Notes for Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
Key concepts: adhocracy, blogging, collective intelligence, consumption communities, digital native, digitization, knowledge communities, monitorial citizen, shared knowledge.
At the core of convergence culture, the ontological status of collective intelligence seems focused on human groups, representing a mutation of the unary, expert knowledge of liberal humanist subject, recalling Lyotard's point that for modernist science the receiver does not matter, to which, through texts and technology, media studies, and embodied cognitive science, the inhuman (thinking of Lyotard), machine, technological, cyborg components, are brought into scope as well.
Related theorists: Duncombe, Feenberg, Habermas, Lessig, Lévy, Manovich, Negroponte.
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
“Worship at the Altar of Convergence”
A
New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change
(2)
Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide,
where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of
the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in
unpredictable ways.
(2) This book is about the relationship
between three concepts – media convergence, participatory culture,
and collective intelligence.
Focus is on cultural shift in consumer behavior rather than functions of technological devices.
(3) I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.
At the core of convergence culture, the ontological status of collective intelligence seems focused on human groups, representing a mutation of the unary, expert knowledge of liberal humanist subject, recalling Lyotard point that for modernist science the receiver does not matter, to which, through texts and technology, media studies, and embodied cognitive science, the inhuman (thinking of Lyotard), machine, technological, cyborg components, are brought into scope as well.
Jenkins names collective intelligence the collective process involving humans collaborating along with information technologies, together consuming and creating knowledge.
(4) Consumption has become a collective process – and that's what this book means by collective intelligence, a term coined by French cyberneticist Pierre Lévy. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.
Convergence Talk
The
Prophet of Convergence
(10)
If Wired
magazine
declared Marshall McLuhan the patron saint of the digital revolution,
we might well describe the late MIT political scientist Ithiel de
Sola Pool as the prophet of media convergence. Pool's Technologies
of Freedom (1983)
was probably the first book to lay out the concept of convergence as
a force of change within the media industries.
(11) New media
technologies enabled the same content to flow through many different
channels and assume many different forms at the point of reception.
Pool was describing what Nicholas Negroponte calls the transformation
of “atoms into bytes” or digitization.
(12)
I want to describe some of the ways that convergence thinking is
reshaping American popular culture and, in particular, the ways it is
impacting the relationship between media audiences, producers, and
content.
(12) The world of media fandom has been a central theme
of my work for almost two decades – an interest that emerges from
my own participation within various fan communities as much as it
does from my intellectual interests as a media scholar.
The Black Box Fallacy
Good distinction between delivery technologies and media.
(13) Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced: media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the media. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.
Compare this position based on Gitelman two levels to how Sterne articulates media.
(13-14) To define media, let's turn to historian Lisa Gitelman, who
offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a
medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a
medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural
practices that have grown up around that technology. Delivery systems
are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural
systems.
(14-15) Much contemporary discourse about convergence
starts and ends with what I call the Black Box Fallacy. . . . Part of
what makes the black box concept a fallacy is that it reduces media
change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels
we are considering here.
(15) The perpetual tangle of cords that
stands between me and my “home entertainment” center reflects the
degree of incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the
various media technologies.
(15-16) Media convergence is more than
simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship
between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and
audiences. Convergence alters the logic by which media industries
operate and by which media consumers process news and entertainment.
Keep this in mind: convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint.
There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media
into our homes.
(16) Fueling this technological convergence is a
shift in patterns of media ownership. Whereas old Hollywood focused
on cinema, the new media conglomerates have controlling interests
across the entire entertainment industry.
(16) In turn, media
convergence impacts the way we consume media.
The
Cultural Logic of Media Convergence
(17)
Entertainment content isn't the only thing that flows across multiple
media platforms. Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies,
desires also flow across media channels.
(17-18) The American
media environment is now being shaped by two seemingly contradictory
trands: on the one hand, new media technologies have lowered
production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available
delivery channels, and enabled consumers to archive, annotate,
appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. At
the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the
ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of
multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the
entertainment industry.
(18) Convergence, as we can see, is both a
top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven
process.
(18) Convergence requires media companies to rethink old
assumptions about what it means to consume media, assumptions that
shape both programming and marketing decisions.
(19) Extension,
synergy, and franchising are pushing media industries to embrace
convergence. For that reason, the case studies I selected for this
book deal with some of the most successful franchises in recent media
history. Some (American
Idol,
2002, and Survivor,
2000) originate on television, some (The
Matrix,
1999, Star
Wars,
1977) on the big screen, some as book (Harry
Potter,
1998), and some as games (The
Sims,
2000), but each extends outward from its originating medium to
influence many other sites of cultural production.
