Web Directions

Very useful Henry Jenkins quote

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• March 25, 2008
• Leave a response

I always find it the most tire­some of con­ver­sa­tion stop­pers when­ever any­one says “Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/Flickr/[insert name of social net­work­ing appli­ca­tion here] is stu­pid. I don’t care what you had for break­fast. I don’t want to find out what my friends are up to over the web etc etc etc.” Boring!

In a nice quote from his sum­mary of his SXSW 2008 Keynote, Henry Jenkins’ words are so much more elo­quent and polite than mine:

Humans do not engage in activ­i­ties that are mean­ing­less. If you think you see peo­ple doing things you find mean­ing­less, look again and try to under­stand what the activ­i­ties mean for them.

He’s actu­ally talk­ing about the activ­i­ties of fans, but I think it goes a long way toward explain­ing just about every­thing I ever find interesting.

4 responses to “Very useful Henry Jenkins quote”:

1. • By:Kay Smoljak
   • March 25th, 2008
   

   Just some honey wheat flakes with milk. But thanks for asking :)

   I’ve read var­i­ous arti­cles that say that social net­work­ing is some­how dan­ger­ous, in that it lets peo­ple feel they are con­nected to oth­ers when in fact they’re not. But I’m not sure I agree — what’s the dif­fer­ence anyway?

2. • By:NathanaelB
   • March 25th, 2008
   

   Great quote — already sent it round the office :-)

3. • By:pat
   • April 5th, 2008
   

   Nice per­spec­tive!

   The quote (and your con­text) reminded me of a similar-​​ish post I came across the other week… in particular:

   “There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongo­ing noise. It helps us get to know peo­ple who would oth­er­wise be just acquain­tances. It makes us feel closer to peo­ple we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to par­tic­i­pate as closely as we’d like.”

4. • By:RaiulBaztepo
   • March 29th, 2009
   

   Hello!
   Very Interesting post! Thank you for such inter­est­ing resource!
   PS: Sorry for my bad eng­lish, I’v just started to learn this lan­guage ;)
   See you!
   Your, Raiul Baztepo

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