Response: Convergence Culture

Kevin Moloney

Buying into American Idol

This was an excellent look at the way the advertising market has changed over the last ten years and how media powerhouses like Fox have reinvented the way they build programming to engage and "commodify" viewers and their interactions. As Jenkins has noted through these three chapters, that is no easy task, even with television. Many predicted that a form of interactivity with the venerable boob tube would be impossible.

The crisis in the traditional media is often misread to be only about content and content delivery. This is certainly a big piece of that complex problem. But central to the troubles of TV affiliates, magazines and newspapers is the newfound ability to really see who your advertising is reaching.

How valuable is that full-page ad in Marie Claire, when you know that online versions of the same are not being clicked through?

I also found amusing references and hints about American democracy in Jenkins' look at American Idol:

"American Idol offers up a fantasy of empowerment — 'America' gets to 'decide' upon the next idol. This promise of participation helps build fan investments, but it may also lead to misunderstandings and disappointments as viewers feel that their votes have not been counted."

Indeed Jenkins' analysis of this phenom-show could simply swap "Idol" for "Presidency" and become a political science piece.

Our old friend Bob McChesney hosted a couple weeks ago on his WILL radio show "Media Matters" Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation.

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters Feb. 7 show

If I am remembering this show correctly, Jhally talked among other things about how Obama was very successful in becoming a brand during the election, using many of the affective economics that Jenkins discusses. Jhally noted that this is now, though, a core problem for the administration as so many people have different emotional responses and expectations for what he will do as president that he is failing to meet many of those affective expectations — much like the fans of Idol.

And the suspicions of vote fraud or election rigging on Idol also parallel the American electorate as well.

Searching for the Origami Unicorn

I think my life was changed by this chapter.

Should we be personal in these responses? I hope so. I was fascinated with this one.

I happily watched the Matrix series on the big screen and never felt baffled by its holes. I'm a long-time "art film" lover, and to watch a movie that unfolded as if you knew it all already was to me a simple break in the patronization of Hollywood. I never would have thought to hunt for the answers in other media.

I guess I'm one of the wrinkled geezers in Bagge's cartoon, but with an art-cinema smile on my face.

Having watched the "print" media flail around with figuring out the Internet's possibility and light only on simplistic and old ideas of multimedia in their story telling — an all-inclusive main story with Web extras like slide shows, a video, a sidebar of information that don't need to be seen to find the whole big picture — I had long figured there was a better approach. Though the Matrix's "synergistic storytelling" isn't new on my radar either, I had never put the two together until reading here. For example, gaming and journalism are not comfortable bedfellows, and that always seemed to be too big of a component in the transmedia entertainment I had seen.

Jenkins' framing puts it in many more contexts though. The whole being more than the sum of the parts has been my argument with editors for a couple decades. As a photojournalist a great frustration has always been editorial demands that the images merely illustrate or repeat the main story line. I have long felt that was just redundant. The pairing should add up to more, otherwise it is a waste of space.

The slow response from the news media is not a surprise, of course. Journalists are more obsessed with delivering the story as concisely and completely as they can, and not letting creativity get in the way. That forms a natural limit in thinking, and is slow to evolve.

So where does the creativity come from? Ideas often come from the bottom up — the "open source" of the collective imagination or expertise. But as the Matrix proved, those ideas are truly instituted by the big money. Hollywood has the resources to make new ideas work.

Yet has anyone else picked up this now old (2003 in the case of the Matrix, or the Middle Ages in terms of the Catholic Church) idea and run with it so well? From the Wikipedia entry on the Avatar game:

"Avatar: The Game has received mixed reception. Many critics criticized the game's linear gameplay and said its controls are unintuitive and camera sloppy. The Wii version received mediocre scores mostly, citing poor camera angling, frame rate and story telling, but visuals and controls were spoken well of."

And, as Jenkins asks, can this only apply to the media consumption habits of a particular age group or class of individual? I'd argue that no, that isn't the case. Perhaps The Matrix series appealed already to a certain group, and give the right material a totally different group could become so involved in a "search for meaning." For me, The Matrix was still successful without the transmedia hunt. And perhaps the wrinkled old codgers in Bagge's cartoon would never be satisfied with the Matrix's dystopia anyway.

* Yes, I seem to make everything about the print media, don't I?

Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?

Perhaps Avatar's and other's less success in transmedia comes from attempt at too much control of content and story.

The media-monoply culture has been an extremely short slice of human experience, and the groundswell of "collaborationism" is a readjustment back to the historical pattern.

Relative to the previous chapter, this idea continues the point that the ideas rarely come from the commercial sector. In the arts as well as in technology and science the ideas more often come from the bottom and are appropriated by commerce. Here Jenkins also notes that the appropriations made by the commercial sector from the "folk" are inevitably reappropriated by the bottom and remixed, redefined and reinvented, feeding the top again.

It sounds like a National Geographic special on an ecosystem.

Interestingly, it is the capitalist impulse that leads both to the prohibitionist stance as mass media companies lobby for the deepest copyright control they can grab, and to the collaborationist revolution/regression. Here is a case where grassroots trends will inevitably lead to profits for a media entity that embraces them effectively. From there, if someone is grossly successful, the prohibitionists will follow.

As Jenkins stated, "Ultimately the prohibitionist position is not going to be effective on anything other that the most local level unless the media companies can win back popular consent..."

Both are possible. There are markets where a prohibitionist stance could probably easily survive, but only where the passions and fantasies of the consumers are limited. That's not a natural condition in any segment of the entertainment industry which exists primarily to incite the passion and imagination of the consumer.

Where could prohibitionism survive? That's a harder question to answer as things that inherently don't incite passion and imagination are less likely to come to mind. Maybe by class time I'll have an example.