Henry Jenkins

Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide

Updated and with a New Afterword

New York University Press • New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.ny upress.org

© 2006 by New York University All rights reserved

First published in paperback in 2008.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jenkins, Henry, 1958-Convergence culture : where old and new media collide I Henry Jenkins. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4281-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8147-4281-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-4295-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8147-4295-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mass media and culture-United States. 2. Popular culture-United States. I. Title. P94.65.U6J46 2006 302.230973–dc22 2006007358

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

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Introduction: "Worship at the

Altar of Convergence"

A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change

Worship at the Altar of Convergence

-slogan, the New Orleans Media Experience (2003)

The story circulated in the fall of 2001: Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-Ameri­can high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's (1970) Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert Is Evil" images he posted on his homepage (fig. 1.1). Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolf Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber, or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the Web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie. The publisher may not have rec­ognized Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al­Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlike­ly sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs

Fig. 1.1. Dino Ignacio's digital collage of Sesame Street's Bert and Osama Bin Laden.

2 Introduction

Fig.l.2. Ignacio's collage sur­prisingly appeared in CNN coverage of anti-American pro­tests following September 11.

depicting Bert and Bin Laden (fig. I.2). Representatives from the Chil­dren's Television Workshop, creators of the Sesame Street series, spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of them­selves. We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on-the young man who had initially appropriated their images, or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a num­ber of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. As the publicity grew, Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality. . . . "Bert Is Evil " and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."1 Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media inter­sect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.

This book is about the relationship between three concepts-media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want. Conver-

Introduction 3

gence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cul­tural, and social changes depending on who's speaking and what they -think they are talking about. (In this book I will be mixing and match­ing terms across these various frames of reference. I have added a glos­sary at· the end of the book to help guide readers.)

In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multi­ple media platforms. Think about the circuits that the Bert Is Evil images traveled -from Sesame Street through 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 and into the living rooms of people around the world. Some of its cir­culation depended on corporate strategies, such as the localization of Sesame Street or the global coverage of CNN. Some of its circulation depended on tactics of grassroots appropriation, whether in North America or in the Middle East.

This circulation of media content-across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders-depends heavily on consumers' active participation. I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. This book is about the work-and play-spectators perform in the new media system.

The term participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as par­ticipants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations-and even individuals within corporate media­still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.

Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however so­phisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and frag­ments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed

4 Introduction

into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives. Be­cause there is more information on any given topic than anyone can store in their head, there is an added incentive for us to talk among ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz that is increasingly valued by the media industry. Consumption has become a collective process-and that's what this book means by col­lective intelligence, a term coined by French cybertheorist Pierre Levy. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using this collective power through our recreational life, but soon we will be deploying those skills for more "serious " purposes. In this book, I explore how collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate.

Convergence Talk

Another snapshot of convergence culture at work: In December 2004, a hotly anticipated Bollywood film, Rok Sako To Rok Lo (2004), was screened in its entirety to movie buffs in Delhi, Bangalore, Hydera­bad, Mumbai, and other parts of India through EDGE-enabled mobile phones with live video streaming facility. This is believed to be the first time that a feature film had been fully accessible via mobile phones.21t remains to be seen how this kind of distribution fits into people's lives. Will it substitute for going to the movies or will people simply use it to sample movies they may want to see at other venues? Who knows?

Over the past several years, many of us have watched as cell phones have become increasingly central to the release strategies of commercial motion pictures around the world, as amateur and professional cell phone movies have competed for prizes in international film festivals, as mobile users have been able to listen in to major concerts, as Japan­ese novelists serialize their work via instant messenger, and as game players have used mobile devices to compete in augmented and alter­nate reality games. Some functions will take root; others will fail.

Call me old fashioned . The other week I wanted to buy a cell phone

Introduction 5

-you know, to make phone calls. I didn't want a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an MP3 player, or a game system. I also wasn't interested in something that could show me movie previews, would have customizable ring tones, or would allow me to read novels. I didn't want the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife. When the phone rings, I don't want to have to figure out which button to push. I just wanted a phone. The sales clerks sneered at me; they laughed at me behind my back. I was told by company after mobile company that they don't make single-function phones anymore. Nobody wants them. This was a powerful demonstration of how central mobiles have be­come to the process of media convergence.

You've probably been hearing a lot about convergence lately. You are going to be hearing even more.

