Of all of the changes in the new media environment over the past two decades, perhaps the biggest has been a shift in how media content circulates - away from top-down corporate controlled distribution and into a still emerging hybrid system where everyday people play an increasingly central role in how media spreads. Cultural Studies has historically been centered around issues of production and reception and has had much less to say about circulation. What issues emerge when we put the process of grassroots (often unauthorized) circulation at the center of our focus? How does it change our accounts of the relationships between mass media and participatory culture? How might it shake up existing models of viral media and web 2.0? This far-reaching talk, based on a forthcoming book authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, offers snapshots of a culture-in-process, a media ecology still taking shape, suggesting what it means not only for the futures of entertainment but also of civic life.

Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.