(19-20) Chapter
1, which focuses on Survivor,
and chapter 2, which centers on American
Idol,
look at the phenomenon of reality television. . . . Survivor
spoiling
will be read here as a particularly vivid example of collective
intelligence at work.
(20) On the other hand, chapter 2 examines
American
Idol from
the perspective of the media industry, trying to understand how
reality television is being shaped by what I call “affective
economics.”
(20)
Strikingly, in both cases, relations between producers and consumers
are breaking down as consumers seek to act upon the invitation to
participate in the life of the franchises.
(20-21) Chapter 3
examines The
Matrix franchise
as an example of what I am calling transmedia
storytelling.
. . . Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully
experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of
hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media
channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion
groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time
and effort will come away with a richer entertainment
experience.
(21) Chapter 4 deals with Star
Wars fan
filmmakers and gamers, who are actively reshaping George Lucas's
mythology to satisfy their own fantasies and desires. Fan cultures
will be understood here as a revitalization of the old folk culture
process in response to the content of mass culture. Chapter 5 deals
with young Harry
Potter fans
who are writing their own stories about Hogwarts and its students. In
both cases, these grassroots artists are finding themselves in
conflict with commercial media producers who want to exert greater
control over their intellectual property.
(21) Chapter 5 extends
this focus on the politics of participation to consider two specific
struggles over Harry
Potter:
the conflicting interests between Harry
Potter fans
an Warner Bros., the studio that acquired the film rights to J. K.
Rowling's books and teachers who have seen them as a means of
encouraging young readers.
(22) Chapter 6 will turn from popular
culture to public culture, applying my ideas about convergence to
offer a perspective on the 2004 American presidential campaign,
exploring what it might take to make democracy more
participatory.
(22-23) convergence culture represents a shift in
the ways we think about our relations to media, that we are making
that shift first through our relations with popular culture, but that
the skills we acquire through play may have implications for how we
learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect with
other people around the world.
Another narrative that takes surface enjoyment of postmodernism over depth for granted, yet offering more degrees of freedom due to the interaction between consumers and producers.
(23) Increasingly, the digital divide is giving way to concern about
the participation gap. . . . As long as the focus remains on access,
reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk
about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and
practices.
(23) Most of the people depicted in this book are early
adopters. In this country they are disproportionately white, male,
middle class, and college educated. . . . These elite consumers exert
a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because
advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold
their attention. Where they go, the media industry is apt to follow;
where the media industry goes, these consumers are apt to be found.
Right now, both are chasing their own tails.
1
Spoiling Survivor
The
Anatomy of a Knowledge Community
(25)
Survivor
is
television for the Internet age—designed to be discussed,
dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued.
Spoiling as Collective Intelligence
Of emergent cyberspace knowledge, collective intelligence in producer knowledge communities, such as within Sourceforge, enact Linus Law that given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, solving technical problems; from consumer orientation its consequence is political action upon media producers.
(26-27) On the Internet, Pierre Lévy argues, people harness their individual expertise toward shared goals and objectives: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.” . . . And this organization of audiences into what Lévy calls knowledge communities allows them to exert a greater aggregate power in their negotiations with media producers. . . . He suggests, however, that collective intelligence will gradually alter the ways commodity culture operates.
Difference between collective intelligence and shared knowledge articulated by Levy.
(27) Lévy draws a distinction between shared knowledge, information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group, and collective intelligence, the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question.
Compare Levy to Feenberg, suggesting that while essential to democratic citizenship, consumer-oriented knowledge communities, even when spoiling the government rather than television networks, are suboptimal in comparison to producer developer communities, because expert paradigm restricts critique whereas well organized, distributed production can leverage many well-informed dilettantes (OGorman).
(28-29) We are experimenting with new
kinds of knowledge that emerge in cyberspace. Out of such play,
Pierre Lévy believes, new kinds of political power will emerge which
will operate alongside and sometimes directly challenge the hegemony
of the nation-state of the economic might of corporate capitalism.
Lévy sees such knowledge communities as central to the task of
restoring democratic citizenship.
(29) Imagine the kinds of
information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil the
government rather than the networks. . . . I would argue that one
reason more Americans do not participate in public debates is that
our normal ways of thinking and talking about politics require us to
buy into what we will discuss later in this chapter as the expert
paradigm: to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or,
more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for
you.