The media industries are undergoing another paradigm shift. It hap­pens from time to time. In the 1990s, rhetoric about a coming digital revolution contained an implicit and often explicit assumption that new media was going to push aside old media, that the Internet was going to displace broadcasting, and that all of this would enable con­sumers to more easily access media content that was personally mean­ingful to them. A best seller in 1990, Nicholas Negroponte's Being Dig­ital, drew a sharp contrast between "passive old media " and "interac­tive new media, " predicting the collapse of broadcast networks in favor of an era of narrowcasting and niche media on demand: "What will happen to broadcast television over the next five years is so phenome­nal that it's difficult to comprehend."3 At one point, he suggests that no government regulation will be necessary to shatter the media conglom­erates: "The monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving into an array of cottage industries . . . . Media barons of today will be grasping to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow. . . . The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws Congress can invent."4 Sometimes, the new media companies spoke about convergence, but by this term, they seemed to mean that old media would be absorbed fully and completely into the orbit of the emerging technologies. George Gilder, another digital revolutionary, dismissed such claims: "The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse, the TV converged with the nickelodeon, the word-processing program converged with the typewriter, the CAD program converged with the drafting board, and

6 Introduction

digital desktop publishing converged with the linotype machine and the letterpress."5 For Gilder, the computer had come not to transform mass culture but to destroy it.

The popping of the dot-com bubble threw cold water on this talk of a digital revolution. Now, convergence has reemerged as an important reference point as old and new media companies try to imagine the future of the entertainment industry. If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways. The digital revolution paradigm claimed that new media was going to change everything. After the dot-com crash, the tendency was to imagine that new media had changed nothing. As with so many things about the current media environment, the truth lay somewhere in between. More and more, industry leaders are re­turning to convergence as a way of making sense of a moment of dis­orienting change. Convergence is, in that sense, an old concept taking on new meanings.

There was lots of convergence talk to be heard at the New Orleans Media Experience in October 2003. The New Orleans Media Experience was organized by HSI Productions, Inc., a New York-based company that produces music videos and commercials. HSI has committed to spend $100 million over the next five years, to make New Orleans the mecca for media convergence that Slamdance has become for inde­pendent cinema. The New Orleans Media Experience is more than a film festival; it is also a showcase for game releases, a venue for com­mercials and music videos, an array of concerts and theatrical perform­ances, and a three-day series of panels and discussions with industry leaders.

Inside the auditorium, massive posters featuring images of eyes, ears, mouths, and hands urged attendees to "worship at the Altar of Convergence, " but it was far from clear what kind of deity they were genuflecting before. Was it a New Testament God who promised them salvation? An Old Testament God threatening destruction unless they followed His rules? A multifaced deity that spoke like an oracle and demanded blood sacrifices? Perhaps, in keeping with the location, con­vergence was a voodoo goddess who would give them the power to inflict pain on their competitors?

Like me, the participants had come to New Orleans hoping to glimpse tomorrow before it was too late. Many were nonbelievers who

Introduction 7

had been burned in the dot-com meltdown and were there to scoff at any new vision. Others were freshly minted from America's top business schools and there to find ways to make their first million. Still others were there because their bosses had sent them, hoping for en­lightenment, but willing to settle for one good night in the French Quarter.

The mood was tempered by a sober realization of the dangers of moving too quickly, as embodied by the ghost-town campuses in the Bay Area and the office furniture being sold at bulk prices on eBay; and the dangers of moving too slowly, as represented by the recording industry's desperate flailing as it tries to close the door on file-sharing after the cows have already come stampeding out of the bam. The par­ticipants had come to New Orleans in search of the "just right " -the right investments, predictions, and business models. No longer expect­ing to surf the waves of change, they would be content with staying afloat. The old paradigms were breaking down faster than the new ones were emerging, producing panic among those most invested in the status quo and curiosity in those who saw change as opportunity.

Advertising guys in pinstriped shirts mingled with recording indus­try flacks with backward baseball caps, Hollywood agents in Hawaiian shirts, pointy-bearded technologists, and shaggy-haired garners. The only thing they all knew how to do was to exchange business cards.

As represented on the panels at the New Orleans Media Experience, convergence was a "come as you are " party, and some of the partici­pants were less ready for what was planned than others. It was also a swap meet where each of the entertainment industries traded problems and solutions, finding through the interplay among media what they can't achieve working in isolation. In every discussion, there emerged different models of convergence followed by the acknowledgment that none of them knew for sure what the outcomes were going to be. Then, everyone adjourned for a quick round of Red Bulls (a conference spon­sor) as if funky high-energy drinks were going to blast them over all of those hurdles.

Political economists and business gurus make convergence sound so easy; they look at the charts that show the concentration of media own­ership as if they ensure that all of the parts will work together to pur­sue maximum profits. But from the ground, many of the big media giants look like great big dysfunctional families, whose members aren't speaking with each other and pursue their own short-term agendas

8 Introduction

even at the expense of other divisions of the same companies. In New Orleans, however, the representatives for different industries seemed tentatively ready to lower their guard and speak openly about common visions.

This event was billed as a chance for the general public to learn first­hand about the coming changes in news and entertainment. In accept­ing an invitation to be on panels, in displaying a willingness to "go public " with their doubts and anxieties, perhaps industry leaders were acknowledging the importance of the role that ordinary consumers can play not just in accepting convergence, but actually in driving the proc­ess. If the media industry in recent years has seemed at war with its consumers, in that it is trying to force consumers back into old relation­ships and into obedience to well-established norms, companies hoped to use this New Orleans event to justify their decisions to consumers and stockholders alike.

