Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins is "an old friend of mine" so to speak, as I read quite a lot of his earlier writings back in 2005 when I was working on my BA Thesis. In the first years of the second millennium he was, as much as I remember, an only well-known authority on the field of videogame theory who bull-headedly tried to convince the public that videogames are a new art form, more precisely – an art form of 21th century. Now it seems that the abovementioned issue has lost its relevance; it looks like scholars have reached the consensus that videogames are an intriguing research topic in itself, even if they are something "less" than art (the divisions between the high culture and low culture are never really dead until they stop existing in people's heads).

Jenkins' texts are easily accessible to people whose background is in humanities (on contrary to some other new media theoreticians). It may be that his own background in journalism is partly to blame on that. In my opinion, his overall writing style could often be characterized as journalistic: it is clear that he loves catchy titles, for example. However, being journalistic is not always the good thing. For example, jumping from an analysis to a reportage (he does it in the introduction of a book) is in my opinion extremely annoying. When I am reading a supposedly scholarly book, I do not want to be "entertained" by a long overview of some convention that goes on pages and looks like it is copied from a local paper: I would like a point to be made and then, hopefully some conclusions as well. Fortunately, both points and conclusions can be found from the book later on.

Even if Jenkins says in the beginning of the book that it is hard to say something definite about the current and coming trends in what he calls a "convergence culture" as everything is in such a rapid change, it still seems that Jenkins himself represents a kind of techno-optimist in this debate. For example, Jenkins is enthusiastically describing so called "knowledge communities" in the first chapter of a book that tells us about the fans of the reality-show publishing spoilers about the "Survivor". I would present a question: who can vouch for these "knowledge communities" that they really are to function as "knowledge", not for example "rumor", "blind faith" or "mass hysteria" communities – assuming that all or most of the members of these communities are anonymous and really never need to take real responsibility of the information they're providing? Jenkins speculates over the political power this kind of "spoiling" could theoretically have, if many people would work as motivated on some other issues than reality-show, but does not rise that question, assuming that the grains of truth will be eventually washed out from the groundless speculations. I suspect that this would not always be the case.

Also in the later chapters of the book Jenkins has picked out the success stories of "convergence culture" (the selection of case studies in itself is excellent, of course). Even if he mentions that new kind of media users, (active users on contrary to old passive users) are sometimes cooperating with corporate powers and sometimes seem to be waging a war with them, after finishing Jenkins' book the reader is still left with the impression that the new, participating users will "win the war" and have the future to themselves. As we know for the recent developments (media mogul Rupert Murdoch's wish to remove the indexes of "his articles" from the Google search engine, for example), there is actually no way of predicting which directions the producer/user relations will actually take.

Jenkins also seems to believe that extensive file sharing is something that cannot be stopped or reversed (talking of music industry) but in the practice file sharing sites are sued and closed constantly. Examples of warning are made out of people who have downloaded some music files and then sued and fined with hundreds of thousands dollars. Is it not so impossible to imagine an Internet now, I think, that would be totally controlled by corporations and where everything that has any value (news value, intellectual value etc) would be charged. If this anti-utopia should come to true one day, what would happen to Jenkins' convergence culture, I wonder.