Images from Space
No moral judgment on collective intelligence hacking email.
(36) Sometimes, it takes a little effort. The Ellipsis Brain Trust tracked down the name of the person who designed the CBS Survivor Web site, hacked into their hotmail account, and found a single entry, a list of URLs that were to be acquired immediately, sixteen in all, each bearing the name of a man or a woman. (There are sixteen contestants on each series of Survivor.) From there, the members of the EBT divided the listed names and began to investigate to see if they were real people.
“Gated
[Knowledge] Communities”
(38)
One question Lévy never fully addresses is the scale on which these
knowledge communities may operate.
Contested Information
The
Evil Pecker and His Minions
(48)
[Mark] Burnett like to talk about Survivor
as
a psychological experiment to see how people would react under
extreme circumstances. Was he also playing an experiment with his
audience to watch how an information society would respond to
misdirection?
Collective
Intelligence and the Expert Paradigm
(52)
We might understand this dispute in terms of the distinction between
Pierre Lévy's notion of collective intelligence and what Peter Walsh
has described as “the expert paradigm.” . . . The expert paradigm
requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can
master.
(53) Second, Walsh argues that the expert paradigm creates
an “exterior” and “interior”; there are some people who know
things and others who don't.
(53) Third, the expert paradigm,
Walsh argues, uses rules about how you access and process
information, rules that are established through traditional
disciplines. By contrast, the strength and weakness of a collective
intelligence is that it is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly.
Expert paradigm versus collective intelligence for knowledge communities important for comparing notions of subjectivity; cathedral versus bazaar for software development fits.
Interesting point about totalitarian dimension potential, like a dishonest merchant in the bazaar compared to the lawfulness of the superstore.
(54) Fourth, Walsh's experts are credentialized.
(55) Lévy speaks
about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations;
yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without
regard to anyone else's preferences holds a deeply totalitarian
dimension.
Can fetishism of sourced information instead of puzzle-solving cleverness also serve as an indicator of post-postmodern subjectivity?
(55)
Spoiling—at least within Survivor
fandom—has
now moved decisively from a game of puzzle-solving to one based on
revelation of sourced information.
(56) As spoiling has moved more
and more into the public eye, it has moved from a fun game that Mark
Burnett occasionally liked to play with a small segment of his
audience to a serious threat to the relationship he wanted to
construct with the mass audience of his series.
(57-58) Yet, fans
also exploited convergence to create their own points of contact.
They were looking for ways to prolong their pleasurable engagement
with a favorite program, and they were drawn toward the collaborative
production and evaluation of knowledge.
2
Buying
into American Idol
How We Are Being Sold
on Reality Television
(59)
Who would have predicted that reality television series, such as
Survivor
(2000)
and American
Idol (2002),
would turn out to be the first killer application of media
convergence—the big new thing that demonstrated the power the lies
at the intersection between old and new media?
“Impress Me”
Lovemarks and Emotional Capital
Zappers, Casuals, and Loyals
Talk among Yourselves!
How Gossip Fuels Convergence
Contesting the Vote
3
Searching
for the Origami Unicorn
The Matrix and Transmedia
Storytelling
What Is the Matrix?
“Synergistic Storytelling”
Collaborative Authorship
The Art of World-Making
Additive Comprehension
4
Quentin
Tarantion's Star Wars?
Grassroots
Creativity Meets the Media Industry
Folk Culture, Mass Culture, Convergence Culture
“Dude, We're Gonna Be Jedi!”
“The 500-Pound Wookiee”
Design Your Own Galaxy
Where Do We Go from Here?
5
Why
Heather Can Write
Media Literacy and the Harry
Potter Wars
Hogwarts and All
Rewriting School
Defense against Dark Arts
Muggles for Harry Potter
What Would Jesus Do with Harry Potter?
6
Photoshop
for Democracy
The New Relationship between
Politics and Popular Culture
(217)
Who would have imagined that Donald Trump could emerge as a populist
spokesman, or that sympathetic images of corporate control could fuel
a movement to reclaim democracy? A curious mix of cynicism and
optimism, the video made Democrats laugh at the current
administration and then rally to transform it.
Viral marketing is just-in-time.
(217-218) Interviewed a few weeks before the election, Garrett LoPorto, a senior creative consultant for True Majority, said that the core of viral marketing is getting the right idea into the right hands at the right time. . . . True Majority's goal was to get these ideas into the broadest possible circulation. To do that, they sought to create images that are vivid, memorable, and evocative. And most important, the content had to be consistent with what people more or less already believed about the world.