Unfortunately, although this was not a closed-door event, it might as well have been. Those few members of the public who did show up were ill informed. After an intense panel discussion about the chal­lenges of broadening the uses of game consoles, the first member of the audience to raise his hand wanted to know when Grand Theft Auto III was coming out on the Xbox. You can scarcely blame consumers for not knowing how to speak this new language or even what questions to ask when so little previous effort has been made to educate them about convergence thinking.

At a panel on game consoles, the big tension was between Sony (a hardware company) and Microsoft (a software company); both had ambitious plans but fundamentally different business models and vi­sions. All agreed that the core challenge was to expand the potential uses of this cheap and readily accessible technology so that it became the "black box, " the "Trojan horse " that smuggled convergence culture right into people's living rooms. What was mom going to do with the console when her kids were at school? What would get a family to give a game console to grandpa for Christmas? They had the technology to bring about convergence, but they hadn't figured out why anyone would want it.

Another panel focused on the relationship between video games and traditional media. Increasingly, movie moguls saw games not simply as a means of stamping the franchise logo on some ancillary product but as a means of expanding the storytelling experience. These filmmakers

Introduction 9

had come of age as garners and had their own ideas about the creative intersections between the media; they knew who the most creative designers were, and they worked the collaboration into their contract. They wanted to use games to explore ideas that couldn't fit within two­hour films.

Such collaborations meant taking everyone out of their II comfort zones," as one movieland agent explained. These relationships were difficult to sustain, since all parties worried about losing creative control, and since the time spans for development and distribution in the media were radically different. Should the game company try to align its timing to the often unpredictable production cycle of a movie with the hopes of hitting Wal-Mart the same weekend the film opens? Should the movie producers wait for the often equally unpredictable game development cycle to run its course, sitting out the clock while some competitor steals their thunder? Will the game get released weeks or months later, after the buzz of the movie has dried up or, worse yet, after the movie has bombed? Should the game become part of the pub­licity buildup toward a major release, even though that means starting development before the film project has been 11 green lighted" by a stu­dio? Working with a television production company is even more nerve wracking, since the turnaround time is much shorter and the risk much higher that the series will never reach the air.

If the game industry folks had the smirking belief that they con­trolled the future, the record industry types were sweating bullets; their days were numbered unless they figured out how to tum around current trends (such as dwindling audiences, declining sales, and ex­panding piracy). The panel on "monetizing music" was one of the most heavily attended. Everyone tried to speak at once, yet none of them were sure their "answers" would work. Will the future revenue come from rights management, from billing people for the music they down­load, or from creating a fee the servers had to pay out to the rec­ord industry as a whole? And what about cell phone rings-which some felt represented an unexplored market for new music as well as a grassroots promotional channel? Perhaps the money will lie in the intersection between the various media with new artists promoted via music videos that are paid for by advertisers who want to use their sounds and images for branding, with new artists tracked via the Web, which allows the public to register its preferences in hours rather than weeks.

I 0 Introduction

And so it went, in panel after panel. The New Orleans Media Experi­ence pressed us into the future. Every path forward had roadblocks, most of which felt insurmountable, but somehow, they would either have to be routed around or broken down in the coming decade.

The messages were plain:

1. Convergence is coming and you had better be ready. 2. Convergence is harder than it sounds. 3. Everyone will survive if everyone works together. (Unfortunately,

that was the one thing nobody knew how to do.)

The Prophet of Convergence

If Wired magazine declared Marshall McLuhan the patron saint of the digital revolution, we might well describe the late MIT political scien­tist Ithiel de Sola Pool as the prophet of media convergence. Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1983) was probably the first book to lay out the concept of convergence as a force of change within the media industries:

A process called the "convergence of modes" is blurring the lines be­

tween media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the

post, telephone and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the

press, radio, and television. A single physical means-be it wires, cables

or airwaves-may carry services that in the past were provided in sepa­

rate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by any one

medium-be it broadcasting, the press, or telephony-can now be pro­

vided in several different physical ways. So the one-to-one relationship

that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.6

Some people today talk about divergence rather than convergence, but Pool understood that they were two sides of the same phenomenon.

"Once upon a time, " Pool explained, "companies that published newspapers, magazines, and books did very little else; their involve­ment with other media was slight."7 Each medium had its own distinc­tive functions and markets, and each was regulated under different regimes, depending on whether its character was centralized or de­centralized, marked by scarcity or plenitude, dominated by news or

Introduction I I

entertainment, and owned by governmental or private interests. Pool felt that these differences were largely the product of political choices and preserved through habit rather than any essential characteristic of the various technologies. But he did see some communications tech­nologies as supporting more diversity and a greater degree of partici­pation than others: "Freedom is fostered when the means of communi­cation are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available, as are printing presses or microcomputers. Central control is more likely when the means of communication are concentrated, monopolized, and scarce, as are great networks." 8

Several forces, however, have begun breaking down the walls sepa­rating these different media. New media technologies enabled the same content to flow through many different channels and assume many different forms at the point of reception. Pool was describing what Nicholas Negroponte calls the transformation of "atoms into bytes " or digitization. 9 At the same time, new patterns of cross-media owner­ship that began in the mid-1980s, during what we can now see as the first phase of a longer process of media concentration, were making it more desirable for companies to distribute content across those various channels rather than within a single media platform. Digitization set the conditions for convergence; corporate conglomerates created its im­perative.

