Jenkins, Henry
2006
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

2
This book is about the relationship between three concepts – media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.”

2f
Definition-convergence
“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. Convergence 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.”

13
Definition-medium
“Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.”

13f
Definition-medium
“[…] on the first [level], 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. 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.” Here he references Gitelman, Lisa ~ Always Already New. I need a better definition of medium! READ IT!

20f
Definition-transmedia storytelling
“Transmedia storytelling refers to a new 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.”

23
Since most of the people depicted in this book are early adopters (for the US that means white, ale, middle class, college educated), the explained cultural practices probably won’t remain the same. Larger parts of the population will join in and they will expect different things.
I think ARGs for example will remain primarily for geeks, but the mainstream population will want less time-consuming/involving entertainment. That’s where I come in! Dialogue yes. Consumer participation yes. But also: a central story and storyteller yes!

24
Convergence is no result, it’s a process. And it won’t be finished anytime soon.

26
“It is at a moment of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them.”

27
Definition-shared knowledge
“information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group”
Definition-collective intelligence
“the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question”
Both definitions from Lévy, Pierre ~ Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, p214f.

54
“The question was whether, within a knowledge community, one has the right to not know-or more precisely, whether each community member should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it. Levy speaks about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations; yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without regard to any­ one else’s preferences holds a deeply totalitarian dimension.”

58
“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.”

61f
Definition-affective economics
“a new config­uration of marketing theory, still somewhat on the fringes but gaining ground within the media industry, which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions.”
Economics trying to catch up with cultural studies, but from producer’s, not consumer’s, perspective.

62f
“Here’s the paradox: […] Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored. […] Those groups that are commodified find themselves targeted more aggressively by marketers and often feel they have lost control over their own culture, since it is mass produced and mass marketed. One cannot help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go unrepresented – but one doesn’t want to be exploited, either.”

78
“a trend that runs across all contempo­rary television-a movement away from the self-contained episodes that domi­nated broadcasting for its first several decades in favor of longer and more com­plicated program arcs and more elaborate appeals to series history. Serialization rewards the competency and mastery of loyals. The reason loyals watch every epi­sode isn’t simply that they enjoy them; they need to have seen every episode to make sense of long-term developments.”

95f
Definition-transmedia storytelling:
“A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytell­ing, each medium does what it does best-so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self­ contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy bums up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experi­ence refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty. The eco­nomic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry-that is, one where a single company may have roots across all of the differ­ent media sectors-dictates the flow of content across media. Different media attract different market niches. Films and television probably have the most diverse audiences; comics and games the narrowest. A good transmedia franchise works to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently in the different media. If there is, however, enough to sustain those different constituencies­ and if each work offers fresh experiences-then you can count on a crossover market that will expand the potential gross.”

103f
“By the standards of classical Holly­ wood storytelling, these gaps (such as the failure to introduce The Kid or to explain where Niobe came from) or excesses (such as the reference to “the last transmission of the Osiris”) confuse the spectator. The old Hollywood system depended on re­dundancy to ensure that viewers could follow the plot at all times, even if they were distracted or went out to the lobby for a popcorn refill during a crucial scene. The new Hollywood demands that we keep our eyes on the road at all times, and that we do research before we arrive at the theater.”

104
“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transme­dia storytelling.”
“Everything about the structure of the modem entertain­ment industry was designed with this single idea in mind-the con­struction and enhancement of entertainment franchises.”

105
“Under licensing, the cen­tral media company-most often the film producers-sells the rights to manufacture products using its assets to an often unaffiliated third party; the license limits what can be done with the characters or con­cepts to protect the original property. Soon, licensing will give way to what industry insiders are calling “co-creation.” In co-creation, the companies collaborate from the beginning to create content they know plays well in each of their sectors, allowing each medium to generate new experiences for the consumer and expand points of entry into the franchise.
The current licensing system typically generates works that are re­dundant (allowing no new character background or plot development), watered down (asking the new media to slavishly duplicate experi­ences better achieved through the old), or riddled with sloppy contra­dictions (failing to respect the core consistency audiences expect within a franchise). These failures account for why sequels and franchises have a bad reputation. Franchise products are governed too much by economic logic and not enough by artistic vision.”

106
“So far, the most successful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control.” Like Indiana Jones or Star Wars, he says.

107
“While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic pros­pects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven’t done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transme­dia experiences. Even within the media conglomerates, units compete aggressively rather than collaborate. Many believe that much greater coordination across the media sectors is needed to produce transmedia content.”