Collective intelligence powered monitorial citizen replaces individualized informed citizen.
(219) In each case, entrenched institutions are taking their models from grassroots fan communities, reinventing themselves for an era of media convergence and collective intelligence. So why not apply those same lessons to presidential politics? . . . What they are talking about is a shift in the public's role in the political process, bringing the realm of political discourse closer to the everyday life experiences of citizens; what they are talking about is changing the ways people think about community and power so that they are able to mobilize collective intelligence to transform governance; and what they are talking about is a shift from the individualized conception of the informed citizen toward the collaborative concept of a monitorial citizen.
“The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
(222)
Trippi celebrates what he sees as the “empowerment age” when
average citizens challenge the power of entrenched institutions: “If
information is power, then this new technology—which is the first
to evenly distribute information—is really distributing
power.”
(222) The new political culture—just like the new
popular culture—reflects the pull and tug of these two media
systems: one broadcast and commercial, the other narrowcast and
grassroots. New ideas and alternative perspectives are more likely to
emerge in the digital environment, but the mainstream media will be
monitoring those channels, looking for content to co-opt and
circulate.
(223) If we focus on the technology, the battle will be
lost before we even begin to fight. We need to confront the social,
cultural, and political protocols that surround the technology and
define how it will get used.
Culture jamming versus blogging reflects movement from revolutionary digital culture paradigm, for example Negativland, to convergence culture.
(225) We might understand the transition by thinking a bit about the
difference between “culture jamming,” a political tactic that
reflected the logic of the digital revolution, and blogging, which
seems emblematic of convergence culture.
(226) The old rhetoric of
opposition and co-optation assumed a world where consumers had little
direct power to shape media content and faced enormous barriers to
entry into the marketplace, whereas the new digital environment
expands the scope and reach of consumer activities.
Grassroots convergence essence of blogging as summarizing and linking rather than traditional authorship; measure this idealization to current Facebook posting during recent election.
(226)
The term “blog” is short for Weblog, a new form of personal and
subcultural grassroots expression involving summarizing and linking
to other sites. In effect, blogging
is a form of grassroots convergence.
By pooling their information and tapping grassroots expertise, by
debating evidence and scrutinizing all available information, and,
perhaps, most powerfully, by challenging one another's assumptions,
the blogging community is “spoiling” the American
government.
(229) In publishing their talking
points about Edwards on the Web, the GOP was not so much trying to
spin the story as to give the public a tool kit they could use to
spin it themselves in their conversations with friends and neighbors.
Fans, Consumers, Citizens
(231)
Many bloggers explicitly define themselves in opposition to
mainstream media and what they see as its corporately controlled
content. A second prehisotry, however, takes us through efforts of
fans to connect online and to exert their combined influence to
protect their favorite shows.
(231-232) Activists, fans, and
parodists of all stripes are using the popular graphics software
package Photoshop to appropriate and manipulate images to make a
political statement. Such images might be seen as the grassroots
equivalent of political cartoons—the attempt to encapsulate topical
concerns in a powerful image.
Image texts as important to citizenship as letters to the editor: Ulmer connection.
(233)
Yet, I would also suggest that crystallizing one's political
perspectives into a photomontage that is intended for broader
circulation is no less an act of citizenship then writing a letter to
the editor or a local newspaper that may or may not actually print
it. For a growing number of young Americans, images (or more
precisely the combination of words and images) may represent as
important a set of rhetorical resources and texts. . . . What
changes, however, is the degree to which amateurs are able to insert
their images and thoughts into the political process—and in at
least some cases, these images can circulate broadly and reach a
large public.
(233-234) A politics based on consumption can
represent
a dead end when consumerism substitutes for citizenship (the old
cliché of voting with our dollars), but it may
represent
a powerful force when striking back economically at core institutions
can directly impact their power and influence.
Entertaining
the Monitorial Citizen
(235)
Does making politics into a kind of popular culture allow consumers
to apply fan expertise to their civic responsibilities? Parody
newscasts like The
Daily Show (1996)
may be teaching us to do just that.
(235) Pew showed that young
people were getting information from entertainment media instead of
news media.
(236) Comedy Central offered more hours of coverage of
the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions than ABC,
CBS, and NBC combined: the news media was walking away from
historical responsibilities, and popular culture was taking its
pedagogical potential more seriously.