Much writing about the so-called digital revolution presumed that the outcome of technological change was more or less inevitable. Pool, on the other hand, predicted a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems competed and collaborated, search­ing for the stability that would always elude them: "Convergence does not mean ultimate stability or unity. It operates as a constant force for unification but always in dynamic tension with change . . .. There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that." 1 0

As Pool predicted, we are i n a n age of media transition, one marked by tactical decisions and unintended consequences, mixed signals and competing interests, and most of all, unclear directions and unpre­dictable outcomes. 1 1 Two decades later, I find myself reexamining some of the core questions Pool raised -about how we maintain the poten­tial of participatory culture in the wake of growing media concentra­tion, about whether the changes brought about by convergence open new opportunities for expression or expand the power of big media.

12 Introduction

Pool was interested in the impact of convergence on political culture; I am more interested in its impact on popular culture, but as chapter 6 will suggest, the lines between the two have now blurred.

It is beyond my abilities to describe or fully document all of the changes that are occurring. My aim is more modest. I want to describe some of the ways that convergence thinking is reshaping American popular culture and, in particular, the ways it is impacting the relation­ship between media audiences, producers, and content. Although this chapter will outline the big picture (insofar as any of us can see it clearly yet), subsequent chapters will examine these changes through a series of case studies focused on specific media franchises and their audiences. My goal is to help ordinary people grasp how convergence is impacting the media they consume and, at the same time, to help industry leaders and policymakers understand consumer perspectives on these changes. Writing this book has been challenging because everything seems to be changing at once and there is no vantage point that takes me above the fray. Rather than trying to write from an objec­tive vantage point, I describe in this book what this process looks like from various localized perspectives-advertising executives struggling to reach a changing market, creative artists discovering new ways to tell stories, educators tapping informal learning communities, activists deploying new resources to shape the political future, religious groups contesting the quality of their cultural environs, and, of course, various fan communities who are early adopters and creative users of emerging media.

I can't claim to be a neutral observer in any of this. For one thing, I am not simply a consumer of many of thes� media products; I am also an active fan. The world of media fandom has been a central theme of my work for almost two decades-an interest that emerges from my own participation within various fan communities as much as it does from my intellectual interests as a media scholar. During that time, I have watched fans move from the invisible margins of popular culture and into the center of current thinking about media production and consumption. For another, through my role as director of the MIT Com­parative Media Studies Program, I have been an active participant in discussions among industry insiders and policymakers; I have con­sulted with some of the companies discussed in this book; my earlier writings on fan communities and participatory culture have been em­braced by business schools and are starting to have some modest

Introduction 13

impact on the way media companies are relating to their consumers; many of the creative artists and media executives I interviewed are people I would consider friends. At a time when the roles between pro­ducers and consumers are shifting, my job allows me to move among different vantage points . I hope this book allows readers to benefit from my adventures into spaces where few humanists have gone before. Yet, readers should also keep in mind that my engagement with fans and producers alike necessarily colors what I say. My goal here is to docu­ment conflicting perspectives on media change rather than to critique them. I don't think we can meaningfully critique convergence until it is more fully understood; yet if the public doesn't get some insights into the discussions that are taking place, they will have little to no input into decisions that will dramatically change their relationship to media.

The Black Box Fallacy

Almost a decade ago, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling established what he calls the Dead Media Project. As his Web site (http://www .deadmedia.org) explains, "The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the twentieth century are poorly adapted to the postmodem technological environment." 12 Antic­ipating that some of these "dinosaurs " were heading to the tar pits, he constructed a shrine to "the media that have died on the barbed wire of technological change." His collection is astounding, including relics like "the phenakistoscope, the telharmonium, the Edison wax cylinder, the stereopticon . . . various species of magic lantern. " 13

Yet, history teaches us that old media never die-and they don't even necessarily fade away. W hat dies are simply the tools we use to access media content-the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling's project lists falls under this category. Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium . CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery tech­nologies.

To define media, let's tum to historian Lisa Gitelman, who offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated "protocols " or social and cultural practices that have

14 Introduction

grown up around that technology. 14 Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems. Delivery technolo­gies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment stratum.

A medium's content may shift (as occurred when television dis­placed radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the pri­mary showcase for rock and roll), its audience may change (as occurs when comics move from a mainstream medium in the 1950s to a niche medium today), and its social status may rise or fall (as occurs when theater moves from a popular form to an elite one), but once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Print­ed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Televi­sion did not kill radio.15 Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media. That's why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding the past several decades of media change than the old digital revolution paradigm was. Old media are not being dis­placed. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduc­tion of new technologies.

