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Convergence Culture

Page history last edited by Elizabeth Burow-Flak 14 years, 6 months ago

Essays in response to Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

 

Go to our class-created directory of essays for musings on Harry Potter, American Idol, video games, popular films, the Obama inauguration, the next generation of ipods, children, and more.

 

As a class, we have studied Jenkins' book as a means to address the new literacies new media demand, and also to address what convergence culture means for literature--for reading, writing, and story or other forms of imaginative expression--as we know it.  This book takes the place of other books that we have used to explore new media and literacy in previous semesters, namely David Bennahum's Extra Life: Coming Of Age in Cyberspace (1998), Douglass Rushkoff's Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids (1999), and Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Actually Makes Us Smarter (2005), the object of a class blog in previous semesters.

 

Jenkins defines convergence culture as situations where three things occur: 1) old and new media come together, 2) the culture is participatory, and 3) there are unprecedented interchanges between those who produce the media and those who consume it.  He opens the second edition (2008) with the example of the photo of Osama Bin Laden from the Bert is Evil website, a humor site created by then-high school student Dino Ignacio, and now mirrored  widely on the web, that features photos of Sesame Street's Bert photoshopped with any number of villains or villainous activities (with Joseph Stalin, for example, with Klu Klux Klan members, at the JFK assassination, or throwing pies at Bill Gates).  When the photo of Bert with Osama Bin Laden showed up on CNN in collage-style anti-American posters that protestors were waving in Bangladesh (the printer who had scanned the web had evidently not known who Bert was), the Children's Television Workshop protested the abuse of their character and, although there was no one against whom to act lucratively, nonetheless threatened legal action.  The incident resulted in amusement and also speculation on the unpredictability of information and how it will be used as it increasingly becomes available.

 

Jenkins' examples in the book are extended; discussing the fan culture surrounding  Survivor and American Idol, respectively, he sees them as examples of collective intelligence, as defined by Pierre Lévy, and "affective economics," in which advertisers glean information from consumers, often about the content of media they sponsor, and tailor advertising to them.  Jenkins further discusses The Matrix films, games, and other media (for example, the Animatrix cartoons) as examples of transmedia storytelling, in which consumers who wish to "look deep" are encouraged or even required to consult multiple sources to get the entire story.  As licensing, which restricts the ways that characters, images, or a storyline can be used, gives way to co-creation, Jenkins argues, the stage will be set for still more  transmedia experiences that, right now, cater to youth but tend to leave older generations and more casual viewers mystified, and are turning those who we once considered experts--critics and academics--to mere participants in the growing stories.  In relation to the widespread practice of amateur film making, Jenkins explores some of the quality work that has been produced in response to the Star Wars films and analyzes producers' attempts to either prohibit, encourage (but still control), or allow this activity that very much qualifies as remix culture, in William Gibson's words, to exist.  In relation to fan fiction, Jenkins examines the online communities, often created by children, that surround the Harry Potter books, examining Warner Bros' challenges to them in relation to attempts to ban the books themselves and the efforts of groups such as the ACLU to defend children's right to read them, but not to write about them.  In relation, finally, to the past two presidential elections, Jenkins posits that our work primarily with entertainment media is beginning to spill over into politics, and that photoshopped photos of political candidates just a bit more serious than the Bert with Bin Laden photos or the Billiam the Snowman question from the 2007 Democratic presidential debates are the equivalent to political cartoons or writing letters to the editor.  

 

As a class, we have lots to say about media convergence in our own lives, from its existence in children's or other video and computer games, film, the Harry Potter books, and the election of Barack Obama to WWE wrestling, Lord of the Rings, the ipod revolution, and more.  The essays housed here have been drafted once and revised in our classroom space in coursevu before migrating to this more public space.  Consider this collection of essays as a manifestation of our collective intelligence, honed and polished so as to share our expertise as others.

 

 

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