I started reading Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) up to where the free sample ends, around page 78. Right before I chose to buy the ebook, I found a more recent book, Participatory Culture: Interviews (2019) as well as his blog, https://henryjenkins.org/. Ooh, and then also the book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (2020). So, distracted. But great notes here and the thoughts they triggered.
page 15: media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. – he explains these terms, but I am still a bit frustrated by how many names and concepts are out there. What the hell do I call all of this collectively?
page 16: convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.
page 16: The term participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. – I wonder if we talk about participatory culture rather than a transformative culture, or a term describing the diagonalists that Naomi Klein talks about, because we still like to think we are the experts and others can participate in it. When really it’s an open playing field and we’re all in the dark.
page 16: 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. – this is worth bearing in mind in the metaverse conversation too. A fancy VR headset, or fancy augmented phone, or a blockchain wallet, isn’t going to make the social changes happen. They may allow possibilities, or visualise potential futures, but they are still a piece of tech. They are not the core part of change.
related: page 26: 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 turn 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 grown up around that technology.14 Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems.
page 17: Consumption has become a collective process—and that’s what this book means by collective intelligence, a term coined by French cybertheorist Pierre Lévy. 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. – I almost started reading Pierre Lévy but I don’t have the stomach for the idealistic flowery prose. That aside, why do media studies talk of “consumption”? Like a baby bird being fed? When we “put the pieces together” aren’t we creating? Contributing? We need more words for this ecosystem. Although I think that is Jenkins’ point.
page 24: “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 (I don’t have the reference for note 8, yet) This also needs a conversation about Freedom more broadly. There is work on this, how Freedom is hard work and painful and scary and vulnerable and there’s a good reason some animals – INCLUDING humans, domesticated by agriculture, chose domestication, imprisonment and servitude. We have to remember that.
page 24: 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. I think media, popular, political, and games culture – especially emergent games, multi-player games, are all converging. Why does science stand outside that like a snooty elder?
page 25: 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. – where is science in this? (From a quick search on “science culture” it seems to be more of a “let’s be good patronisers”. “Let’s be good in our ivory towers”. Bleugh)
page 32: 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.
page 34: Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making.
page 34: Chapter 5 – Harry Potter – maps a range of responses to the withering of traditional gatekeepers and the expansion of fantasy into many different parts of our everyday lives.
page 35: 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 gamers to work, education, and politics. – and science?
page 35: a core claim: that convergence culture represents a shift in the 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.
page 36: the digital divide is giving way to concern about the participation gap.
Yet many of the activities … 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.
page 39: the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception.
page 39: It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them.2
page 40: The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined. New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments. Members may shift from one group to another as their interests and needs change, and they may belong to more than one community at the same time. These communities, however, are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge. As Levy writes, such groups “make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment.” More importantly, they serve as sites for “collective discussion, negotiation, and development,” and they prod the individual members to seek out new information for the common good: “Unanswered questions will create tension … indicating regions where invention and innovation are required.”5
page 41: But communities must closely scrutinize any information that is going to become part of their shared knowledge, since misinformation can lead to more and more misconceptions as any new insight is read against what the group believes to be core knowledge.
Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in practice.
page 41: motivation to engage because of “uncertainty due to ignorance,” Someone out there knows something they don’t. They want to know what can be known.
page 41: Out of such play, Pierre Lévy believes, new kinds of political power will emerge which will operate alongside and sometimes directly challenge the hegemony of the nation-state or the economic might of corporate capitalism. Lévy sees such knowledge communities as central to the task of restoring democratic citizenship. At his most optimistic, he sees the sharing of knowledge around the world as the best way of breaking down the divisions and suspicions that currently shape international relations.
page 41: Imagine the kinds of information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil (as in the Survivor Spoilers) the government rather than the networks. Later, we will look at the roles collective intelligence played in the 2004 presidential campaign, and we will see signs that players of alternate reality games are beginning to focus their energies toward solving civic and political problems.
