Rachel

In his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins theorizes on the concept of “Convergence Culture,” which is a way of making sense of the trends in media and the Internet that have been changing the way society looks at itself, politics, and entertainment. Convergence culture is the convergence, not only of media technologies, but also of society and media technologies.
An important part of convergence of media technologies to remember is, “Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater (p. 14).” New media never replaces old media, the old media converges and co-exists with the new. Jenkins also argues that media never dies, only the ways in which media is delivered, which he calls “delivery technologies.” For example, while the 8-track may be obsolete, its media—music has evolved. Convergence of technologies has been occurring for decades. This decade the computer is converging with the television in the same way that cars converged with horses and word processors converged with typewriters. “Convergence does not depend on any specific delivery mechanism. Rather, convergence represents a paradigm shit—a move from media specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communication systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture (p. 243).”
Another part of convergence culture is that consumers are taking media into their own hands like never before, “The water-cooler has gone digital…media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic modes of reception (p. 26).” Collective intelligence is an important part of participatory, convergence culture. Blogs, you-tube, message boards, and even role-playing games are an important part of participatory culture, each participant offers a knew piece of knowledge until the group as a whole knows everything. “…consumers are using new media technologies to engage with old media content, seeing the Internet as a vehicle for collective problem solving, public deliberation and grassroots creativity (p. 169).”
Jenkins gave a list of skills needed for participants in convergence culture on page 176. Many of these were for specific examples he gave throughout the book, but they can also be seen as real skills needed to actively participate in this new digital world, skills that will be needed by all within the next few years:

-The ability to pool knowledge in a collaborative exercise
-the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas
-the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information
-the ability to express your interpretations and feelings toward popular fictions through your own folk culture
-the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others
-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.

All in all, this book was a decent attempt to discern the ever-evolving media-driven world around us.
Next weeks book: Ambient Findability.