- In this video, we're going
to be discussing the history
of some of the talk around convergence
as a means to understand
its current status
and Jenkins' perspective on it
that it is driven more by the sharing
of content by the audience
than necessarily the
technological developments.
And so he calls convergence
a paradigm shift
in media industries.
Paradigm shift is a
concept that comes from a
science historian named Kuhn
who talked about paradigm shifts
as this complete change
in our understanding
of the world around us, that as we
continue to develop new, new information,
our old ways of understanding,
our old paradigms
start to not work anymore,
and so we reach a breaking point
where we have a paradigm shift
where we just completely
abandon the old paradigm
and adopt a new one.
And so the previous belief
that drove a lot of our approaches
to internet and new media
leading up to the 1990s
was that new media would just
completely replace old media.
This developed by the 1990s
into what was known as the
digital revolution rhetoric,
this talk about new media,
that it would just
completely revolutionize
the media industry.
And so the internet
would just completely
replace broadcasting.
You wouldn't have broadcasting anymore.
Everything would just be on the internet,
and it would just be content
created on the internet,
not the moving a
broadcast to the internet,
but just completely
internet-driven content.
And so this media shift
would have allowed consumers
to more easily access content
that was personally meaningful.
There's a big idea in the '90s
that everything was going to be tailored
to you specifically.
And we've seen efforts at creating this
with like the Netflix
queue and that kinda thing.
But it really, even
going further than that,
that everything you consume
would just be somehow meant
just for you personally.
And so in making this argument,
those who engaged in this
digital revolution rhetoric
tended to contrast
between passive old media,
movies, TV shows, radio that was passive,
you just sat there and listened to it,
and interactive new media,
so this was video games
and the internet itself
that requires you to actively interact
with what was going on,
to be able to consume
and enjoy the new media.
One of the biggest proponents
of the digital revolution rhetoric
was a scholar by the name
of Nicholas Negroponte.
And he predicted in his
1990 book, "Being Digital,"
that all the broadcast networks,
ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, would
just collapse entirely
as we move more and more into
narrowcasting and niche media.
And so this early convergence talk
focused on old media
being completely absorbed
and replaced by new media.
But this
understanding of convergence
sort of fell apart in the early 2000s
when the dot-com bubble burst.
There was a lot of investment
in early internet sites and platforms,
billions of dollars being
invested into these sites,
and then in the early 2000s,
it all just kind of fell apart
when all these websites that
had been promising certain services
just weren't able to live
up to those expectations.
And so this early promise of
the internet and new media
sort of falls apart.
But then after that bubble burst,
then you start to see the
idea of convergence reemerge.
And so this is what we're talking about
with the paradigm shift.
So in the past, the paradigm was that
new media was just gonna
completely replace old media,
old media was just gonna go away,
and the emerging paradigm
assumes that old and new media
interact in more complex ways,
but both are still active.
And so, industry leaders
are returning to this idea of convergence
as a way of making sense
of the changes that have happened
in the media system over
the last couple of decades.
To develop this idea
of convergence, Jenkins
relied on the work of an
MIT political scientist
named Ithiel de Sola Pool,
who he calls the Prophet of Convergence,
that he predicted a lot of how convergence
would actually develop when
the paradigm shift happened.
And so Pool saw convergence
as a force of social change,
blurring the lines between media
instead of thinking of it as one form
of media replacing another.
And so a single
physical technology may carry services
that in the past were
provided in separate ways.
So, used to have to have a TV and a VCR
and a radio
and all this kinda stuff
to consume different media,
but now they are converging into one,
more and more, one device.
And so that service
can now be provided in a lot of different,
even physical ways.
You can access Netflix through your phone,
but also through a tablet,
through a game system,
through your laptop,
through your desktop, through your TV,
through a set-top box,
all kinds of stuff can
give you the same service.
And the one-to-one relationship
that used to exist between
a medium and its uses
is eroding, of course.
Cell phones, when they first came out,
were just about making calls on the go,
but now, of course, smartphones
do all kinds of stuff.
Reading was primarily
done through print media
like books and magazines,
and now we're reading on
our laptops and tablets
and phones and all kinds
of stuff all the time.
And so one of Pool's insights
that Jenkins is drawing on
is the idea that what we're getting now
is the same content, just
through many different channels.
So the walls that used to separate media
are being broken down.
New media technologies
enable content to flow
through many different
channels more easily
and assume many different forms
at the point of reception.
So watching a movie on your smartphone
is not the same as watching
it in the theaters.
You're still able to
consume the same content,
but the experience is different.
So that's what we mean by
assuming different forms,
that watching a movie on your phone
is never gonna be exactly the
same, and it shouldn't be.
If you had to project
the image up on a wall
to be able to see it,
if you had to start it and not stop
for the two hours that it was running,
that wouldn't be conducive
to a lot of the ways we consume media.
And so the walls are breaking down,
and we're having similar
access to content,
but it is in different forms.
And the new
cross-media ownership patterns we've seen
encourage companies to make their content
available across, say, different problems.
AT&T, for example, a few
years ago, bought DirecTV,
and they've also been buying
parts of Turner Media and Warner Brothers.
And so when they buy DirecTV,
they start to make the content,
the platform available
through their phone service
because they own both of it,
and why should they keep it separate?
So we're seeing that content
be spread across very different
services and platforms,
and the ownership structures
of media companies
facilitate this as well.
Pool concluded that
we're still in a period
of prolonged transition.
Media systems are
competing, collaborating.
We're still sort of
searching for stability
that will often elude us and
elude these companies as well.
There's constant changes to who owns what
and even just what movies are available
and where they're available.
You might see a movie that
you intend to watch on Netflix
and you'll add it to your
queue, and then two years later,
when you finally decide to
get around to watching it,
and you try to get on there and watch it,
and it's not there anymore.
And so you have to go find,
oh, now it's on Amazon
and now it's on Hulu or whatever.
And so even something as simple as that,
we're not quite seeing that stability yet.
And so in this age of media transition,
we're seeing a lot of tactical decisions
being made about what technology to get,
what platforms to use, that kinda stuff,
a lot of unintended consequences,
mixed signals, competing efforts.
And most important for our purposes
in thinking about the
audience is unclear directions
and unpredictable outcomes.
So this is kind of the situation we're in,
and so convergence is
about understanding this,
so our current situation.
In this idea of convergence talk,
we've gone from the predictions
that we would have this
digital revolution,
that new media would just
completely replace old media,
to this period of transition
where we're seeing content
being spread more easily across a variety
of services and platforms,
but we're still seeing
a lot of uncertainty.