(237) Instead, he [Michael
Schudson] argues, “Monitorial citizens tend to be defensive rather
than pro-active. . . . The monitorial citizen engages in
environmental surveillance more than information-gathering. Picture
parents watching small children at the community pool. They are not
gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene. They
look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required.
The monitorial citizen is not an absentee citizen but watchful, even
while he or she is doing something else.”
(237-238) One might
see Schudson's monitorial citizen as a participant in the kind of
knowledge culture Lévy described—knowledgeable in some areas,
somewhat aware of others, operating in a context of mutual trust and
shared resources. . . . The
Daily Show consistently
focuses attention on issues badly covered through the mainstream
media, ensuring that they register on the radar of many monitorial
citizens.
Monitorial citizen practices active surveillance, and spoof media trains active hashing of competing accounts for news discovery.
(238) The Daily Show's mix of spoof segments with interviews with actual public figures demands an active and alert viewer to shift through the distinctions between fact and fantasy. Such a program provides a good training ground for monitorial citizens. . . . From the start, The Daily Show challenges viewers to look for signs of fabrication, and it consistently spoofs the conventions of traditional journalism and the corporate control of the media. Such shows pose questions rather than offering answers. In such spaces, news is something to be discovered through active hashing through of competing accounts rather than something to be digested from authoritative sources.
Playing Politics in Alphaville
Tie playing with power on microlevel in games to Gee learning principles.
(239)
If we want to get young people to vote, we have to start earlier,
changing the process by which they are socialized into citizenship.
If what [David] Buckingham
argues
is true, then one way that popular culture can enable a more engaged
citizenry is by allowing people to play
with power on a microlevel,
to exert control over imaginary worlds. Here again, popular culture
may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture; in
this case, the most compelling example comes from the world of video
games. Let's consider what happened in Alphaville, one of the oldest
and most densely populated towns in The
Sims Online,
a massively multiplayer version of the most successful game franchise
of all time.
(240) On one level, some adults
might still prefer engagement in student government elections because
it represents action at the local level—actions that have
real-world consequences. This is a classic critique of online
communities—that they don't matter because they are not
face-to-face. From another perspective, children have more
opportunities to exert leadership and influence the actions of online
worlds than they every enjoyed in their high school governments.
After all, it wasn't as if schools gave students much real power to
change their everyday environments.
(241) Reading through the
reader responses in the Alphaville Herald,
it is clear that, for many, the stolen election forced them to ask
some fundamental questions about the nature of democracy.
(242)
However much they represent themselves as civic experiments,
massively multiplayer game worlds are, like the shopping malls,
commercial spaces. We should be concerned about what happens to free
speech in a corporate-controlled environment, where the profit motive
can undo any decision made by the citizenry and where the company can
pull the plug whenever sales figures warrant.
(243) When something
breaks in a knowledge culture, the impulse is to figure out how to
fix it, because a knowledge culture empowers its members to identify
problems and pose solutions. If we learn to do this through our play,
perhaps we can learn to extend those experiences into actual
political culture.
Vote
Naked
(245)
What happens next? Precisely because these efforts were linked so
closely to a particular election, they treated political
participation as a special event and not yet part of our everyday
lives. The next step is to think of democratic citizenship as a
lifestyle.
Achievable utopia through extending practices developed through play to actual political culture, and people also seem willing consider alternative positions when stakes are lower, such as discussing popular culture; relate to my learning programming achievable utopia.
(245-246)
In Collective
Intelligence (2000),
Pierre Lévy proposes what he calls an “achievable utopia”: he
asks us to imagine what would happen when the sharing of knowledge
and the exercise of grassroots power become normative.
(247) We
vote naked not in the sense that we feel an intimate engagement with
politics but in the sense that we feel raw, exposed, and
vulnerable.
(248) [quoting Salon
technology
columnist Andrew Leonard] What I find disturbing, however, is how
easy the internet has made it not just to Google the fact that I need
when I need it, but to get the mindset I want when I want it.
(249)
The reason why Lévy was optimistic that the emergence of a
knowledge-based culture would enhance democracy and global
understanding was that it would model new protocols for interacting
across our differences. Of course, those protocols do not emerge
spontaneously as an inevitable consequence of technological change.
They will emerge through experimentation and conscious
effort.
(249-250) Popular culture allows us to entertain
alternative framings in
part because the stakes are lower, because our viewing commitments
don't carry the same weight as our choices at the ballot box. Our
willingness to step outside ideological enclaves may be greatest when
we are talking about what kind of person Harry Potter is going to
grow up to be or what kind of world will emerge as the machines and
humans learn to work together in The
Matrix (1999).