'

The implications of this distinction between media and delivery sys­tems become clearer as Gitelman elaborates on what she means by "protocols. " She writes: "Protocols express a huge variety of social, eco­nomic, and material relationships. So telephony includes the salutation 'Hello?' (for English speakers, at least) and includes the monthly billing cycle and includes the wires and cables that materially connect our phones . . .. Cinema includes everything from the sprocket holes that run along the sides of film to the widely shared sense of being able to wait and see 'films' at home on video. And protocols are far from static. "16 This book will have less to say about the technological dimen­sions of media change than about the shifts in the protocols by which we are producing and consuming media.

Much contemporary discourse about convergence starts and ends with what I call the Black Box Fallacy. Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go). If the folks at the New Or-

Introduction 15

leans Media Experience could just figure out which black box will reign supreme, then everyone can make reasonable investments for the fu­ture. Part of what makes the black box concept a fallacy is that it reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cul­tural levels we are considering here.

I don't know about you, but in my living room, I am seeing more and more black boxes. There are my VCR, my digital cable box, my DVD player, my digital recorder, my sound system, and my two game systems, not to mention a huge mound of videotapes, DVDs and CDs, game cartridges and controllers, sitting atop, laying alongside, toppling over the edge of my television system. (I would definitely qualify as an early adopter, but most American homes now have, or soon will have, their own pile of black boxes.) The perpetual tangle of cords that stands between me and my "home entertainment " center reflects the degree of incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the various media technologies. And many of my MIT students are lugging around multi­ple black boxes-their laptops, their cells, their iPods, their Game Boys, their BlackBerrys, you name it.

As Cheskin Research explained in a 2002 report, "The old idea of convergence was that all devices would converge into one central device that did everything for you (ala the universal remote). What we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges . . . . Your email needs and expectations are different whether you're at home, work, school, commuting, the airport, etc., and these different devices are designed to suit your needs for accessing content depend­ing on where you are-your situated context. " 17 This pull toward more specialized media appliances coexists with a push toward more generic devices. We can see the proliferation of black boxes as symptomatic of a moment of convergence: because no one is sure what kinds of functions should be combined, we are forced to buy a range of specialized and incompatible appliances. On the other end of the spectrum, we may also be forced to deal with an escalation of functions within the same media appliance, functions that decrease the ability of that appliance to serve its original function, and so I can't get a cell phone that is just a phone.

Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Con­vergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, indus­tries, markets, genres, and audiences. Convergence alters the logic by

16 Introduction

which media industries operate and by which media consumers proc­ess news and entertainment. Keep this in mind: convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint. There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes. Thanks to the proliferation of chan­nels and the portability of new computing arid telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era when media will be everywhere. Convergence isn't something that is going to happen one day when we have enough bandwidth or figure out the correct configuration of appliances. Ready or not, we are already living within a convergence culture.

Our cell phones are not simply telecommunications devices; they also allow us to play games, download information from the Inter­net, and take and send photographs or text messages. Increasingly they allow us to watch previews of new films, download installments of serialized novels, or attend concerts from remote locations. All of this is already happening in northern Europe and Asia. Any of these functions can also be performed using other media appliances. You can listen to the Dixie Chicks through your DVD player, your car radio, your Walk­man, your iPod, a Web radio station, or a music cable channel.

Fueling this technological convergence is a shift in patterns of media ownership. W hereas old Hollywood focused on cinema, the new media conglomerates have controlling interests across the entire entertain­ment industry. Warner Bros. produces film, television, popular music, computer games, Web sites, toys, amusement park rides, books, news­papers, magazines, and comics.

In turn, media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the Web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks. And fans of a popular television series may sample dialogue, summarize epi­sodes, debate subtexts, create original fan fiction, record their own soundtracks, make their own movies-and distribute all of this world­wide via the Internet.

Convergence is taking place within the same appliances, within the same franchise, within the same company, within the brain of the con­sumer, and within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed.

Introduction 1 7

The Cultural Logic o f Media Convergence

Another snapshot of the future: Anthropologist Mizuko Ito has docu­mented the growing place of mobile communications among Japanese youth, describing y oung couples who remain in constant contact with each other throughout the day, thanks to their access to various mobile technologies.18 They wake up together, work together, eat together, and go to bed together even though they live miles apart and may have face-to-face contact only a few times a month. We might call it tele­cocooning.

Convergence doesn't just involve commercially produced materials and services traveling along well-regulated and predictable circuits. It doesn't just involve the mobile companies getting together with the film companies to decide when and where we watch a newly released film. It also occurs when people take media in their own hands. Enter­tainment content isn't the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms. Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels. Being a lover or a mommy or a teacher occurs on multiple platforms.19 Sometimes we tuck our kids into bed at night and other times we Instant Message them from the other side of the globe.

