More of Henry Jenkins

Queer youth in Rural America, prt. 2

source : http://henryjenkins.org/index.html

After reading the first part of the intervieuw with Mary L. Gray (as described in my previous post) i also rode the second part about queer youth in Rural America.  In this part she specifies the 'live and let live'- principle: do your thing and don't care what other people do. But Gray even added one word more to this sentence: quietly.

So now we deal with the following principle: live and let live, quietly. With this she interfers to the queer youth in rural america, that to some point homosexuality is allowed as long that it doesnt affect the public life. The difficult thing about homosexuality in the rural parts of America is that its difficult to have the homosexual identitity without losing your other identity, the one of communitymember. It is necessary to remind local communities thar their queer kids are still valued local sons and daughters.

Mary L. Gray talks all the time about Rural America, but how big is this part actually?

William Howarth writes in his article 'The Value of Rural Life in American Culture' that 75 percent of the United States' inhabitants live in suburban and urban areas, whereas cities occupy only 2 percent of the country. Rural areas occupy the remaining 98 percen, so the study that Gray is doing on researching the homosexual youth in america is from a bigger importance than we expected.

Democracy, big brother style. 

source: http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/democracy_big_brother_style_1.html#more

In this article Jenkins links the voting from reality television to the voting on elections. In 2006 some people claimed that there were more voters for Idols that year than for the presidential elections. Jenkins remarks that there weren't more voters for Idols, but that a lot of people used multiple votes. Later on he talks more specific about Big Brother. People gossip a lot, even if they don't know eachother very good (through the internet for example). Jenkins points out that the bonds that get formed while gossiping are even more important then the subject. If you participate in Big Brother you actually allow the whole country to gossip about you. Jenkins lines a few cases of houseguests from big brother and how they persuade the people at home not to vote them away. Later in the article he talks about the VFTW-principle: Vote For The Worst, a  syndrome that come up in Idols, and that has now his consecuences in Big brother. He names the case of Chicken George and how he tries to persuade the people to vote him back in the house ;

the link with democracy is that people cannot vote anymore now for Big Brother. The were allowed to do it in the first season, but then all the coloured charachters where voted out as first so that in the and there were only the more boring people in the house. Now the people in the big brother house vote and the people at home can only decide little things. A more specific example where politic and  reality tv are linked are in China, where in the chines version of Idols the people at home could vote for the first time on who they want with a lot of candidates. Jenkins ends his article with the following words : But then, they seem to take democracy more seriously in other parts of the world than we do in the United States.