109
“By contrast, the Wachowskis sought animators and comic-book writers who already had cult followings and were known for their dis­tinctive visual styles and authorial voices. They worked with people they admired, not people they felt would follow orders.”

114
“More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise-since fan speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions. As an experienced screenwriter told me, “When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story. you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a charac­ter because a good character could sup­port multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.””

115
“As the art of world-making becomes more advanced, art direction takes on a more central role in the conception of franchises.”

116
Definition-story arc
“Part of what makes a site like Dawson’s Desktop possible has been a shift in the ways narratives operate in American television.”

118
“Most film critics are taught to think in terms of very traditional story structures. More and more, they are talking about a collapse of story­telling. We should be suspicious of such claims, since it is hard to imag­ine that the public has actually lost interest in stories. Stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences. Rather, we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by ex­panding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end.”

119
“Film­ goers educated on nonlinear media like video games were expecting a different kind of entertainment experience. If you look at such works [like The Matrix, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Proj­ect, Being John Malkovich, Run Lola Run, Go, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, all 1999] by old criteria, these movies may seem more fragmented, but the frag­ments exist so that consumers can make the connections on their own time and in their own ways.”

123
[Electronic Arts game designer] “Neil Young talks about “additive comprehension.” He cites the example of the director’s cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: “That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending…The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?””

127
“There has to be a breaking point beyond which franchises cannot be stretched, subplots can’t be added, secondary char­acters can’t be identified, and references can’t be fully realized. We just don’t know where it is yet.”

128
“Criticism may have once been a meeting of two minds-the critic and the author-but now there are multiple authors and multiple critics.”

129
“So far, our schools are still focused on generating autonomous learners; to seek information from others is still classified as cheating. […] Our schools are not teaching what it means to live and work in such knowledge communities, but popular culture may be doing so.”

130
“The key point is that going in deep has to remain an option-something readers choose to do-and not the only way to derive pleasure from media franchises.”

133
“The constraints on interactivity are technological. In almost every case, what you can do in an interactive environment is prestructured by the designer.
Participation, on the other hand, is shaped by the cultural and social protocols.”

135f
Definition-mass culture
“a category of production”

136
Definition-popular culture
“a category of consump­tion”
“popular culture is what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture.”

137
“The older American folk culture was built on borrowings from various mother countries; the modem mass media builds upon borrowings from folk culture; the new convergence culture will be built on borrowings from various media conglomerates.”

149
“[George] Lucas wants to be “celebrated” but not appropriated.
Lucas has opened up a space for fans to create and share what they create with others but only on his terms. The franchise has struggled with these issues from the 1970s to the present […]”

158
“”Corporations have a right to keep copy­right but they have an interest in releas­ing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. The economics of plentitude dictate the second.”” in McCracken, Grant ~ Plenitude, p85.

158f
“McCracken argues that those companies that loosen their copyright control will attract the most active and committed consumers, and those who ruthlessly set limits will find themselves with a dwindling share of the media marketplace.”

167
“What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better.” Will Wright in Jenkins’ interview, 2003.

176
Skills children need to become full participants in con­vergence culture:

• “the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative enterprise (as in Survivor spoiling)”
• “the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas (as occurs in the gossip surrounding reality television)”
• “the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information (as occurs when we consume The Matrix, 1999, or Pokemon, 1998)”
• “the ability to express your interpretations and feelings toward popular fictions through your own folk culture (as occurs in Star Wars fan cinema)”
• “the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema)”
• “role-playing both as a means of exploring a fictional realm and as a means of developing a richer understanding of yourself and the culture around you”

179
“Authorship has an almost sacred aura in a world where there are limited opportunities to circulate your ideas to a larger public. As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author-and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors-necessarily shifts. This shift could lead to a heightened awareness of intellectual property rights as more and more people feel a sense of ownership over the stories they create. Yet, it also can result in a demystification of the creative process, a growing recognition of the communal dimensions of expression, as writing takes on more aspects of traditional folk practice.”

182
“Historically, young artists learned from established masters, sometimes contributing to the older artists’ works, often following their patterns, before they developed their own styles and techniques. Our modern expectations about original expression are a difficult burden for anyone at the start of a career.”
“”The problem with world building is that there is so much backstory to play with. I like filling in holes. … See if you can figure out a plausible way that would fit into the established canon to explain why Snape left Voldemort and went to serve Dumbledore. There are so many explanations for that but we don’t know for sure yet, so when we find out, if we find out, there are going to be so many people reading for it and if someone gets it right, they are going to go, yes, I nailed it.” Quote of somebody.

