Convergence Culture - How to predict the future?

In his book Convergence Culture- where old and new media collide, Henry Jenkins tries to explain the impact of convergence on the media we consume and produce.

The book is written in a very attractive style and Jenkins uses many examples to make his argumentation even clearer. The chapters in the book use a specific example of the changing relation between producer and consumer in media.

In my opinion, the liveliness of style is often underrated. A book like this really helps the reader to understand the ‘convergence culture’. The crisp style even convinced me to buy the book. Unfortunately, the use of examples often seems to imply more small mistakes in references. When Jenkins talks about the fan fiction, made by the filmmaker Evan Mather, he refers to “gets medieval” as a quotation from Samuel L. Jackson instead of Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction. Of course, these mistakes are not important to the line of argumentation in the book and therefore cannot be regarded as flaws. If we look at Jenkins’ arguments closely, we could argue that there are some flaws though. In the beginning of the book, Jenkins points out that he is not a neutral observer of media convergence. This results in a preoccupied position towards an optimistic view of convergence of media, participatory culture and collective intelligence. It does not have to be a bad thing on itself but in Convergence Culture, Jenkins decides to keep his distance towards technology. We have seen in several reviews that this position is, to say the least, problematic because technology plays an integral part of the concept of convergence. Jenkins preoccupied position also leads to an optimistic view of collective intelligence:

“Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power (...). At present we use this collective power principally for having fun, but soon we will use these skills for more ‘serious’ purposes”(Jenkins, 2006, p.4).

You can never be sure when speaking about the future and personally, I consider this way of arguing very trivial. It would have been better if Jenkins gave an account of those ‘serious purposes’ that already exist. For example, when the book was published in 2006, Wikipedia was already gaining popularity.

Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture adds a lively contribution to the field of media studies in which media is restated but not replaced.