page 41: About the importance of play: one reason more Americans do not participate in public debates is that our normal ways of thinking and talking about politics require us to buy into … the expert paradigm: to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or, more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for you. One reason why spoiling is a more compelling practice is because the way knowledge gets produced and evaluated is more democratic.
page 41: Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be much more important than it seems at first glance. On the other hand, play is also valuable on its own terms and for its own ends. At the end of the day, if spoiling wasn’t fun, they wouldn’t do it.
page 62: “[Don’t] assume that everyone comes to these boards for the same reason. Spoiling Survivor is a game. Spoiling the Survivor spoilers is a game. Planting fakes to see how long they go is a game. Spoiling certain elite spoiling groups is a game. … Many people come to play at this big wide open amusement park, and some of them could be playing with you.”
page 64: collaborative knowledge communities
Three assumptions:
page 66: We might understand this dispute in terms of the distinction between Pierre Lévy’s notion of collective intelligence and what Peter Walsh has described as “the expert paradigm.”16 Walsh argues that our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary; they slip and slide across borders and draw on the combined knowledge of a more diverse community.
Second, Walsh argues that the expert paradigm creates an “exterior” and “interior”; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis. (Experts becomes another person with something to contribute, but they are not priviledged overall)
Third, the expert paradigm, Walsh argues, uses rules about how you access and process information, rules that are established through traditional disciplines. By contrast, the strength and weakness of a collective intelligence is that it is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly. Just as knowledge gets called upon on an ad hoc basis, there are no fixed procedures for what you do with knowledge.
Fourth, Walsh’s experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual that designates them as having mastered a particular domain, often having to do with formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate or document how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system, and knowledge that comes from real-life experience rather than formal education may be, if anything, more highly valued here. Asserting one’s expertise as special, threatens the more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates.
What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties.
page 68: What information gets shared and who gets to decide? Lévy speaks about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations; yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without regard to anyone else’s preferences holds a deeply totalitarian dimension.
page 69: emerging knowledge cultures as defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations. Because they are voluntary, people do not remain in communities that no longer meet their emotional or intellectual needs. Because they are temporary, these communities form and disband with relative flexibility. Because they are tactical, they tend not to last beyond the tasks that set them in motion.
page 70: We can see such knowledge communities as central to the process of grassroots convergence.
page 70: the interests of producers and consumers are not the same. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they conflict. The communities that on one level are the producer’s best allies on another level may be their worst enemies. – This also holds for science, politics, decision-making, this is why the need for accountability to balance out this transformation of expertise is critical, and needs to work both ways. That IS the challenge of democracy. For example, ONLY relying on (potentially politicised anJenkins_2008d therefore polluted) scientific expertise means the needs of people and the environment at large, in a rapidly changing vulnerable world, is neglected. ONLY relying on people to act at will means chaos – not taking vaccines, destroying cellphones towers because 5G causes covid … I do find this metaphor of producers entangled with consumers useful – in the context of scientific expertise entangled with grassroots contributions, and government entangled with citizens. It captures the encroachment of capitalism into scientific and political fields nicely.
page 75: affective economics
One cannot help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go unrepresented—but one doesn’t want to be exploited, either.
page 76: They don’t simply want to get a consumer to make a single purchase, but rather to build a long-term relationship with a brand. – following that producer – consumer metaphor, I think this can also be applied to democracy, moving from a vote occasionally being the equivalent of a single purchase, and democratic engagement being a long-term relationship with the brand… of democracy, I guess. And for science, rather than blindly believing scientific facts as the equivalent of a single purchase, moving to building a long-term relationship with the brand of the scientific method.
and that’s the end of the free sample. It’s weird to think that this book was published in 2008 and is still so relevant and modern. I would have to buy it. But, there are also other more recent resources: His blog: https://www.civicimaginationproject.org/ and two other books:
