Henry Jenkins response to Mark Bauerlein

Reading this, Mark, there is very little on which I would disagree here. Anyone who has visited my apartment, where every wall space is filled with a book case, would know that I am a deep and passionate lover of books and of traditional forms of reading. Heck, I've publish 13 books myself and so if I was a "bibliophobe," I would also be a profound hypocrite. And I would certainly want for there to be space for contemplative reading available to every student in America, just as I think there needs to be a way to insure that all Americans have access to networked computers. I stress in my white paper for MacArthur that reading, writing, and traditional research skills are foundational and that new media literacies have to be understood as an expansion of those basic competencies and not a replacement for them. Indeed, one of the first projects our team undertook was to develop a study guide for reading Moby-Dick. We offer some new ways of thinking about the novel, the ways it built on existing texts, the ways it can function as a resource for our own time, but we were pushing teachers to go back and engage with a serious piece of literature as part of the classroom experience of all children.

Having said that, I also believe strongly that young people need to acquire a range of basic skills and competencies dealing with the affordances of new media. There's a danger in turning them loose on their own to develop these skills -- especially given some of the risks that Digital Nation identifies. It's vital that we identify best practices and productive relationships with new media tools and processes and that we model these through the classroom. This is not about introducing computers for tech's sake or doing so because we don't think we can hold their attention otherwise. It is about recognizing that a significant body of research is finding ways that learning is enhanced as young people deal with the resources and opportunities represented by digital media. ...

If our media gets filled with scare stories which model the worst practices, yet refuses to take a close look at the best practices (in informal learning and in the classroom), we don't allow students, parents, and teachers to acquire the skills they need to use these technologies in a productive manner. And that's why I felt Digital Nation was a lost opportunity. We could have made a film which reflected Mark's cautionary voice alongside the folks from the MacArthur Foundation network who see promise in the computer and are modeling productive ways of integrating it into schools. When we set up a false opposition between books and computers, we don't do either side justice. It is inevitable that during a period of profound and prolonged media transition, we veer to one extreme or another, but I'd like to think that there is common ground which allows us to respond to the risks that are identified and also take advantage of the very real opportunities here.