Justin Marshall

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Henry Jenkins. New York: New York University Press 2006. 307 pp.

In 2006, Apple, Inc. unveiled its iconic ad campaign, “Get a Mac,” where two characters, a man dressed in casual clothes introduces himself as a Mac (“Hi, I’m a Mac …”) and a man in a formal suit introduces himself as a PC (“Hi, I’m a PC …”), act out vignettes pitting each against the other and ultimately showcasing the advanced features of a Mac. These commercials, genius in their simplicity and impact, were so popular that Apple remade them in both Japan and the UK.

In many senses, Apple created a genre for communicating commercial comparison with video in a new way. Within months, social media sites like YouTube began to see parodies emerge of the iconic commercials, where people took the new commercial genre into their own hands. They used the same format: characters talking in front of a simplistic white background, and made new statements with new personas for their own rhetorical purpose.

For instance, Greenpeace created a parody to raise awareness of the contaminants within both a Mac and PC, while others created similar ads to further the Mac/PC war. One parody, created by a multimedia production class at California State University Northridge, intersects the ad genre with the popular animated comedy, Southpark, to make the point that “all computers suck.”

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, explains the “Get a Mac” phenomena as the very product of an emerging convergence culture, where participation, collaboration, and collective intelligence intersect with sanctioned, corporate media. He argues a cultural shift is taking shape, as consumers are encouraged to interact with media in new ways (3). New technology offers new ways for consumers to interact with content. Now a single story can be woven through multiple movies, games, and online communities. And the barrier to participate has been lowered, making the line between amateurs and pros increasingly blurry.

In the introduction, Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, refreshingly cleans house by steering the overused discussion of “media convergence” in a new direction. Discounting the hackneyed “black-box fallacy,” namely that sooner or later all media will stream through a single box in our living rooms; he begins his argument that convergence is not about hardware and technology. Instead, it’s a cultural shift, a collective mind change.

Throughout the book, readers will inevitably catch on to Jenkins’ affinity for pop culture and mass media, as he draws liberally from pop culture phenomenon like American Idol, Survivor, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. Intersecting these pop sensations with scholars like Pierre Levy and Grant McCracken, the book injects theories of collective intelligence and anthropology into media convergence by taking deep-dives into the brand communities surrounding these pulp phenomenons, exploring how they share information, amplify the brand’s perception, and ultimately participate in creating the culture and history of the brand itself (79).

While Jenkins’ argument is well informed and mildly entertaining at times, he seems to fall into several holes that make the book less convincing to the critical reader. To start, the author’s over-indulgence into mass-media fan communities—like Survivor spoilers, Star Wars fan film-makers, and authors of Harry Potter fan fiction—often become distracting and take the reader away from the original point. Page after page, these well-chosen stories become drawn out and banal, losing what could be a thoughtful, cogent 25-page argument Jenkins’ into a 250-page cacophony. And, while the reader can appreciate the author’s interest in pop culture and anthropology, a more concise profile of these communities would be better used to construct an effective argument.

Second, his strict focus on fan communities as examples of how participation and collective intelligence has shifted the culture toward a convergence culture is inherently weak, since fan communities make up a significantly small sample of the media consumer culture as a whole. Like many early admirers of emerging social media, Jenkins has overestimated the prevalence of participation in these communities. A year ago, various social media evangelists attributed Pareto’s Law to participation, falsely claiming that 20 percent of consumers were creating 80 percent of the content on user-generated sites. Fortunately, recent—more scientific—studies have presented a more accurate picture of participation.

While “new media technologies” are offering the possibility for consumers to engage with old media in new ways, the reality is that only about 1% of all consumers actively participate. (Sites like Church of the Customer Blog and Center for Citizen Media helps further this argument by presenting that the 1% rule shows that instead of it being an 80-20 rule, it’s more like 1-9-90, 1% content creators, 9% highly participatory consumers, and 90% passive consumers.) Hence, the author’s emphasis to discuss such a small sample of the overall population immediately seems like an attempt to make something out of nothing.

Aside from these missteps, Jenkins’ argument raises an awareness of the tension professional communicators must adhere to in light of the struggle between the top-down, corporate powerhouses and the bottom-up, grassroots media. To add, the author provides a solid framework for forecasting the vast potential for old and new media to birth a culture that breeds multifaceted storytelling, coupled with a “communal media,” where creative engagement amongst passionate, collaborative individuals can flourish (245).

Questions:

1. Since the participatory web is still in its infancy—hence the 1-9-90 ratio—what might participation in a more enhanced and evolved convergence culture look like?
2. It is often the propensity of authors—like Jenkins—to focus on active participation as the embodiment of what it means to live in the participatory, or social, web. However, with the increasing ability to track, measure and predict user behavior on the Internet as well as the prevalence of user input features like ratings and comments, passive participants (or the 90%) can be of great value. First, where do you see the role of the passive participant in the social web? And, second, do you find it necessary to engage passive participants into further engagement or is their value found in who they are?
3. Authentic community on the web is something active participants find very valuable, and if necessary, willing to fight for it. With the recent examples of Digg’s HD DVD saga and the Kathy Sierra incident (of Creating Passionate User’s fame), is there a need for a Code of Conduct within the blogosphere or is the self-policing nature of the social web enough?