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.
