Convergence Culture

Convergence Culture: Consumer Participation and the Economics of Mass Media

URL = http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3017

Book by Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006.

This book on Media Convergence is extensively reviewed at http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000590.shtml

The book is a study of fan communities (such as TV series Survivor and American Idol, Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars, The Matrix Trilogy, and Harry Potter) and how they spread across different media (hence 'convergence'), re-influencing back the old media, thus acquiring a new kind of particpatory power as consumers.

Key arguments of the book

Henry Jenkings/Joshua Green:

"The book's argument might be reduced to the following core claims - that convergence is a cultural, rather than technological, process; that networking computing encourages collective intelligence; that a new form of participatory culture is emerging; and that skills acquired through 'leisure' activities are increasingly being applied in more "serious" contexts.

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.

Convergence is understood here not as the bringing together of all media functions within a single device but rather as a cultural logic involving an ever more complex interplay across multiple channels of distribution. A decade ago, people predicted the digital revolution would displace older one-to-many broadcast media systems with newer many-to-many modes of communication. Today, the major changes emerge from the interactions between old and new media, sometimes working in concert (as in transmedia storytelling or branding efforts) and sometimes in opposition (as when consumers use new media channels to talk back to media conglomerates.). This convergence is being shaped both by media conglomerates' desires to exploit "synergies" between different divisions and consumer demands for media content where, when, and in what form they want it.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.

This capacity of consumers to work together across geographic and social distances has been at the heart of Web 2.0 discourse. Networked communities, as Pierre Levy (1997) has suggested, represent an alternative source of knowledge and power which intersect, but remain autonomous from, the transnational reach of consumer capitalism and the sovereignty of nation-states over their citizens. Web 2.0 companies incorporate and embrace (in Tim O'Reilly's (2005) terms, "harness") this collective intelligence rather than allowing it to exist as an independent source of consumer power and critique.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests.

Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by new media technologies that enable us to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. An increasingly more digitally enabled and media literate population has taken tools once the reserve of professional media producers and made reworking photographs, video, and music a routine practice. The "remixability" of media content, shared platforms for the distribution of grassroots media, and the social networks that have grown up around media properties are reshaping audience expectations about the entertainment experience.

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play and recreational lives which we will later apply towards more serious ends.

This logic of participation is extending from consumer relations within the entertainment industry towards a broader range of interactions, including the interface of political candidates and government agencies with consumers, ministers with congregations, corporations with their employees, and educators with students. Indeed, as Yochai Benkler (2006) argues in his book, The Wealth of Networks, the emergence of new media technologies, platforms, and practices results in a hybrid media ecology, where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, and educational media producers interact in ever more complex ways, often deploying the same media channels towards very different ends. These groups come together at YouTube, which has provided a distribution channel, or Second Life, which has provided a meeting ground for diverse companies, institutions, and subcultural communities. A model based purely on amateur consumers and commercial producers can't adequately account for the diverse points of intersection between these various stakeholders. Far from the frictionless economy envisioned by some corporate gurus, there seems to be rather a lot of friction when one looks closely at any point of contact between these groups." (http://henryjenkins.org/2008/03/the_moral_economy_of_web_20_pa_1.html)

Lecture at the Open Content Symposium

Context of the lecture

The Economics of Open Content Symposium:

The Economics of Open Text

Convergence Culture: Consumer Participation and the Economics of Mass Media

Fred Beshears, University of California at Berkeley Ellen Faran, MIT Press Henry Jenkins, MIT Joel Greenberg, GSD&M Sande Scoredos, Sony Pictures Imageworks

The economics of open text and new models for textbook, university-press, and commercial publishing are described by University of California Berkeley's Senior Strategist Fred Beshears, MIT Press Director Ellen Faran, and University of British Columbia's John Willinsky. New modalities of consumer participation in mass media are discussed by Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Joel Greenberg from the GSD&M advertising agency in Austin, Texas, and Sande Scoredos, Sony Pictures Imageworks's Executive Director of Technical Training and Artist Development.

Industry Study: The Economics of Open Text Fred Beshears, University of California, Berkeley Ellen W. Faran, MIT Press

Convergence Culture: Consumer Participation and the Economics of Mass Media Henry Jenkins, MIT Joel Greenberg, GSD&M Sande Scoredos, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Context for the Symposium

On January 23-24, 2006, Intelligent Television hosts the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT to bring together representatives from media industries, cultural and educational institutions, and legal and business minds to discuss how to make open content happen better and faster.

With the support of the Hewlett Foundation and MIT Open Courseware, Intelligent Television brings representatives of commercial media industries (publishing, film, music, television, video, software, education/courseware, gaming) together with representatives of cultural and educational institutions who are innovative in this area and legal and business minds in the academy who are studying how to make this happen faster and better. New Yorker economics columnist and bestselling author (The Wisdom of Crowds) James Surowiecki keynotes at the Cambridge meeting, with a presentation entitled 'Openness as an Ethos.'

Intelligent Television has been conducting a year-long investigation into the economics of open content. This project is a systematic study of why and how it makes sense for commercial companies and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media to make certain materials widely available for free, and also how free services are finding new (sometimes commercial) ways of becoming sustainable. The project builds upon written work that Intelligent Television recently completed with the support of the Mellon Foundation and Ithaka on Marketing Culture in the Digital Age, and also upon work now being completed as part of the Mellon Foundation-supported Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The project also informs new economic models that Intelligent Television is establishing for its documentary work."

More Information

1. Moral Economy