And yet another snapshot: Intoxicated students at a local high school use their cell phones spontaneously to produce their own soft-core porn movie involving topless cheerleaders making out in the locker room. Within hours, the movie is circulating across the school, being downloaded by students and teachers alike and watched between classes on personal media devices.

When people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved.

For the foreseeable future, convergence will be a kind of kludge-a jerry-rigged relationship among different media technologies-rather than a fully integrated system. Right now, the cultural shifts, the legal battles, and the economic consolidations that are fueling media conver­gence are preceding shifts in the technological infrastructure. How those various transitions unfold will determine the balance of power in the next media era.

The American media environment is now being shaped by two seem­ingly contradictory trends: on the one hand, new media technologies

18 Introduction

have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enabled consumers to archive, anno­tate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. At the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the enter­tainment industry. No one seems capable of describing both sets of changes at the same time, let alone showing how they impact each other. Some fear that media is out of control, others that it is too controlled. Some see a world without gatekeepers, others a world where gate­keepers have unprecedented power. Again, the truth lies somewhere in between.

Another snapshot: People around the world are affixing stickers showing Yellow Arrows (http:/ I global.yellowarrow.net) alongside pub­lic monuments and factories, beneath highway overpasses, onto lamp posts. The arrows provide numbers others can call to access recorded voice messages-personal annotations on our shared urban landscape. They use it to share a beautiful vista or criticize an irresponsible com­pany. And increasingly, companies are co-opting the system to leave their own advertising pitches.

Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Corporate conver­gence coexists with grassroots convergence. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets, and rein­force viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content. Inspired by those ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture. Sometimes, corporate and grassroots convergence reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Some­times, these two forces are at war, and those struggles will redefine the face of American popular culture.

Convergence requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media, assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decisions. If old consumers were as­sumed to be passive, the new consumers are active. If old consumers

Introduction 1 9

were predictable and stayed where y o u told them t o stay, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.

Media producers are responding to these newly empowered con­sumers in contradictory ways, sometimes encouraging change, some­times resisting what they see as renegade behavior. And consumers, in turn, are perplexed by what they see as mixed signals about how much and what kinds of participation they can enjoy.

As they undergo this transition, the media companies are not be­having in a monolithic fashion; often, different divisions of the same company are pursuing radically different strategies, reflecting their un­certainty about how to proceed. On the one hand, convergence repre­sents an expanded opportunity for media conglomerates, since content that succeeds in one sector can spread across other platforms. On the other, convergence represents a risk since most of these media fear a fragmentation or erosion of their markets. Each time they move a viewer from television to the Internet, say, there is a risk that the con­sumer may not return.

Industry insiders use the term "extension" to refer to their efforts to expand the potential markets by moving content across different deliv­ery systems, "synergy" to refer to the economic opportunities repre­sented by their ability to own and control all of those manifestations, and "franchise" to refer to their coordinated effort to brand and market fictional content under these new conditions. Extension, synergy, and franchising are pushing media industries to embrace convergence. For that reason, the case studies I selected for this book deal with some of the most successful franchises in recent media history. Some (American Idol, 2002, and Survivor, 2000) originate on television, some (The Matrix, 1999, Star Wars, 1977) on the big screen, some as books (Harry Potter, 1998), and some as games (The Sims, 2000), but each extends outward from its originating medium to influence many other sites of cultural production. Each of these franchises offers a different vantage point from which to understand how media convergence is reshaping the relationship between media producers and consumers.

Chapter 1, which focuses on Survivor, and chapter 2, which centers on American Idol, look at the phenomenon of reality television. Chapter 1 guides readers through the little-known world of Survivor spoilers-a

20 I ntroduction

group of active consumers who pool their knowledge to try to unearth the series's many secrets before they are revealed on the air. Survivor spoiling will be read here as a particularly vivid example of collective intelligence at work. Knowledge communities form around mutual in­tellectual interests; their members work together to forge new knowl­edge often in realms where no traditional expertise exists; the pursuit of and assessment of knowledge is at once communal and adversarial. Mapping how these knowledge communities work can help us better understand the social nature of contemporary media consumption. They can also give us insight into how knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence.

On the other hand, chapter 2 examines American Idol from the per­spective of the media industry, trying to understand how reality tele­vision is being shaped by what I call 11 affective economics." The de­creasing value of the thirty-second commercial in an age of TiVos and V CRs is forcing Madison Avenue to rethink its interface with the con­suming public. This new 11 affective economics" encourages companies to transform brands into what one industry insider calls 11lovemarks" and to blur the line between entertainment content and brand mes­sages. According to the logic of affective economics, the ideal consumer is active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked. Watching the advert or consuming the product is no longer enough; the company invites the audience inside the brand community. Yet, if such affilia­tions encourage more active consumption, these same communities can also become protectors of brand integrity and thus critics of the compa­nies that seek to court their allegiance.

