One of the most enjoyable facets of "Geek" culture is its welcoming, all-inclusive, anything goes mentality. The more passionate you are about your preferred mythos, the better. I was watching the Morgan Spurlock (along with Joss Whedon and Stan Lee) documentary on the cultural phenomenon that is Comic-Con. (Trailer here) It reminded me of Henry Jenkins' book (who also is interviewed in the film) on transmedia and the increasing power/influence/production capacity of fans, Convergence Culture. Here is the review of it I wrote for class.
In Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins attempts 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,
produces, and content” (12). Convergence is the flow of media content across
multiple media platforms and the increasingly cooperative and dynamic producers
and consumers of that content. Convergence is a somewhat chaotic journey, not a
fixed destination. Jenkins refutes the “black box fallacy” that all media is
destined to someday be streamed into our homes through a single device. Media
companies are learning that convergence is inevitable and are gradually
learning to adopt their content and platforms to account for their collective,
empowered, active audience. Convergence is radically altering the dynamic
relationships between media producer, content, and audience.
Jenkins begins with a discussion on
the prototype reality TV show Survivor
as an example of how the collective intelligence of online fans can be leveraged
in their struggle to wrest information from the producers of the show. The
questionable spoiling activity of “ChillOne”, who provided end-of-season
secrets to online Survivor fan
communicates, raises questions of what members of a collective intelligence
(Jenkins draws heavily from Pierre Levy) can reasonably expect to know, share
with others, or expect from producers of a show. Fans are typically grouped in
a community on a volunteer, goal-oriented, finite basis. The show American Idol is the most profitable
reality show of all time and is largely shaped by corporate, financial, and
marketing concerns. Jenkins describes this changing landscape as “affective
economics”. It has both positive and negative implications: “allowing
advertisers to tap the power of collective intelligence and direct it toward
their own ends, but at the same time allowing consumers to form their own kind
of collective bargaining structure that they can use to challenge corporate
decisions” (63). Idol convinces fans
that they have a say in the outcome of the show and thereby cement their
loyalty and recognition of advertisers. The series is designed to garner
multiple levels of audience engagement from channel-surfing “zappers” to
diehard “loyals” and fans in-between. When there is a perceived discrepancy (as
in a voting scandal) the advertisers’ brand may suffer, so their interest is in
maintaining consistently pleasant emotions in the audience.
The Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix film ushered in a new era of
transmedia storytelling: the communication of a cultural phenomenon through
multiple platforms. “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” (95). It was not just a single
movie, but a film trilogy, series of video games, an online presence, a comic
book, and more. Transmedia storytelling requires the creation not only of a
single believable narrative but a believable world—one that embraces multiple interpretations,
overlapping mysteries, and where one text might shed light on another and thus
enlighten fans. “Fans are the most active segment of the media audience, one
that refuses to simpy accept that they are given, but rather insists on the
right to become full participants” (131). No cultural text has generated more
fan activity than the Star Wars
franchise. Hundreds of thousands of fans have created just as many hours of fan
fiction (both written and film), re-edited films frame-by-frame to remove unwelcome
characters, and in general been a blessing and a headache for Lucasfilm, the
owners of the Star Wars rights. There
are contraditions and multiple perspectives to be considered at the succession from one media
paradigm to the next. “None of us really knows how to live in this era of media
convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture” (170). When a
13 year old girl creates a fictional newspaper for the world of Harry Potter, the problem of transmedia
storytelling becomes cross-generational in addition to crossing (and further
blurring) the boundaries of creator/fan, owner/borrower, etc. Everyone from
religions communities to political parties are wrestling with how to adopt,
reject, or survive the shifting landscape.
The 2004 presidential campaign was
the first in which parties seriously attempted to incorporate and communicate
messages across various media systems and bring bloggers into their service.
Voter awareness and participation were encouraged by web-sites, sardonic TV
shows, controversies, and voters themselves. Jenkins advocates a kind of
critical mediated utopianism and pushes back against those who are purely
critical or pessimistic of evolving transmedia practices and convergence
culture as a whole. Convergence culture is enabling new forms and venues for
participation and collaboration, and this turns the traditional one-way flow of
power (from producers to consumers) into multi-directional avenues of control,
creativity, and opportunity. The future is taking shape now.
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