Convergence for Jenkins is about new media creations that attract larger amounts of audience participation which then fosters a type of storytelling from the fan base themselves.
Introduction: “Worship at the Alter of Convergence”
“‘Bert Is Evil” and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open. 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” (p. 2).
Book about media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence
Convergence – “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 entertainment experiences they want” (p. 2).
“This circulation of media content – across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders – depends heavily on consumers’ active participation…convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (p. 3).
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. Not all participants are created equal” (p. 3).
Convergence not through media appliance but through the brains of consumers and through social interactions.
Collective intelligence – “Consumption has become a collective process. 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. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power” (p. 4).
“If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways” (p. 6).
1. Convergence is coming and you had better be ready
2. Convergence is harder than it sounds
3. Everyone will survive if everyone works together (Unfortunately, that was the one thing nobody knew how to do) (p. 10).
Ithiel de Sola Pool – “the prophet of media convergence” (p. 10).
Pool – “Freedom is fostered when the means of communication are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available, as are printing presses or microcomputers. Central control is more likely when the means of communication are concentrated, monopolized, and scarce, as are great networks” (p. 11).
Pool thought the transition from old to new media would take a longer time than most thought, “There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that” (p. 11).
Pool – political culture
Jenkins – popular culture
“Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies” (p. 13).
Gitelman – define media – “a medium is a technology that enables communication; a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology”(13-14)
“Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (p. 14).
Black Box Fallacy – “Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms” (p. 14).
Why a fallacy – “It reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels we are considering here” (p. 15).
“Convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” (p. 16).
“Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms. Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels” (p. 17).
American media environment shaped by two things
1. “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” (p. 17-18).
2. “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” (p. 18).
Convergence is both top-down corporate and bottom-up consumer grassroots
Old consumers vs. New consumers – old passive, new active, old stationary, new migratory, old silent and invisible, new noisy and public (p. 18-19).
Survivor and American Idol – “relations between producers and consumers are breaking down as consumers seek to act upon the invitation to participate in the life of the franchises” (p. 20). How much participation is too much and when do producers exert too much power over the experience?
Transmedia storytelling – “refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence – one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities. Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making” (p. 20-21).
“Again and again, citizens were better served by popular culture than they were by news or political discourse” (p. 22).
1. Spoiling Survivor
“The age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes reception. Not every media consumer interacts within a virtual community; some simply discuss what they see with their friends, family members, and workmates. But few watch television in total silence and isolation” (p. 26).
“My focus here is on the process and ethics of shared problem-solving in an online community…I am interested in how the community reacts to a shift in its normal ways of processing and evaluating knowledge. It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them” (p. 26).
“Collective intelligence refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively” (p. 27).
“Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in practice” (p. 28).
“Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be more important that it seems at first glance” (p. 29).
“Spoiling follows a logical sequence. The first phase is focused on identifying the location, because the impact of the production is felt first where the series was shot. The second phase is focused on identifying the contestants, since the second impact is felt on the local communities where these “average Americans” come from. The collective has its feelers out everywhere and responds to the slightest brush” (p. 36).
“Earlier, I described these emerging knowledge cultures as defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations. Because they are voluntary, people do not remain in communities that no longer meet their emotional or intellectual needs” (p. 57).
“We can see such knowledge communities as central to the process of grassroots convergence” (p. 57).
2. Buying into American Idol
“The shift is one from real-times interaction toward asynchronous participation” (p. 59).
Affective Economics – “By affective economics, I mean a new configuration of marketing theory, still somewhat on the fringes but gaining ground with the media industry, which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions” (p. 61-62).
The Paradox – “to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified. On the one hand, to be commodified expands a group’s cultural visibility. Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored. That said, commodification is also a form of exploitation” (p. 62).
Fans or loyals – More likely to watch a series faithfully
“My own view is that this emerging discourse of affective economics 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” (p. 63).
Audience measurements ineffective, TV ads just as ineffective as internet banner ads.
Whiting – DVR “the VCR on steroids”
“The American viewing public is becoming harder and harder to impress” (p. 67).
Expression – “Expression charts attentiveness to programming and advertising, time spent with the program, and the degree of viewer loyalty and affinity to the program and its sponsors” (p. 67-68). “Expression may start at the level of the individual consumer, but by definition it situates consumption within a larger social and cultural context. Consumers not only watch media; they also share media with one another” (p. 68).
Brand extension – Multiple contacts between the brand and the consumer. Not a single media platform. Intensified meanings about brands “no longer just intellectual property, they’re emotional capital” (p. 69).
Lovemarks – “That are more powerful than traditional “brands” because they command the “love” as well as the “respect” of consumers: “The emotions are a serious opportunity to get in touch with consumers. And best of all, emotion is an unlimited resource” (p. 69-70).
“Brand loyalty is the holy grail of affective economics because of what economists call the 80/20 rule: for most consumer products, 80 percent of purchases are made by 20 percent of their consumer base” (p. 72).
Inspirational consumers or brand advocates – Promote and advocate for a particular brand
Roberts – companies must pay attention to inspirational consumers, “When a consumer loves you enough to take action, any action, it is time to take notice. Immediately” (p. 73).
Zappers – “people who constantly flit across the dial – watching snippets of shows rather than sitting down for a prolonged engagement” (p. 74).
Loyals – watch less hours than general population, watch same show more than once, talk about their shows more, and more likely to pursue content across media channels. “Loyals watch series; zappers watch television” (p. 74).
Casuals – “They watch a particular series when they think of it or have nothing better to do” (p. 74).
Loyals more valuable than zappers, have a higher rate of brand recall, less likely to leave the networks for cable, and more likely to pay attention to ads and recall them.
Serialization – American Idol is a contest across an entire season rather than on a single episode. “The reason loyals watch every episode isn’t simply that they enjoy them; they need to have seen every episode to make sense of long-term developments.
Brand communities -”trying to better understand why some groups of consumers form intense bonds with the product and, through the product, with fellow consumers…Communities exert pressure on members to remain loyal to the collective and to the brand” (p. 79).
3. Searching for the Origami Unicorn
“The Matrix is also entertainment for the era of collective intelligence. Pierre Levy speculates about what kind of aesthetic works would respond to the demands of his knowledge cultures. First, he suggests that the “distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend” to form a circuit of expression, with each participant working to “sustain the activity of others” which is a Cultural Attractor.
Cultural Activator – “drawing togehter and creating common ground between diverse communities” (p. 95).
“A good transmedia franchise works to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently in different media” (p. 96).
“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” (p. 97).
Eco – Casablanca as a cult artifact
1. “The work must come to us as a “completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian world” (p. 97).
2. “The work must be encyclopedic, containing a rich array of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered my devoted consumers” (p. 97).
“We experience a cult movie, he suggests, not as having “one central idea but many,” as “a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs” (p. 98).
“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling. Media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media platforms inevitable” (p. 104).
“The level of integration and coordination is difficult to achieve even though the economic logic of the large media conglomerates encourages them to think in terms of synergies and franchises” (p. 106).
“More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise – since fan speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions” (p. 114).
Murray – encyclopedic capacity – To make these worlds seem even more real, storytellers and readers begin to create “contextualizing devices – color coded paths, time lines, family trees, maps, clocks, calendars, and so on” (p. 116).
Film critics dislike the disjoined nature of transmedia storytelling yet, “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” (p. 119).
Odyssey and Matrix
Greeks got the Odyssey because they had a background, a frame of reference. “This is why high school students today struggle with The Odyssey, because they don’t have the same frame of reference as the original audience” (p. 120).
“These new mythologies, if we can call them that, are emerging in the context of an increasingly fragmented and multicultural society…Its goals are not so much to preserve cultural traditions as to put together the pieces of the culture in innovative ways” (p. 121).
