related toys, and my own sus­pi­cion has always been that such expe­ri­ences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the begin­ning, they under­stood sto­ries less in terms of plots than in terms of clus­ters of char­ac­ters and in terms of world build­ing. From the begin­ning they thought of sto­ries as extend­ing from the screen across plat­forms and into the phys­i­cal realm. From the begin­ning they thought of sto­ries as resources out of which they could cre­ate their own fan­tasies, as some­thing which shifted into the hands of the audi­ence once they had been pro­duced and in turn as some­thing which was expanded and remixed on the grass­roots level.

The impe­tus for Jenkins’s gen­er­a­tional med­i­ta­tion (besides an impend­ing dead­line for a keynote) is this io9 piece on “The 10 Most Unfor­tu­nate Mas­ters of the Uni­verse Toys,” which 1) I linked to a ways back on Twit­ter, and 2) is hilar­i­ous. Sample:

Stinkor was an evil skunk. How do we know he was evil? He has the suf­fix “-or” appended to his name. If his name was just “Stink,” he’d be kick­ing back in Cas­tle Greyskull, pound­ing Schlitz with Man-At-Arms and sched­ul­ing bac­carat night with Man-E-Faces.

I love generational study. I am actually born on a cusp. I'm either the very youngest of Gen X or the very oldest of The Millennials - hence my fascination. Check out this NYT article about Gen X reaching their 40's and having a mid-life crisis. I just turned 28. I am old enough to have some familiarty with the cultural icons of Gen X (Say Anything, Billy Idol, etc) but I was just a little too young to have any kind of youthful rebellious connection to them. Nirvana plays a much bigger role in my adolescent nostalgia than anything from the 80's. Still... my fascination continues.