That is, we may be able to talk across our differences if we find
commonalities through our fantasies. This is in the end another
reason why popular culture matters politically—because it doesn't
seem to be about politics at all.
Conclusion
Democratizing
Television? The Politics of Participation
(251)
The Internet opened a floodgate for young people, whose passions are
finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit.
(251-252) The
idea of reader-moderated news content is not new. . . . Yet, this
would be the first time that something like the Slashdot model was
being applied to television.
Cable news network Current demonstrates trouble with television as pedagogical tool implicit in Ulmer Applied Grammatology mitigated by Internet, which is only one of four senses of democratization Jenkins enumerates; BBC example frees broadcast content and meta-information for mashup, and contrast position Lessig depicts concerning copyrighted media, also whether Feenberg makes such differentiations.
(252)
Was Current going to be democratic in its content (focusing on the
kinds of information that a democratic society needs to function),
its effects (mobilizing young people to participate more fully in the
democratic process), its values (fostering rational discourse and a
stronger sense of social contract), or its process (expanding access
to the means of media production and distribution)?
(253)
The network defended itself as a work in progress—one that was
doing what it could to democratize a medium while working under
market conditions.
(253-254) By 2005, the BBC was digitizing large
segments of its archive and making the streaming content available
via the Web. The BBC was also encouraging grassroots experimentation
with ways to annotate and index these materials. Current's path led
from the Web—where many could share what they created—into
broadcast media, where many could consume what a few had created. The
BBC efforts were moving in the other direction, opening up television
content to the more participatory impulses shaping digital culture.
Compare paradigm shift of convergence to Ulmer AG shift; consciousness changes whether the public pushes for more participation or settles into new modes of consumption, noting emphasis on collective changes rather than individual.
(254) Rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture. . . . Yet, whatever its motivations, convergence is changing the ways in which media industries operate and the ways average people think about their relation to media. . . . The question is whether the public is ready to push for greater participation or willing to settle for the same old relations to mass media.
Ong open systems, Feenberg examples of unintended uses by consumers.
(255) No sooner is a new technology—say, Google Maps—released to the public than diverse grassroots communities begin to tinker with it, expanding its functionality, hacking its code, and pushing it into a more participatory direction.
From individual to collective, networked consumption practices.
(255) Betsy Frank and other industry thinkers still tend to emphasize changes that are occurring within individuals, whereas this book's argument is that the greatest changes are occurring within consumption communities. The biggest change may be the shift from individualized and personalized media consumption toward consumption as a networked practice.
Extend communal media to communal experience of software in general in the built environment.
(256) Rather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media—media that become part of our lives as members of communities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net.
Sources of political effects through emergence of collective intelligence and participatory culture in addition to circulating new ideas and more data.
(257) Just as studying fan culture
helped us to understand the innovations that occur on the fringes of
the media industry, we may also want to look at the structures of fan
communities as showing us new ways of thinking about citizenship and
collaboration. The political effects of these fan communities come
not simply through the production and circulation of new ideas (the
critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to new
social structures (collective intelligence) and new models of
cultural production (participatory culture).
(258) But pointing to
those opportunities for change is not enough in and of itself. One
must also identify the various barriers that block the realization of
those possibilities and look for ways to route around them. . . .
Rather, we should read these case studies as demonstrations of what
it is possible to do in the context of convergence culture.
Apply critical utopian versus critical pessimist distinction to software studies, focusing on empowerment versus victimization; old complaints about evil empire replaced with transformative potential of free software, open protocols, and open standards, and need to capitalize on window of opportunity rather than battling conglomerates exclusively, for which Jenkins enumerates actionable tasks. This is part of the significance of my work.
(258-259) Critical pessimists, such as
media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert
McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more
democratic society. . . . The politics of critical utopianism is
founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical
pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are
doing with media, the other on what media is doing to us.
(259)
Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this
window of opportunity will have passed. That is why it is so
important to fight against the corporate copyright regime, to argue
against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize these
emerging forms of participation, to publicize the best practices of
these online communities, to expand access and participation to
groups that are otherwise being left behind, and to promote forms of
media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills
needed to become full participants in their culture.
(260) A
politics of participation starts from the assumption that we may have
greater collective bargaining power if we form consumption
communities.
