This map presents a graphic visualization of the big ideas in Jenkin's book, Convergence Culture. It shows how Jenkins uses words to map the background, here & now and potential futures of convergence culture. It visualizes one conceptual route through today's highly dense and volatile media landscape. Use it to locate yourself within that landscape and inform your actions there.
<---BACKGROUND
1847-1920s Marxist Social Theory, 1930s-1960s Frankfurt School, and 1960s-1990s Cultural Studies generate theories of agency and control. This unleashes a big debate that goes on for decades: "media are too controlled and controlling" vs. "media are out of control and audiences are powerful.” These debates set the terms for a clash of old and new ideas about media and audiences that persist to this day.
1983: Ithiel de Sola Pool writes "Technologies of Freedom." A prophet of convergence, he foresees that a single means (wires, cables) will carry many services, that any service can be provided in many different ways, and that there is no longer a one-to-one relation between a medium and its use.
1980s: convergence of media modes begins and becomes a force for change in media industries.
1980s: cross media ownership, media ownership concentration, proliferation of media channels, corporate conglomeration become forces for convergence.
1990s: portability of new computer and telecommunication technologies.
1990s: digitalization enables content to flow through many channels and assume many different forms at their points of reception.
1990s-2000s: costs drop enabling consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, recirculate media content.
1990s-2000s: Cultural Shift! Participatory culture emerges as consumers become producers.
1990s-2000s: people use media in unintended ways: work, play, relationships, occur on multiple platforms.
1990s-2000s: generation of "media actives," born after 1970, spawn DIY media.
1990s-2000s: accelerated flow of media across delivery channels expands markets, creating "franchises" (branding and marketing fictional content across many media platforms) and "synergy" (ownership and control across all platforms).
2000s: "extension” becomes a characteristic of convergence culture: books/games/films extend out from their originating medium and influence other sites of cultural production (toy production, websites, etc.).
HERE AND NOW
Right now, media phenomena that make up convergence culture are in a prolonged transition.
Convergence culture is a process, not an endpoint. The media landscape now is one of disorienting change, unpredictable outcomes, with everything changing at once.
There is no vantage point above the fray. Old and new media are interacting in ever more complex ways and are radically altering relations between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audience.
Convergence culture is an evolutionary shift in the huge variety of social, economic, and material protocols by which we produce and consume media.
The process that media are undergoing in convergence culture is one of evolution. If an "old" medium satisfies a core human demand, it is not replaced. Rather, it shifts into new forms.
New social practices grow up around new technologies and delivery systems. Media devices and uses evolve, becoming ever more layered and complicated within larger systems of communication options.
Convergence culture is a process that changes continuously. Update your senses of its Here & Now by visiting MIT's "Convergence Culture Consortium" Weblog.
SCENARIOS--->
Digital media will not replace old media and all devices will not converge into one central device. Instead, there will be a simultaneous pull toward more specialized appliances and push toward more generic devices.
Individual consumption will evolve into "networked collaboration,” spawning big changes as corporations must negotiate with audiences and as the public pushes for more participation in media content.
Marshall Sella foresees: The prediction that all media will become “personal media” will not come true. On the contrary, media are evolving toward more communal forms.
New goals for media literacy will reshape media education: it will no longer aim to simply make students critical consumers of media. It will aim to expand students’ abilities to deploy media for their own ends. Media education will create cultural producers, not just informed consumers. Consumers turned producers will rewrite the core stories that the culture has given us.
The futures of media industries will be shaped by the flow between two forces: broadcast media that amplify media “messages” by distributing them widely, and grass roots media that diversify media “messages” as consumers modify, amend, expand, re-circulate, and feedback their participation to broadcast media.
Consumers will become even more “migratory,” as they are loyal not to media networks or brands … but to socially constituted, noisy, public networks.
Knowledge communities such as wikipedia will shift what counts as knowledge and expertise, creating "collective intelligence" based on a moral economy of mutual obligation and shared expectation.
Convergence culture will lead to a democratizing politics of participation. Instead of "voting with their pocketbooks," media consumers will change the nature of the marketplace altogether. The fan communities of today will create new ways for us to think about citizenship and collaboration.
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