Henry had me at Hello

Henry Jenkins is my favorite academic working on the issues of media and online and how it intersects with our lives. OK, danah boyd too. (When I saw danah and Jenkins speak at YPulse, Anastasia Goodstein's fab Youth Culture conference last July, it was heaven.)

So no surprise that the high point of my trip to SXSW this month was the opening remarks by Henry Jenkins.

Here are some highlights:

• He discussed a book called Bowling Alone which made the argument that the 1950s and 60s damaged our society. Between corporate transfers, divorce, television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values created a breakdown in civil society as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. But the thing that's bringing it together again? The Internet. Regardless of all the naysayers who fear that it's isolating us.
• That most adults are in a moral panic and have started a trend he called “The Dumbest Generation.” That adults not clear on what’s happening online and in social networks, so they are in a “moral panic.” That’s when you stop asking questions and assume you already know the answers. Jenkins encourages us to have different starting point. Namely to start with the premise that people (and kids) aren’t idiots.
• That education and business do a miserable job of capturing the collective intelligence of individuals. That professionals go to school and learn huge amounts of information - consider doctors and nurses and teachers - but on the job they are only using miniscule amounts of information at a time. That we need to design systems that allow that info to be accessed by the collective organization.
• That the skills required to prepare you for life are not being taught in school where the teacher sits at the front of the class and downloads information in a one-way dialog and then rote information is memorized and regurgitated back. That now we are living in an era of collective intelligence. And for once, not everyone needs to know everything. So education needs to teach us how to pool and gather knowledge and work collectively to find solutions. And unfortunately we are still doing individual testing and knowledge acquisition.

There was so much more. And there always is with Jenkins. It's truly a gift to be able to sit and spew all of these incredible insights without any pause.

Here's a short clip: