Review: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: By convergence, Jenkins doesn’t mean that we’ll all own one black box that gives us all our information. Rather, we will have many boxes, but we’ll often follow particular cultural objects on a sort of treasure hunt through those boxes - watch the TV show, go talk about it at Television Without Pity, make a vid on our computer, use text messaging to access special bonus content by phone. Media will be richer for those who want to engage with them, even as other members of the audience just watch the show. Jenkins looks at Survivor spoilers, American Idol fans, The Matrix across different media, Star Wars fan films, young Harry Potter fans, and remix/mashup culture as applied to politics, drawing related lessons from each example.
There’s a detailed, thoughtful review here, to which Jenkins responds on his blog. I enjoyed the book and found it to have an interesting relationship to Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks -- Jenkins is all about the particular example and what it might lead us to imagine for future systems, whereas Benkler is all about high theory and systematic reasoning, so the combination gives you deduction and induction together, reasoning towards similar results. Jenkins comes off as something of a booster, since he deliberately chooses to emphasize the liberatory and participatory power of convergence between media creators and media audiences, even as he acknowledges that producers are desperately trying to monetize and manage fan experiences. There’s a reason that “user-generated content” is now a buzzword on the pages of the Wall Street Journal -- businesses (and I don’t exclude TWoP) want to profit from the voluntary work of engaged, dedicated fans. Jenkins takes the view that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and I see his point. I’ve bought TWoP merchandise and I pay LJ to let me be a fan. Yet there’s a fair amount of room between “inherently” and “in practice,” and I would have appreciated more explicit attention to ways that convergence can go wrong and right from the perspective of participatory democracy. There’s a hint of this discussion in the chapter on Star Wars fan films, much of which has appeared elsewhere, when Jenkins elaborates Lucasfilm’s happiness with (certain) fan films, mostly by men, as compared to its deep unease with fan fiction, mostly by women. Even as big media companies loosen some constraints on fan interaction, they still want us to “celebrate the story the way it is.” As theorist, Jenkins would probably agree that much depends on what the meaning of “is” is, but Fox and Lucasfilms and the like aren’t interested in theory.
There’s a detailed, thoughtful review here, to which Jenkins responds on his blog. I enjoyed the book and found it to have an interesting relationship to Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks -- Jenkins is all about the particular example and what it might lead us to imagine for future systems, whereas Benkler is all about high theory and systematic reasoning, so the combination gives you deduction and induction together, reasoning towards similar results. Jenkins comes off as something of a booster, since he deliberately chooses to emphasize the liberatory and participatory power of convergence between media creators and media audiences, even as he acknowledges that producers are desperately trying to monetize and manage fan experiences. There’s a reason that “user-generated content” is now a buzzword on the pages of the Wall Street Journal -- businesses (and I don’t exclude TWoP) want to profit from the voluntary work of engaged, dedicated fans. Jenkins takes the view that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and I see his point. I’ve bought TWoP merchandise and I pay LJ to let me be a fan. Yet there’s a fair amount of room between “inherently” and “in practice,” and I would have appreciated more explicit attention to ways that convergence can go wrong and right from the perspective of participatory democracy. There’s a hint of this discussion in the chapter on Star Wars fan films, much of which has appeared elsewhere, when Jenkins elaborates Lucasfilm’s happiness with (certain) fan films, mostly by men, as compared to its deep unease with fan fiction, mostly by women. Even as big media companies loosen some constraints on fan interaction, they still want us to “celebrate the story the way it is.” As theorist, Jenkins would probably agree that much depends on what the meaning of “is” is, but Fox and Lucasfilms and the like aren’t interested in theory.