183
“Schools are still locked into a model of autonomous learning that contrasts sharply with the kinds of learning that are needed as stu­ dents are entering the new knowledge cultures.”

189
“Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn’t have a category for deal­ing with amateur creative expression.”
“Industry groups have tended to address copyright issues primarily through a piracy model, focusing on the threat of file sharing, rather than dealing with the complexities of fan fiction. Their official educa­tional materials have been criticized for focusing on copyright protec­tions to the exclusion of any reference to fair use. By implication, fans are seen simply as “pirates” who steal from the studios and give noth­ing in return.”

190
“In the short run, change is more likely to occur by shifting the way studios think about fan communities than reshaping the law, and that’s why the collaborative approaches we’ve seen across the past two chap­ters seem like important steps in redefining the space of amateur par­ticipation.”

220
“we can see the logic of convergence politics at play here: the effort to use grassroots media to mobilize and mainstream media to publicize.”

244
“Betsy Frank and other industry thinkers still tend to emphasize changes that are occurring within indi­viduals, whereas this book’s argument is that the greatest changes are occurring within consumption communities. The biggest change may be the shift from individualized and personalized media consumption toward consumption as a networked practice.”

246
“In the late 1980s and early 1990s, cultural scholars, myself included, depicted media fandom as an important test site for ideas about ac­tive consumption and grassroots creativity. We were drawn toward the idea of “fan culture” as operating in the shadows of, in response to, as well as an alternative to commercial culture. Fan culture was defined through the appropriation and transformation of materials borrowed from mass culture; it was the application of folk culture practices to mass culture content.”

248
“The politics of criti­cal utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empow­ered, not when they are at their weakest.”
“Concentration is bad because it

• stifles competition and places media industries above the demands of their consumers.
• lowers diversity-important in terms of popular culture, es­sential in terms of news.
• lowers the incentives for companies to negotiate with their consumers and raises the barriers to their participation.

Big concentrated media can ignore their audience (at least up to a point); smaller niche media must accom­modate us.”
“Right now, conver­gence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding the opportunities for grassroots groups to speak back to the mass media. Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this window of opportunity will have passed. That is why it is so important to

• fight against the cor­porate copyright regime,
• argue against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize these emerging forms of participation,
• publicize the best practices of these online communities,
• expand access and participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind,
• promote forms of media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed to become full participants in their culture.”

249
“Media com­panies don’t need to share our ideals in order to change their practices. What will motivate the media companies is their own economic inter­ests.”

250
“The old model, which many wisely dismissed, was that consumers vote with their pocketbooks. The new model is that we are collectively changing the nature of the marketplace, and in so doing we are pressuring companies to change the products they are creating and the ways they relate to their consumers.”

251
“The polar opposite of a bureaucracy, an adhocracy is an organization characterized by a lack of hierarchy. In it, each person contributes to confronting a particular problem as needed based on his or her knowledge and abilities, and leadership roles shift as tasks change.”
256
“mass media has tended to use its tight control over intellectual property to reign in competing interpretations, resulting in a world where there is one official version. Such tight controls increase the coherence of the franchise and protect the producers’ economic interests, yet the culture is impoverished through such regulation. Fan fiction repairs the damage caused by an increasingly privatized culture.”
“Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths. Here, the right to participate in the culture is assumed to be “the freedom we have allowed ourselves,” not a privilege granted by a benevolent company, not something they are prepared to barter away for better sound files or free Web hosting. Fans also reject the studio’s assumption that intellectual property is a “limited good,” to be tightly controlled lest it dilute its value. Instead, they embrace an understanding of intellectual property as “shareware,” something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in vari­ous ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a prolifer­ation of alternative meanings.”
“Nobody is anticipating a point where all bureaucracies will become adhocracies. Concentrated power is apt to remain concentrated.”

257
“As we move closer to the older and more mass market media industries, corporate resistance to grassroots participation increases: the stakes are too high to experiment, and the economic impact of any given con­sumption community lessens.”
“The power of the grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broad­ cast media is that it amplifies. That’s why we should be concerned with the flow between the two: expanding the potentials for participation represents the greatest opportunity for cultural diversity. Throw away the powers of broadcasting and one has only cultural fragmentation. The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial cul­ture but from writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feed­ing it back into the mainstream media.”

258
“Over time, freedom of press increasingly came to rest with those who could afford to buy printing presses. The emergence of new media technologies supports a democratic urge to allow more people to create and circulate media.”

259
He mentions transmedia entertainment: “the complexity of transmedia entertainment”

260
“Consumers will be more powerful within convergence cul­ture-but only if they recognize and use that power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture.”