Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York UP, 2006.
Henry Jenkins covered a range of media to write through a personal addiction of “hoping to glimpse tomorrow before it was too late (6). The author reapplies a number of recent marketing, such as affective economics, “the need to quantify desire, to measure connections, and to commodify commitments, and the need to transform all of the above into return on investment” (62). I interpret that to say that the tension between an audience’s desires and their pressures from life are taken into account when building new products and new media. He adopts throughout Pierre Lรจvy’s term collective intelligence (4), describing a system wherein “grassroots communication” is the principal means for learning (224). This sounds like a trickle-up model for learning, as distinct from learning from the masters, but I would argue that it is not just a more democratic but also more empirical system of education. The lives of people increasingly center on digital and interactive media, including a cooperative winnowing-down of a harvest of information to that selection they determine to be interesting, amusing, or significant.
He is driven by his inference that “Consumption has become a collective process” (4). I agree—but marketers know that most viewers, readers, and netizens still have personal motives in mind. What have changed are the modes of sharing news, talking back to the television, sharing in game play, and cooperation in generating texts—such as with wikis of all sorts. I have recently been interested in on-line translation companies, because an old friend started a translation business. Translators in 2011 can put in bids to translate texts (for Russian medical equipment, proper maintenance of shoes) and be accepted to complete the entire translation. Another friend is paid per word to write articles on a breadth of subjects, such as the history of Groundhog Day or the advantages of Visions cookware. A few hours this semester I will work for an on-line tutoring company, where students submit their essays for feedback. The tutors have scheduled shifts and must comment on a new essay every thirty minutes.
Jenkins gives me a sense of how much I have missed by hitting the books the last few years—not just the voting through text messages and Dawson’s Desktop, which I did look up for a retrospective—but the spirit that has passed me by through my failure to keep my finger on the pulse. I was intrigued by the discussion of The Beast and the resultant model for decrypting data which was used to encroach on terrorism (127-32 sidebars), Machinima (153-8), which I had never heard of, and political drama in The Sims’ Alphaville (166-71) were standout moments of American history that had escaped my notice. Jenkins’ work also makes a compelling argument for a change in copyright law that bodes well, or at least creatively, for the future: that the copyright law as we know it was designed for mass culture, and that its application to folk culture, as he calls our decade-old frenzy of creative processes, is outdated and inappropriate (end of the Tarantino/Star Wars chapter). Convergence Culture leaves me re-thinking the machine that is the mass-media, wondering if the mass of viewers has created the media all along.
I want to share one syncretic form of media I like, a comic called Wondermark, which is best explained by looking at a few of the artist David Malki’s panels.
Walter Benjamin’s much-cited and less-often read 1936 work “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” from which Jenkins pulls some ideas.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Anthologized in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Harvard UP, 2008.
http://design.wishiewashie.com/HT5/WalterBenjaminTheWorkofArt.pdf
I have already been reminded several times by Literate Lives and Convergence Culture of Donna Haraway’s famous 1991 article “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which is linked here.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
I have located a video tutorial and advertisement for Sumatra .pdf reader, for those of us who are sick of updating Adobe cumbersome-ware or want something that works well on a slower system.
No comments:
Post a Comment