- In this video
we're going to be introducing
Henry Jenkins's concept
of convergence as a way of understanding
how the audience continues to evolve,
through its use of new technologies.
We're going to, to understand this concept
we need to connect it to his
ideas on participatory culture
and collective intelligence as well.
He defines convergence
as the flow of content
across multiple media platforms,
the cooperation between
multiple media industries,
and the migratory behavior
of media audiences.
On that last point, he
says that audience members
will go basically anywhere in search
of the kinds of entertainment
experiences they want,
so people aren't platform-dependent,
you're not devoted to a particular medium,
you just want certain kinds of content
and you go looking for those.
This idea of convergence
describes technological,
industrial, cultural,
and social changes
depending on who is speaking
and what they are talking about.
For Jenkins's purposes and ours as well,
we're mostly thinking about
convergence in this case
as the circulation of media content,
how our new media technology's
used to circulate,
to spread content in new ways.
They're spread across
different media systems,
competing media economies,
and also across national borders.
And so, convergence,
this spread of media that's possible
through new ways of using
technology to share content
really depends on the active
participation of consumers.
So,
we as the audience have to be involved.
This spread of content doesn't
just happen on its own.
Others try to argue that convergence
should mostly be understood
in a technological sense,
in the sense of, oh, in this device,
all these types of media,
types of technology are
converging into one thing.
But,
again, Jenkins is more interested
in the content side of
things, how content is moving,
not how technological aspects,
functions are converging.
And mostly because he feels like content
is what the audience is interested in,
that's what drives them to
seek out new technologies,
not necessarily the technology itself.
And so he's interested in
convergence as a cultural shift,
the ways that consumers are now encouraged
to seek out new information
and make connections across
dispersed media content.
Related to this idea of convergence
and Jenkins's approach to it,
from a content-oriented perspective,
is the idea of participatory culture,
so we've talked about ideas
of the passive audience in the past,
and this is not a passive idea,
it's a very much a active
audience perspective.
And, through this concept
Jenkins sees producers
and consumers as interacting participants.
They're not separate roles
that you either fall into one
or the other, but different participants
who interact with each other
depending on what is necessary
at the time, and, according
to a new set of rules
that Jenkins says no one
really fully understands yet,
because we're still developing the rules
about what defines when you're a consumer,
when you're a producer.
But he also, again,
reminds us that not all
participants are equal.
Corporations still have a lot more power
as we kinda talked about with causerie,
to spread their content more widely,
and to bring together
more and more consumers.
So some audience members
do have a greater ability
to participate in this
developing media culture,
media system, but not all audience members
have that same ability.
So some audience members
will be able to develop that platform
and develop their own audience,
but not everybody will.
And, in terms of producing content,
it's important to remember, again,
that a lot of the
platforms that we're using,
YouTube, Instagram, Twitch,
they're owned by big
corporations themselves.
And so, I mean,
YouTube's owned by Google,
Instagram is owned by Facebook,
and then Twitch of course
is owned by Amazon,
and, because of these
corporate ownership practices,
you're still dependent
on a large corporation
to sharing your content.
You may be able to create
it more easily on your own,
and you're able to distribute
it a lot more easily,
but, you're only able to do that
because of these larger corporations.
So we're still dependent.
Corporations still have a lot
of power in this relationship.
But we are more participatory,
and so, convergence allows for us
to participate more because,
the technology converging allows us
to spread our content more easily,
allows the content to be more accessible
across this variety of platforms,
and so it's kind of, they
feed into each other.
The other related concept
that helps us understand
Jenkins's approach to convergence
is the idea of collective intelligence.
His point here is that
convergence doesn't happen
through the appliances themselves,
the actual technology, the physical thing.
Convergence occurs when
consumers come together,
and through their social interactions,
they create new content,
they spread it in new ways,
they use the tools they have
to bring things together.
So, this need to work
together, to build new ideas,
increases our incentive
for talking to each other about media.
We construct a sort of personal mythology
from bits and fragments of information
that we extract from the media flow,
and transform those into resources
through which we make sense
of our everyday lives.
And so we're going through this,
overwhelming stream of information
that we're constantly getting,
and we're trying to sort of,
cobble together an idea
of what is happening,
we're trying to make sense of
what is going on around us.
So it's more information
than any of us could store
in our own heads, and so we rely on others
to help us aggregate this, rely on tools
that we often are creating
together, things like Wikipedia,
we're the ones as the consumers,
as the audience members,
that are creating that.
And these conversations that
we're having are of interest
to media industries, they
want to see discussion,
they want to see their
products being talked about,
and so they are aware of
those ongoing discussions.
And so, consumption from this perspective
is a collective process.
We're always using information from others
to base our decisions on
what we are going to buy,
we listen to what our friends
and other people that we
care about have to say.
You may feel strongly about
buying a certain product,
and, or going to see a certain
movie or something like this,
and then you start seeing reviews
and it says it's really bad
and then you talk to
someone that has seen it,
and they say yeah, it's awful,
and, even though you fully
intended to go see it,
you'd made the conscious
decision on your own
to go see this movie or go buy
this video game or something,
now you are second-guessing that,
and, you ultimately decide not to,
or you go, or you decide
to, but with the knowledge
that other people have
been critical of it.
So, none of us can know everything.
Each of us knows something though,
and we can help each other sort
of put the pieces together,
when we pool our resources,
combine our skills,
and help try to make
sense of life together.
And so collective intelligence
in this way can be seen
as an alternative form of media power.
We are still in the learning stages
of trying to understand
how to use this power
as a part of convergence culture.
We're still mostly using this power
in our recreational lives.
There are hopes that we will
use it more purposefully
in other areas, law, politics,
advertising, military.
There has been some use of,
and attempts to use this
collective intelligence.
There are projects online
that will let you contribute
to the sequencing of DNA,
of genetic information,
helping to identify stars in the sky and,
comets and asteroids and stuff like that,
and so there have been
the beginning attempts
to use this idea of collective
intelligence for more,
productive purposes
than just recreational.
But yet we're still mostly
at the recreational stage.
But, so,
the main purpose to kinda wrap up is,
again that convergence is this,
or for Jenkins, is focused on
the circulation of content,
how these new media
cultures that have grown up
around new media and
social media have helped us
to spread content in
new and different ways,
but it's that content and
our desire for access to it
that has driven those efforts,
not just the technological side of things.
