Convergence Culture
Author
Henry Jenkins (b. 1958), American media scholar, then at MIT as founding director of Comparative Media Studies, now Provost Professor at the University of Southern California.
Publication Details
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 308 pp. ISBN 978-0-8147-4295-2.
Description
Jenkins's argument begins by rejecting the version of convergence that was conventional wisdom when he wrote: the "black box fallacy," the expectation that all media would eventually flow through a single device. Convergence, he argues, is not a technological endpoint but an ongoing cultural process — "the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want."
Crucially, convergence occurs "within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others." It is something people do, not something devices achieve.
The book is built from case studies, each chosen to show a different facet: the Survivor spoiling community, whose distributed knowledge-pooling Jenkins reads through Lévy's collective intelligence; American Idol and the emergence of "affective economics," in which advertisers pursue emotional investment rather than attention; The Matrix as the exemplary transmedia work; the Star Wars fan-film community and Lucasfilm's uneasy management of it; the Harry Potter wars, in which Warner Bros. sent legal threats to teenage fan-site operators while conservative groups campaigned to ban the books; and the 2004 election as a case of participatory politics.
Key Ideas
- Transmedia storytelling. A story dispersed across several media, each contributing what it does best, with no single text containing the whole. The Matrix — film, animated shorts, comics, games — is his model case, and also his demonstration that the form is hard to execute.
- Collective intelligence. Nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, and networked communities can assemble knowledge no member holds. The spoiling communities were, in effect, an unpaid distributed research organisation.
- Participatory culture versus interactivity. Jenkins's sharpest distinction. Interactivity is what a technology permits — designed-in responses. Participation is what a culture does, and it is shaped by social protocols rather than by engineering. A medium can be highly interactive and permit no meaningful participation, and vice versa.
- Affective economics. The shift in marketing from measuring exposure to cultivating emotional attachment, and the resulting instability: brands that solicit passionate investment cannot then control what the invested do.
- The prohibitionist and collaborationist responses. Jenkins's two categories for how media companies react to fan production — suppress it or co-opt it — and his observation that both are attempts to manage a relationship the company does not control.
Criticism
The standing objection is optimism: that the book describes participation without adequately weighing how much of it is unpaid labour captured by platforms, and how unevenly the capacity to participate is distributed. Jenkins conceded part of this with the participation gap, arguing that unequal access to participation rather than to hardware is the meaningful divide.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Convergence Culture is the standard reference for treating audiences as producers, and its interactivity/participation distinction is directly useful when assessing any platform that advertises engagement: the question is not what the system permits but what the community around it is able to do.
