Jenkins claims that convergence is about the relationships between media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intel

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

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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-Ameri­ can 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 rec­ ognized Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al­ Qaeda 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 unlike­ ly 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 sur­ prisingly appeared in CNN coverage of anti-American pro­ tests following September 11.

depicting Bert and Bin Laden (fig. I.2). Representatives from the Chil­ dren'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 them­ selves. 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 num­ ber 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 inter­ sect, 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, cul­ tural, and social changes depending on who's speaking and what they -think they are talking about. (In this book I will be mixing and match­ ing terms across these various frames of reference. I have added a glos­ sary 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 multi­ ple 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 cir­ culation 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 par­ ticipants 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 media­ still 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 so­ phisticated 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 frag­ ments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed

4 Introduction

into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives. Be­ cause 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 col­ lective 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, Hydera­ bad, 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 Japan­ ese novelists serialize their work via instant messenger, and as game players have used mobile devices to compete in augmented and alter­ nate 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 be­ come 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 hap­ pens 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 con­ sumers to more easily access media content that was personally mean­ ingful to them. A best seller in 1990, Nicholas Negroponte's Being Dig­ ital, drew a sharp contrast between "passive old media " and "interac­ tive 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 phenome­ nal that it's difficult to comprehend."3 At one point, he suggests that no government regulation will be necessary to shatter the media conglom­ erates: "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 re­ turning to convergence as a way of making sense of a moment of dis­ orienting 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 inde­ pendent cinema. The New Orleans Media Experience is more than a film festival; it is also a showcase for game releases, a venue for com­ mercials and music videos, an array of concerts and theatrical perform­ ances, 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, con­ vergence 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 en­ lightenment, 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 par­ ticipants had come to New Orleans in search of the "just right " -the right investments, predictions, and business models. No longer expect­ ing 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 indus­ try 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 partici­ pants 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 spon­ sor) 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 own­ ership as if they ensure that all of the parts will work together to pur­ sue 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 first­ hand about the coming changes in news and entertainment. In accept­ ing 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 proc­ ess. 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 relation­ ships 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 chal­ lenges 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 vi­ sions. 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 two­ hour 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 pub­ licity buildup toward a major release, even though that means starting development before the film project has been 11 green lighted" by a stu­ dio? 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 con­ trolled 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 ex­ panding 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 down­ load, or from creating a fee the servers had to pay out to the rec­ ord 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 Experi­ ence 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 scien­ tist 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 involve­ ment with other media was slight."7 Each medium had its own distinc­ tive functions and markets, and each was regulated under different regimes, depending on whether its character was centralized or de­ centralized, 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 tech­ nologies as supporting more diversity and a greater degree of partici­ pation than others: "Freedom is fostered when the means of communi­ cation 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 sepa­ rating 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 owner­ ship 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 im­ perative.

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, search­ ing 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 unpre­ dictable outcomes. 1 1 Two decades later, I find myself reexamining some of the core questions Pool raised -about how we maintain the poten­ tial of participatory culture in the wake of growing media concentra­ tion, 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 relation­ ship 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 objec­ tive 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 Com­ parative Media Studies Program, I have been an active participant in discussions among industry insiders and policymakers; I have con­ sulted with some of the companies discussed in this book; my earlier writings on fan communities and participatory culture have been em­ braced 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 pro­ ducers 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 docu­ ment conflicting perspectives on media change rather than to critique them. I don't think we can meaningfully critique convergence until it is more fully underst

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