Friday, December 21, 2012

Welcome to My Blog!

My name is Zoe Cooper, I'm a student in LIS 201 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here is my blogged review of Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.


Author Henry Jenkins is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. He has been named Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and is the Founder and Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. Convergence Culture is one of eleven books he has written on popular culture and media. 


Here is a link to the author's website:
And is wikipedia page:

You can buy it at Amazon here:

Here are some links to reviews, all of which are very positive:



My Approach.


I really enjoyed Jenkins' book - it was well written, with clear arguments and well-chosen examples to support his definition of convergence. The language of the book is easily understandable to the average reader, he explains terms like "media convergence," "participatory culture" and "collective intelligence" and applies them to his examples. My approach to review his work is to explain his theory of convergence and narrow in on a few of his examples, including the "Bert is Evil" video, spoiler communities based around the reality series Survivor, reactions to the JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, and convergence culture seen in the 2004 Presidential Campaign. 

I believe that the best way to show how effectively Jenkins proves his argument is to explain how he applies his ideas and terms to this diverse set of examples - a YouTube video, a television show, a book series, and an important election. We will see that his theory of convergence is applicable to a wide variety of media platforms, thereby strengthening his assertion that different media outlets interact with and feed off of one another. These various media genres do not act separately - they "converge" in complicated ways. I have included a quote from each of the arguments that I feel helps illuminate the complexity of Jenkins argument.

Here are three of Jenkins' key terms to keep in mind while reading this blog:
1. Media Convergence
2. Participatory Culture
3. Collective Intelligence

What is Convergence Culture?


Jenkins writes a clear, well-written explanation of his theory of "convergence." The term convergence refers to how media content becomes part of multiple media platforms. This establishes a relationships between multiple media industries, each looking to attract audiences. As new media technologies allow content to circulate around the world and across different media channels. the consumer's active participation becomes more important than ever.

Convergence is often thought of as the technologies which bring together multiple media function in a single device - an iPhone, for example, allows you to send texts, emails, read news papers, listen to music - and make and receive phone calls. Jenkins, however, asks us to think about the term "convergence" in a new way. That is, a cultural shift in which consumers "seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content" (3). The viewer, or consumer, plays an active and key role in the new media system of convergence.

Jenkins' ideas on convergence act in relationship to Daniel Bell's writing on the post-industrial society. Bell talks about "communal society," which "by its very nature multiplies the definition of rights - the rights of children, of students, of the poor, of minorities - and transforms them into claims of the community" (99). In Jenkin's culture of convergence, we see individuals and grassroots organizations raising their voices - creating YouTube video, blogging, writing stories, etc and forming a "collective intelligence." Bell's description of groups (many of which are directly described in Jenkins' work - children, students, etc) coming together to participate in the public discourse is seen in Jenkin's term "participatory culture." The struggle to have one's voice heard in a post-industrial society, and the dynamics between minorities/grassroots group and organizations that have traditionally held power is described in both sources, and in turn lends legitimacy to Jenkins' claims.

Bert is Evil: The Consequences of Participatory Culture



I felt that one of Jenkins' best examples of convergence culture was the "Bert is Evil" video. In 2001, a American high school student Dino Ignacio  put together a video of Osama Bin Laden and the character Bert from Sesame Street  (1970) in a video that was intended for laughs. "Bert is Evil" was part of a series of videos, one showed Bert as a Klansman, another interacting with Adolf Hitler, in costume as the Unabomber, or having an affair with Pamela Anderson. After the attacks of the World Trade Center on Septermber 11th, a publisher in Bangladesh searched the web looking for images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and t-shirts. Given that the Arab world had not seen exposed to the character Bernie on Sesame Street, he probably thought Bert was simply a character who slightly resembled Bin laden. As a result, Ignacio's image of Bert and Osama Bin Laden ended up on thousands of posters throughout the Middle East.

WHen CNN picked up the story of thousands of protesters carrying anti-American signs with an image of Bert from Sesame Street, the Children's Television Workshop, the creators of Sesame Street, threatened to sue. The question was, who would they sue? Dino Ignacio, or the terrorist supporters who created the anti-American paraphernalia? In response, fans created new sites linking Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

Jenkin's example of "Bert is Evil" is an excellent one not only because it crosses national borders and involves various media platforms (major news outlets, children's television programming, the blogosphere), but it was inadvertent. Ignacio ultimately took down his site when it sparked an international controversy - this was clearly not his intention. "Bert is Evil" is a good example of how grassroots media (an American high school student's website) and corporate media intersect. The video travels "from Sesame Street though Photoshop to the World Wide Web, from Ignacio's bedroom to a print shop in Bangladesh, from the posters held by anti-American protestors that are captured by CNN into the living rooms of people around the world" (3). Both the grassroots and corporate media outlets were involved in the controversy. This example works well to show how the role of corporate media producer and the role of the consumers should not be seen as separate from one another, but participants who interact with one another in a new way. While the corporate media still has more power than the individual consumer, Jenkins' theory of convergence brings to light the importance of individual's role. As he puts is, each of us creates out own "personal mythology" (3) from pieces of information that we are exposed to through increasingly varied information sources - the internet, the news, etc. Because there is more information out there than ever before, Jenkins argues that people feel the need to talk about the media they consume. It is this conversation that the media industry hopes to be a part of - media consumption has become a collective process. Jenkins' notion of collectivity is where his argument gets interesting - as individuals feel the need to voice their take on information supplied to them, or to use Jenkins' term their own personal mythology - they create a "collective intelligence" (4). In other words, the vast number of individual interpretations of the world around us creates a collective one. According to Jenkins, this collective intelligence is itself a new kind of media power whose consequences we are just beginning to understand.

