Tech.Pop.Japan

A panel discussion about the role of pop culture in the new- media age. The introduction is by Professor Henry Jenkins, head of the Comparative Media Studies Programme and well known from his investigation into the way in which people integrate (new) media into their everyday lives. Under the title ‘Popular Culture in an Age of Media Convergence’ and accompanied by a multimedia extravaganza of images and sounds, Jenkins investigates contemporary developments in which the makers of popular culture and its consumers start to converge. The advent of the digital media, especially Internet, gives the viewer a way of archiving, commenting on, transforming and returning in a new form his favourite programmes, music or whatever – and as such it shapes the malleability of pop culture. Jenkins puts these developments into a broader historic context, adds his own observations about the challenges and dangers of these developments and focuses this all on the Japanese situation. This will be followed by a round-table discussion on the same theme with Sato Dai, Masuyama Hiroshi and JC Herz, chaired by Janet Abrams.