Strikingly, in both cases, relations between producers and consumers are breaking down as consumers seek to act upon the invitation to par­ticipate in the life of the franchises. In the case of Survivor, the spoiler community has become so good at the game that the producers fear they will be unable to protect the rights of other consumers to have a 11 first time" experience of the unfolding series. In the case of American Idol, fans fear that their participation is marginal and that producers still play too active a role in shaping the outcome of the competition. How much participation is too much? W hen does participation be­come interference? And conversely, when do producers exert too much power over the entertainment experience?

Chapter 3 examines The Matrix franchise as an example of what I am calling transmedia storytelling. Transmedia story telling refers to a new

Introduction 2 1

aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence-one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active partici­pation of knowledge communities. Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via on­line discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment ex­perience. Some would argue that the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the three Matrix films, have pushed transmedia story­telling farther than most audience members were prepared to go.

Chapters 4 and 5 take us deeper into the realm of participatory cul­ture. Chapter 4 deals with Star Wars fan filmmakers and garners, who are actively reshaping George Lucas's mythology to satisfy their own fantasies and desires. Fan cultures will be understood here as a revital­ization of the old folk culture process in response to the content of mass culture. Chapter 5 deals with young Harry Potter fans who are writing their own stories about Hogwarts and its students. In both cases, these grassroots artists are finding themselves in conflict with commercial media producers who want to exert greater control over their intellec­tual property. We will see in chapter 4 that LucasArts has had to contin­ually rethink its relations to Star Wars fans throughout the past several decades, trying to strike the right balance between encouraging the enthusiasm of their fans and protecting their investments in the series. Interestingly, as Star Wars moves across media channels, different ex­pectations about participation emerge, with the producers of the Star Wars Galaxies game encouraging consumers to generate much of the content even as the producers of the Star Wars movies issue guidelines enabling and constraining fan participation.

Chapter 5 extends this focus on the politics of participation to con­sider two specific struggles over Harry Potter: the conflicting interests between Harry Potter fans and Warner Bros., the studio that acquired the film rights to J. K. Rawling's books, and the conflict between con­servative Christian critics of the books and teachers who have seen them as a means of encouraging young readers. This chapter maps a range of responses to the withering of traditional gatekeepers and the expansion of fantasy into many different parts of our everyday lives. On the one hand, some conservative Christians are striking back against media convergence and globalization, reasserting traditional

22 Introduction

authority in the face of profound social and cultural change. On the other hand, some Christians embrace convergence through their own forms of media outreach, fostering a distinctive approach to media lit­eracy education and encouraging the emergence of Christian-inflected fan cultures.

Throughout these five chapters, I will show how entrenched institu­tions are taking their models from grassroots fan communities, and reinventing themselves for an era of media convergence and collective intelligence-how the advertising industry has been forced to recon­sider consumers' relations to brands, the military is using multiplayer games to rebuild communications between civilians and service mem­bers, the legal profession has struggled to understand what "fair use" means in an era when many more people are becoming authors, educa­tors are reassessing the value of informal education, and at least some conservative Christians are making their peace with newer forms of popular culture. In each of these cases, powerful institutions are trying to build stronger connections with their constituencies and consumers are applying skills learned as fans and garners to work, edu­cation, and politics.

Chapter 6 will tum from popular culture to public culture, applying my ideas about convergence to offer a perspective on the 2004 Ameri­can presidential campaign, exploring what it might take to make de­mocracy more participatory. Again and again, citizens were better served by popular culture than they were by news or political dis­course; popular culture took on new responsibilities for educating the public about the stakes of this election and inspiring them to partici­pate more fully in the process. In the wake of a divisive campaign, pop­ular media may also model ways we can come together despite our differences. The 2004 elections represent an important transitional mo­ment in the relationship between media and politics as citizens are being encouraged to do much of the dirty work of the campaign and the candidates and parties lost some control over the political process. Here again, all sides are assuming greater participation by citizens and consumers, yet they do not yet agree on the terms of that participation.

In my conclusion, I will return to my three key terms-convergence, collective intelligence, and participation. I want to explore some of the implications of the trends I will be discussing in this book for edu­cation, media reform, and democratic citizenship. I will be returning there to a core claim: that convergence culture represents a shift in the

Introduction 23

ways we think about our relations to media, that we are making that shift first through our relations with popular culture, but that the skills we acquire through play may have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect with other peo­ple around the world.

I will be focusing throughout this book on the competing and con­tradictory ideas about participation that are shaping this new media culture. Yet, I must acknowledge that not all consumers have access to the skills and resources needed to be full participants in the cul­tural practices I am describing. Increasingly, the digital divide is giv­ing way to concern about the participation gap. Throughout the 1990s, the primary question was one of access. Today, most Americans have some limited access to the Internet, say, though for many, that access is through the public library or the local school. Yet many of the activities this book will describe depend on more extended access to those tech­nologies, a greater familiarity with the new kinds of social interactions they enable, a fuller mastery over the conceptual skills that consumers have developed in response to media convergence. As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices.