Spoiling Survivor: The Formation of a Knowledge Community



"What holds a collective intelligence together in not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties" (54).

In Jenkins' chapter on the reality TV show Survivor, he examines a spoiler website ChillOne. Dedicated followers of the show go to great lengths to try to reveal what will happen in the next episode. This is a particularly good example of Jenkins' theory of convergence because it involves a group of active consumers who pool their knowledge  to try to figure out what will happen on the show before it airs. Each individual fan, brings their own "personal mythology" to the site in order to contribute to a collective intelligence. The community of fans forms around their shared interest in the show. The quote above expresses the extent to which these fans create a knowledge community. Despite their lack of expertise on the subject - these are ordinary people - they come together to try to understand the information, or show, they love to watch.

Jenkins' Survivor example works so well because we see consumers taking a role in the franchise. As a result, corporate producers of the show struggle to maintain the mystery of a cliffhanger, and design the show around grassroots fan response. The ChillOne community became so good at predicting what would happen in future episodes, that Survivor's corporate producer worried that they were taking the away the right of other consumers to have a so-called "first-time experience" watching the show. The participatory culture of fans on the internet is both a result of the success of the show (it's ability to attract an extremely enthusiastic fan base), but also challenges its creators and producers to rethink the way they do their job.  

Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars



"Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves" (176).

Harry Potter attracted an enormous fan base, another example of Jenkins' notion of participatory culture. Young fans began writing their own stories about Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and its students. These grassroots individuals find themselves in conflict with corporate media producer's interests. While it may seem like a good thing that Harry Potter inspired thousands of young adults to create their own literature, media producers see it as a threat to their intellectual property. While teachers see the books as inspiring, the executives at Warner Bros., who had the movie rights the books did not agree. Here we see an example of how the interests of grassroots participants and corporate executive can come into conflict - the relationship between the two in a culture of convergence is not always a mutually beneficial one. 

Jenkins' choice to talk about a book series opens up questions of the definition of literacy, a topic we have already seen in Deborah Brandt's writing. In the "Potter Wars"as they were called, literacy does not just refer to printed words, but also the ability to "read" media. This connection to literact debates adds legitimacy and nuance to his argument. That is, is literacy as widespread as we like to think? The young readers who were inspired by JK Rowling's series increased their literacy skills - but are there barriers in place, as Brandt suggests, that limit literacy? Jenkins talks about corporate interest as one of those barriers leading to problems in literacy. Brandt's article makes me raise the question: who were these young readers, and what kind of exposure to literature might they have in Warner Bros interest were not a factor?

Photoshop for Democracy: The New Relationship between Politics and Pop Culture



In his chapter about the media convergence in the 2008 Presidential election, Jenkins turns from popular culture to public culture. he gives the example of the "Trump fires Bush" video, in which Donald Trump directs his notorious "You're fired!" slogan at then President George W. Bush. The video was created by a progressive grassroots group called True Majority, hoping to increase voter participation in the upcoming election and promote their leftist leanings. Given the widespread distrust of major news networks (often accused of bipartisanship and questionable business interests), voters felt better served by grassroots media groups like True Majority. Normal citizens, not professional journalists, took on a new responsibility for educating the public and inspired them to vote. Jenkins uses the example of the 2008 Presidential election as an example in which citizens were doing the work of the campaign.

Jenkins introduces the concept of "serious fun" - grassroots internet users' ability to use humor in order to make a political statement and reach large numbers of people. Anyone with an internet connection can now voice their political opinion and in turn shape the voting decisions of other citizens as well. The inability, or failure, or corporate media to interact with citizens this way emphasized the power of grassroots media. Traditional networks can't post a clip of Donald Trump firing someone - but they can report on the story of True Majority's video going viral and reaching citizens around the country. In the 2008 election, we began to see the grassroots media and traditional media interact in new ways - while grassroots media lack the professional journalistic credibility and serious tone, corporate media outlets deal with business interests and growing partisanship. One media platform did not eliminate the other the work together to provide the public with more information. In deciphering this vast amount of information, consumers create their own "personal mythology" and form decisions on who to vote for. The participatory culture Jenkins describes allowed for a convergence between these two kinds of media and allowed more voices to be heard in the public sphere.