The Convergence Culture

The first impression of the book was that it's much easier to read than I thought thanks to it's writing style. The most of the examples chosen were very familiar to me, but the phenomenas surrounding them were not that well known yet, and Jenkings has done a huge job in collecting and analyzing phenomena surrounding the media products of nowaday. The main examples are very diverse: reality-tv series, transmediated world of matrix, the consumer participation in Star Wars, consumer rights over Harry Potter and political spoofs in US politics. The examples are in my opinion so varied that the book can cater all kinds of readers but hardly anyone is already familiar with the phenomena reflected by examples in every chapter. Personally I found the chapter 4 about the grassroots creativity most familiar and interesting, especially it's latter part.

In chapter 4, Jenkins presents Star Wars is a franchise which both encourages grassroots participation and which is at the same time an example how copyright holders try to keep franchise the way they indended. Star Wars has been a subject of huge fan following for decades, and also a target for fan made movies of various filmmaking technologies. The copyright holders in media industry have divided into two stances, which Jenkings calls the prohibitionists and the collaborationists. Former have taken very strict stance to regulate and restrict fan made content, the latter see fans as important promoters and collaborators of franchise. In the new media(mmo games in the example of Star Wars) latter seems to be the way of the future, and in case of Star Wars MMO, fans were allowed to influence the creation of the Star Wars galaxies universe.

In case of MMO games, and perhaps in case of new media in general, the collaboration with customers seems to be the more beneficial stance in my opinion. In MMO game the franchise must be expanded by a huge amount of content, and in order to keep subscriptions running, players must feel the world as their own. Even though the Star Wars lore had been much larger than is visible in the movies, the alive, interactive world demands creation of new lore, and in that fan activity can be very useful. Tools for player interaction and activity creation are required in a modern MMO game, and licence holders cannot possibly regulate all this new content that users are creating.

Jenkins doesn't want to predict which of the stances will reign in the future even though he hopes that the collaborative stance will gain more foothold in the media industry. When games are considered, I tend to be more hopeful than Jenkins. In case of MMO games the media companies don't really have a choise to regulate content of a franchise because the player created content is essential in order to keep MMO world interesting. In the chapter, there is also discussion of modding games and how community created mods can prolong the life of a game and help to find out what kind of features players want from a game. Even though modding tools have been available for a quite long time at least in some games, I'd say that the modding tools and level editing is becoming more and more popular, and even a selling point for games for consoles as well. Another possible trends in gaming, online distribution and expansion pack releasing are not yet very well connected to user created content in my opinion, but approving and distributing high quality user created content as a part of official lore and game expansions could be highly profitable for game companies, even if they paid royalties to users that create content.