November 11, 2008
Caroline Bassett in New Maps for Old?: The Cultural Stakes of '2.0' in Fibreculture makes reference to Harry Jenkins book Convergence Culture a sequel to his 1992 work Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Both books examine participatory media, that is, a popular culture that directly involves fans in the defining of the culture. This convergence isn’t about technology—one screen (or one box) to rule them all—but rather about the way that the bright lines separating content creators from content users are becoming increasingly fuzzy. A convergence of creators and users-as-creators.
Convergence refers to two principal trends: the tendency of modern media creations to attract a much greater degree of audience participation than ever before, to the point that some are actually influenced profoundly by their fanbase, becoming almost a form of interactive storytelling; and the phenomenon of a single franchise being distributed through and impacting a range of media delivery methods. These two trends go together, making it very hard to pull them apart and examine them separately.
This review says that Jenkins' best illustration of all aspects of convergence is his discussion of the Matrix phenomenon.
Most are familiar with the trilogy of movies, but casual viewers perhaps do not realize that they are seeing only part of the story. To fully experience the Wachowski brothers' epic, one must also collect all issues of the comic book; explore the web site; view the anime cartoon; and play the video game. These interlocking parts do not, as one might expect, merely tell the same story in different formats, but rather make their own unique contributions to a single unfolding macro-narrative, and reference one another freely. There are aspects of the later movies, for instance, that make no sense unless one has read the comic or played the game. Jenkins attributes much of the lukewarm reception of the second and third films among the mainstream media to this: "Many film critics trashed the later sequels because they were not sufficiently self-contained and thus bordered on incoherent" (96). Meanwhile, the true fans presumably nodded knowingly during the films and laughed at the hopelessly clueless critics. Jenkins argues that the Matrix is an example of a brand new kind of trans-media storytelling, one which we do not have yet have a critical framework in place to really assess.
Jenkins argues that struggles over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.
How do we situate fan fiction relative to the content created or licensed by the originating authors of say Star Wars? Jenkins sees it (p.255-56) this way:
We might think of fan fiction communities as the literary equivalent of the Wikipedia: around any given media property, writers are constructing a range of different interpretations that get expressed through stories. ... [M]ass media has tended to use its tight control over intellectual property to reign in competing interpretations, resulting in a world in which there is one official version. Such tight controls increase the coherence of the franchise and protect the producers’ economic interests, yet the culture is impoverished through such regulation. Fan fiction repairs the damage caused by an increasingly privatized culture. ... Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths.
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