Convergence Culture

This week we get a bit of fresh air (in my opinion) from the fairly lofty discussions we’ve been reading recently.  Jenkins takes some of our discussion into the popular culture, drawing on works that he assumes we are familiar with (which is probably mostly true).

Jenkins starts us off with the wonderful image of Bert and Bin Laden (I have to admit that I am sad that the website’s been dismantled, he always creeped me out) to set up the concept of convergence.

“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainement experiences they want” (2)

“Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others” (3).  Hmm seems important for the distinction he makes between two levels of the meaning of the word media.

“on the first, a medium is a technology that enable communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated ‘protocols’ or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology” (13-14).  Both are at play, but the second level is more important when considering his other major concepts: participatory culture and collective intelligence.

participatory culture: “Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (3).  The not understanding part is key to the tensions he sets up in the case-study chapters.  People are having to make shit up as they go along.

collective intelligence: “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” (4).  This is how he describes the power the audience for media has come about.  Audiences pool their knowledge and it becomes a kind of leverage in conflict.  It also, outside of conflict, allows the audience many times to simply make sense of what is being presented.

Jenkins wants to shift focus in many ways away from an analysis of the technology that has allowed this convergence to occur and focus on the protocols it creates: “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). 

He acknowledges that this shift, this process that is taking place, “convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” (16), is unequal throughout society, and as one segment moves towards it, others will get left behind. “As information spreads from the film into other media, it creates inequality of participation within the franchise.  The Matrix may be a global cult phenomenon but it is experienced differently in each country round the world” (116-117, sidebar).

Jenkins works through his major concepts through six case-studies (5 of which are pop culture).

1: Survivor and the spoiler phenomenon that popped up around it.

“Survivor is television for the Internet age–designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued” (25).

“It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them” (26).

“New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communitites are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” (27).

“Only certain things are known by all — the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals.  Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises” (28).  Collective intelligence

Sidebar on Twin Peaks: “In the end, they felt betrayed because Lynch could not stay one step ahead of them.  This should have been our first sign that there was going to be tensions head between media producers and consumers” (34).  Participatory culture, the beginnings of convergence.

“Spoiling is also adversarial in the same sense that a court of law is adversarial, committed to the belief that through a contest over information, some ultimate truth will emerge.  The system works best when people are contesting every claim that gets made, taking nothing at face value” (43).

Sidebar on Big Brother: “Fan regard the broadcast version as a family-friendly digest of the much racier and more provocative Web feed, and they are drawn toward talking about things they know were hidden from people who watch only the televised content” (51).  All three key ideas are at play here.  Convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.

“What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory,continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (54).  Thus discussing the tension between the group forum where everyone is encouraged to participate and share what they learned and where they learned it in tension/conflict with the Brain Trust who only allowed the elite membership and felt above having to reveal how they knew what they knew.

Another tension:  to know or not to know: “The question was whether, within a knowledge community, one has the right not to know — or more precisely, whether each communitymember should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it” (55).  This not being an issue brings what Jenkins calls a “deeply totalitarian dimension” to the discussion of these collective groups (55).

“What we need to keep in mind here and througout the book is that the interests of producers and consumers are not the same” (58).  This of course fuels the tension at the heart of his discussion in Ch. 2.

2: American Idol and consumerism vs. audience control

“American Idol was from the start not simply a television program but a transmedia franchise” (61).

affective economics: “a new configuration of marketing theory…which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions” (62).

62-63: commodified audiences and their value/risk

“networks should be focused more on the quality of audience engagment witht he series and less on the quantity of viewers.  Increasingly, advertisers and networks are coming ot more or less the same conclusion” (63).

63: “touch points,” “impressions,” “expressions”

“American Idol offers up a fantasy of empowerment” (64).  Something the audience takes seriously and eventually will make some statements to that effect.

66-68: changes in research concerning audience participation.  move from impressions to expressions.  What they see to what they do.

brand extension: “the idea that successful brands are built by exploiting multiple contacts between the brand and consumer” (69).

“Brand loyalty is the holy grail of affective economics” (72).

Zappers, Loyals, and Casuals: 74-79

“Such distracted viewing is fairly common for women; even though fairly committed to the program must respond to competing demands on their attention in the early evening hours” (81).

“Social viewing, then, would ap-pear to be an important driver behind brand and content extension” (82).  Does anyone know why exactly words are constantly hyphenated in the middle of lines, and in really weird/annoying places?

85: affirmation of conservative social values through discussion of ethical trangressions.

86: process through which collective intelligence becomes shared knowledge

90: product placement as a double-edged sword

“the debates about Idol voting are debates about hte terms of audience participation in American media” (92).  Coming back to the point made before that people don’t know all the rules yet.  They do know that audiences demand a different kind of entertainment.

3: The Matrix as a transmedia world, successful failure.

“The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium” (97).

“The Matrix is also entertainment for the era of collective intelligence” (97).

“Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole.  Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption” (98).

“I would argue, however, that we do not yet have very good aesthetic criteria for evaluating works that play themselves out across multiple media” (99).

“So let’s agree for a moment that The Matrix was a flawed experiment, an interesting failure, but that its flaws did not detract from the significance of what it tried to accomplish” (99).  Ok I can do that; especially since my personal qualms with the franchise have to do with the actual production of the second movie.  It kept me from watching the third.  Maybe I should sometime.

99-100: criteria for cult artifact status

101: necessity for collective intelligence

“The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts” (104).  Cliche perhaps but perhaps apt in this conversation.

“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling” (106).

107: breakdown of licensing structure

“In reality, audiences want the new work to offer new insights and new experiences” (107).

Sidebar on the Mangaverse: “The flow of Asian goods into the Western market has been shaped by two competing forces: the corporate convergence promoted by media industries, and the grassroots convergence promoted by fan communities and immigrant populations” (111-112).

Same: ” ‘transcreation,’ one step beyond translation” (113).

media mix strategy: “these franchises depend on hypersociability, that is, they encourage various formso f participation and social interactions between consumers” (112).

117: logic of world-making

Note: weirdness with a block quote that doesn’t finish on 119.  Do I have a misprinted copy or do others have the same?

On that same page, side bar: the importance of plot arcs that are season based.  Forerunners: Babylon 5 and  The X-Files (oh yeah family favorites).

“we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by expanding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end” (121).

123-125: Getting to know characters in transmedia

127: additive comprehension

127-132: sidebar, “the Beast.”  yeah, I wish I had known about that.

“the emergence of knowledge cultures made it possible for the community as a whole to dig deeper into this bottomless text” (131).

“our schools are not teaching what it means to live and work in such knowledge communities, but popular culture may be doing so” (133).  Such a direct lead in to his discussion of Harry Potter that doesn’t happen for another chapter after this one.  Though Star Wars applies in many ways as well.

“This transmedia impulse is at the heart of what I am calling convergence culture” (133).