Most of the people depicted in this book are early adopters. In this country they are disproportionately white, male, middle class, and col­lege educated. These are people who have the greatest access to new media technologies and have mastered the skills needed to fully par­ticipate in these new knowledge cultures. I don't assume that these cultural practices will remain the same as we broaden access and par­ticipation. In fact, expanding participation necessarily sparks further change. Yet, right now, our best window into convergence culture comes from looking at the experience of these early settlers and first inhabitants. These elite consumers exert a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention. W here they go, the media industry is apt to follow; where the media industry goes, these con­sumers are apt to be found. Right now, both are chasing their own tails.

You are now entering convergence culture. It is not a surprise that we are not yet ready to cope with its complexities and contradictions. We need to find ways to negotiate the changes taking place. No one group can set the terms. No one group can control access and participation.

24 Introduction

Don't expect the uncertainties surrounding convergence to be re­solved anytime soon. We are entering an era of prolonged transition and transformation in the way media operates. Convergence describes the process by which we will sort through those options. There will be no magical black box that puts everything in order again. Media producers will find their way through their current problems only by renegotiating their relationship with their consumers. Audiences, em­powered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersec­tion between old and new media, are demanding the right to partici­pate within the culture. Producers who fail to make their peace with this new participatory culture will face declining goodwill and dimin­ished revenues. The resulting struggles and compromises will define the public culture of the future.

N otes

Notes to the I ntroduction

1. Josh Grossberg, "The Bert-Bin Laden Connection?" E Online, October 10, 2001, http : / /www.eonline.com/News/ ltems/0, 1,8950,00.html. For a different perspective on Bert and Bin Laden, see Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abun­dance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review 108 (June 2003).

2. "RSTRL to Premier on Cell Phone," IndiaFM News Bureau, December 6, 2004, http : / / www.indiafm.com/ scoop / 04 / dec / 06 12rstrlcell /index.shtml.

3. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 54.

4. Ibid., pp. 57-58. 5. George Gilder, "Afterword: The Computer Juggernaut: Life after Life after

Television," added to the 1994 edition of Life after Television: The Coming Transfor­mation of Media and American Life (New York: W. W. Norton), p. 189. The book was originally published in 1990.

6. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 23.

7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. Negroponte, Being Digital. 10. Pool, Technologies of Freedom, pp. 53-54. 11. For a fuller discussion of the concept of media in transition, see David

Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, "Towards an Aesthetics of Transition," in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

12. Bruce Sterling, "The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Pub­lic Appeal," http : / /www.deadmedia.org/ modest-proposal.html.

13. Ibid. 14. Lisa Gitelman, "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects," in Always

Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (work in progress). 15. For a useful discussion of the recurring idea that new media kill off

old media, see Priscilla Coit Murphy, "Books Are Dead, Long Live Books," in

297

298 Notes to the Introduction

David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aes­thetics of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

16. Gitelman, "Introduction." 17. Cheskin Research, "Designing Digital Experiences for Youth," Market

Insights Series, Fall 2002, pp. 8-9. 18. Mizuko Ito, "Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth and the Replacement of the

Social Contract," in Rich Ling and Per Petersen (eds.), Mobile Commun ications: Re­Negotiation of the Social Sphere (forthcoming). http : / / www.itofisher.com/ mito/ archives I mobileyouth.pdf.

19. For a useful illustration of this point, see Henry Jenkins, "Love Online," in Henry Jenkins (ed.), Fans, Garners, and Bloggers (New York: New York Uni­versity Press, 2005).

Notes to Chapter I

1. Joanna Pearlstein, "The Finale as Rerun When Trumping 'Survivor,' " New York Times, March 27, 2003.

2 . ChillOne has his own story about what happened, and he has self-pub­lished his own account of the incidents described here. See ChillOne, The Spoiler: Revealing the Secrets of Survivor (New York: IUniverse, 2003).

3. Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1997), p. 20.

4. Ibid., p . 237. 5. Ibid., p . 217. 6. Ibid., pp. 214-215. 7. Mary Beth Haralovich and Michael W. Trosset, " 'Expect the Unexpected':

Narrative Pleasure and Uncertainty Due to Chance in Survivor, " in Susan Mur­ray and Laurie Ouellette (eds.), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 83-84.

8. Unless otherwise cited, these and subsequent quotes from Sucksters come from "ChillOne's Amazon Vacation Spoilers" thread at http : / /p085 .ezboard.com/ fsurvivorsucksfrm12. show MessageRange ?topiciD=204 . topic & start=1&stop=20. Except for major participants in the story, I have withheld names of posters here to protect their privacy. Where names appear, it is because I have gotten explicit permission from participants to print their user name.

9 . Quotations from Wezzie and Dan are taken from a personal interview with the author, conducted via e-mail, in June 2003.

10. Levy, Collective Intelligence, p . 61. 11. Marshall Sella, "The Remote Controllers," New York Times, October 20,

2002. 12. Daniel Robert Epstein, "Interview: Jeff Probst of Survivor, " Underground

Online, http : / /www.ugo.com / channels/ filmtv / features /jeffprobst / .