(260) The Sequential Tarts represents a new kind
of consumer advocacy group—one that seeks to diversify content and
make mass media more responsive to its consumers.
Adhocracies substitute for mature knowledge culture: compare Ellis Global Frequency Network to Ulmer EmerAgency.
(261) We still do not have any models
for what a mature, fully realized knowledge culture would look like.
But popular culture may provide us with prototypes. A case in point
is Warren Ellis's comic-book series, Global Frequency.
Set in the near future, Global Frequency depicts
a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who
contribute their services on an ad hoc basis.
(262) Other writers,
such as science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, describe such groups as
“adhocracies.”
(263) [quoting John Rogers] “While Warner
Bros. Entertainment values feedback from consumers, copyright
infringement is not a productive way to try to influence corporate
decision.” . . . Rogers's comments invite us to imagine a time when
small niches of consumers who are willing to commit their money to a
cause might ensure the production of a minority-interest program.
Kickstarter funded minority-interest content production: replay PC revolution with widespread programming education and early free software dominance as a science fiction guided by critical utopianism.
(263) If [“Long Tail” Chris]
Anderson is right, then niche-content stands a much better chance of
turning a profit than ever before.
(264) It was the announcement
that ABC-Disney was going to be offering recent episodes of cult
television series (such as Lost and
Desperate Housewives)
for purchase and download via the Apple Music Store that really took
these discussions to the next level.
Nod to open source software with Wikipedia example as adhocracy exemplar.
(265) If one wants to see a real-world example of something like the
Global Frequency Network, take a look at Wikipedia—a grassroots,
multinational effort to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet
written collaboratively from an army of volunteers, working in
roughly two hundred different languages. So far, adhocracy principles
have been embraced by the open-source movement, where software
engineers worldwide collaborate on projects for the common good. The
Wikipedia project represents the application of these open-source
principles to the production and management of knowledge.
(265)
Some worry that the encyclopedia will contain much inaccurate
information, but the Wikipedia community, at its best, functions as a
self-correcting adhocracy. Any knowledge that gets posted can and
most likely will be revised and corrected by other readers.
(266)
The Wikipedia project has found it necessary to develop both a
politics and an ethics—a set of community norms—about knowledge
sharing.
(266-267) We might think of fan fiction communities as
the literary equivalent of the Wikipedia: around any given media
property, writers are constructing a range of different
interpretations that get expressed through stories. Sharing of these
stories opens up new possibilities in the text. . . . Fans reject the
idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by
some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of
us can participate in the creation and circulation of central
cultural myths.
(267) Concentrated power is apt to remain
concentrated. But we will see adhocracy principles applied to more
and more different kinds of projects.
(268) The power of
participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from
writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding
greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding
it back into the mainstream media.
(269) The challenge is to
rethink our understanding of the First Amendment to recognize this
expanded opportunity to participate. We should thus regard those
things that block participation—whether commercial or
governmental—as important obstacles to route around if we are going
to “democratize television” or any other aspect of our
culture.
(269) Another core obstacle might be described as the
participation gap.
Participation characteristics of monitorial citizen.
(269) The participation gap becomes much more important as we think about what it would mean to foster the skills and knowledge needed by monitorial citizens: here, the challenge is not simply being able to read and write, but being able to participate in the deliberations over what issues matter, what knowledge counts, and what ways of knowing command authority and respect.
Cultural producers need media literacy education.
(270) As I finish writing this book, my own focus is increasingly being drawn toward the importance of media literacy eduction. . . . We need to rethink the goals of media education so that young people can come to think of themselves as cultural producers and participants and not simply as consumers, critical or otherwise.
Afterword
Reflections
on Politics in the Age of YouTube
Example of applying analytical method to specific, politically significant historical event.
(272) In this afterword, I will use the Snowman controversy as a point of entry for a broader investigation into the role of Internet parody during the pre-primary season in the 2008 presidential campaign. . . . By studying YouTube as a site of civic discourse, I want to better understand how convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture are impacting the political process.
Turd
Blossom vs. The Obamatar
(274)
Rather than displacing old media, what I call convergence culture is
shaped by increased contact and collaboration between established and
emerging media institutions, expansion of the number of players
producing and circulating media, and the flow of content across
multiple platforms and networks.
(275) Metaphors from genetics or
virology still carry with them notions of culture as self-replicating
or infectious, whereas thinking of YouTube content as spreadable
focuses attention on both properties of texts and the activities of
participants.