Blade Runner – Origami Unicorn – If we add the director’s cut scene, the entire movie changes, Deckard might be a replicant, which changes our experience.
Additive comprehension – For Matrix, after the series was completed, Morpheus was killed off in the Matrix Online (p. 125). Used to motivate player missions.
“The film’s attempts to close down its plot holes disappointed many hardcore fans. Their interest in the Matrix peaked in the mmiddle that tantalized them with possibilities. For the casual consumer, The Matrix asked too much. For the hardcore fan, it provided too little” (p. 126).
4. Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?
“What has shifted is the visibility of fan culture” (p. 131).
Interactivity – “refers to the ways that new technologies have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback” (p. 133).
Participation – “is shaped by the cultural and social protocols…participation is more open-ended, less under the control of media producers and more under the control of media consumers” (p. 133).
Prohibitionists – “the media industries have increasingly adopted a scorched-earth policy toward their consumers, seeking to regulate and criminalize many forms of fan participation that once fell below their radar”
Collaborationists – “new media companies are experimenting with new approaches that see fans as important collaborators in the production of content and as grassroots intermediaries helping to promote the franchise” (p. 134).
Napster generation – “Media companies are giving out profoundly mixed signals because they really can’t decide what kind of relationships they want to have with this new consumer” (p. 138).
“Digital filmmaking alters many of the conditions that led to the marginalization of previous amateur filmmaking efforts” (p. 142).
Lucas was great for fan fiction, but had to pull the reigns back because “Up until the moment the actors spoke, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether that was a real Star Wars film or a fan creation because the special effects are soo good” (p. 155).
Men create fan parody, women create fan fiction
Two tier system
1. “Some works can be rendered more public because they conform to what the rights holder sees as an acceptable appropriation of their intellectual property, while others remain hidden from view.
“Fans and other subcultural groups are not going to return to docility and invisibility. They will go farther underground if they have to – they’ve been there before – but they aren’t going to stop cheating” (p. 158).
Fans know the Star Wars world better than the game designers (p. 162).
“For the moment, the evidence is contradictory: for every franchise which has reached out to court its fan base, there are others who have fired cease and desist letters” (p. 166).
5. Why Heather Can Write
“Corporations imagine participation as something they can start and stop, channel and reroute, commodify and market” (p. 169).
Potter Wars – Intellectual property and the Conservative Right
Literacy – “literacy is understood to include not simply what we can do with printed matter but also what we can do with media” (p. 170).
“Heather has suggested that many kids come to The Daily Prophet because their schools and families have failed them in some way” (p. 173-174).
“What’s striking about this process, though, is that it takes place outside the classroom and beyond any direct adult control. Kids are teaching kids what they need to become full participants in convergence culture” (p. 177).
Affinity Spaces – Informal learning cultures, that offer powerful opportunities for learning “because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching” (p. 177).
Scaffolding – pedagogy in a step by step process that promotes children to try new things. In the classroom it is fostered by the teacher, in a participatory culture, the entire community takes responsibility (p. 178).
Beta readers sort through and offer suggestions to writers
Writing skills are a secondary benefit for the fan fiction community (p. 185).
Rowling all for fan fiction, Warner Brothers not so much (p. 185).
Defense Against Dark Arts – much more organized than Warner Brothers thought, they had a naive approach (p. 187).
“Current copyright law simply doesn’t have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression” (p. 189).
“Here, the conservative critics seem to be taking aim at the very concept of transmedia storytelling – seeing the idea of world making as dangerous in itself insofar as it encourages us to invest more time mastering the details of a fictional environment and less time confronting the real world” (p. 193).
“Rather than ban content that does not fully fit within their worldview, the discernment movement teaches Christian children and parents how to read those books critically, how to ascribe new meanings to them, and how to use them as points of entry into alternative spiritual perspectives” (p. 203).