The Power to Negate and the Power to Marginalize
The Birth of a Snowman
Suggests the media made a spectacle of characters asking debate questions that deflected collective interest from the candidates responses to legitimate concerns of the public electing them.
(279)
A range of public controversies are erupting around the terms of our
participation—struggles over intellectual property and file
sharing, legal battles between media producers and fans, conflicts
between web 2.0 companies and the communities they serve, or
disagreements over the nature of citizen participation in televised
debates. . . . What “pissed off” anonymousAmerican at CNN was the
way the debates had raised expectations of greater citizen
participation and then offered up a high-tech version of America's
Funniest Home Videos.
(280)
Over just a few weeks, the Hamel brother progressed from sophomoric
skit comedy to progressively more savvy interventions into media
politics, demonstrating a growing understanding of how media travels
through YouTube and how YouTube intersects broadcast media.
(282)
Parody represents one important mode for networking mass media
materials for alternative purposes. . . . Here, the Mac/PC template
invites us to comparison shop for presidential candidates, creating
new persons who dramatize the differences between the two major
parties and the consequences of their politices.
Parody in High Places
Manufacturing
Dissent
(284)
Playing on a Walter Lippman phrase brought back into public awareness
through Noam Chomsky's critique of propaganda (Manufacturing
Consent),
[In Dream:
Re-imaging Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy,
Stephen] Duncombe
calls
on progressives to learn new strategies for “manufacturing
dissent.”
(284) As YouTube's cultural visibility has increased,
more activists have adopted True Majority's “serious fun”
approach, making parody videos as a more playful and pleasurable mode
of political discourse.
Barely Political?
Short term tactical alliances between disparate groups energize popular media phenomena like elections and movie releases.
(285) Media producers with different motives—governmental agencies, activist groups, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, fan communities—operate side by side, using the same production tools and distribution networks. YouTube constitutes a shared portal through which these diverse groups come together to circulate media content and learn from each other's practices. In this shared distribution space, short-term tactical alliances between such groups are commonplace.
Fake grassroots media quintessential postmodern simulacra.
(286-287) This hybrid media environment and the active circulation of content beyond its points of origin make it hard to tell where any given video is coming from—in both the literal and the metaphoric sense. Increasingly, we are seeing fake grassroots media being produced by powerful institutions or economic interests—what has become known as “Astroturf.”
Parody as Pedagogy
Media practices of digital natives still subject to critical analysis, preferably in context of critical participation discussing by Gee, analysis coming from well trained digital emigrants similar to that of deep ethnography.
(288-289)
Often, these playful tactics get described in terms of the need to
adopt new rhetorical practices to reach the so-called digital
natives,
a generation of young people who have grown up in a world where the
affordances of participatory media technologies have been
commonplace. . . . Young people are finding their voice through their
play with popular culture and then deploying it through their
participation in public service projects or various political
movements.
(289) Duncombe has argued that news comedy shows, such
as The
Daily Show or
The Colbert
Report,
foster a kind of civic literacy, teaching viewers to ask skeptical
questions about core political values and the rhetorical process that
embodies them.
The
Downsides of Digital Democracy
(290)
An open platform does not necessarily ensure diversity.
Open platforms do not ensure diversity nor ideal Habermasian public debate.
(291) To put it mildly, the user comments posted on YouTube fall for
short of Habermasian ideals of the public sphere, as we suggested by
one blogger's parody of the CNN/YouTube debates.
(291) In an
election whose candidates include women, African Americans and
Hispanics, Catholics and Mormons, groups which have historically been
underrepresented in American political life, online parody often
embraces racist, sexist, and xenophobic humor, which further
discourages minority participation or conversations across
ideological differences.
(293) Democracy has always been a messy
business: the politics of parody offers us no easy way out, yet it
does offer us a chance to rewrite the rules and transform the
language through which our civic life is conducted.
Downsides of digital democracy juxtaposed with achievable utopia seem a crossing for software studies and especially CCS, with respect to media, to discern detailed features of specific open platforms, as as distinctions among licenses and copyright notices that make things free and open; recall Manovich distinction between cultural and technological aesthetics.
(293-294) Too often, we have fallen into the trap of seeing democracy as an “inevitable” outcome of technological change rather than as something which we need to fight to achieve with every tool at our disposal. . . . If we are to move towards what Pierre Lévy called an “achievable utopia,” we must continue to ask hard questions about the practices and institutions which are taking their place. We need to be attentive to the ethical dimensions by which we are generating knowledge, producing culture, and engaging in politics together.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.