Reading Notes: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide By Henry Jenkins. P. 1-25

Jenkins starts off with a story about Dino Ignacio, a high school student who created an uproar by remixing photos of Osama Bin Laden and Bert (from Sesame Street). A publisher from Pakistan didn't know who Bert was but liked the photo so started printing posters up. Childrens Television Network saw it on CNN and threatened legal action, but they weren't sure who they would sue... the high school student, the publisher... etc.

This was one of the earliest pieces of Convergence...

From the pdf:

The term, participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media—still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others. 

Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives. 


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Rok Sako To Rok Lo in India... people were able to access this entire film via a mobile phone...

More notes from the book:

A best seller in 1990, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, drew a sharp contrast between “passive old media” and “interactive new media,” predicting the collapse of broadcast networks in favor of an era of narrowcasting and niche media on demand: “What will happen to broadcast television over the next five years is so phenomenal that it’s difficult to comprehend.”3 At one point, he suggests that no government regulation will be necessary to shatter the media conglomerates: “The monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving into an array of cottage industries.... Media barons of today will be grasping

to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow.... The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws Congress can invent.” 


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More thoughts - - a lot of this was coopted by captalist society... advertisers and companies saw the writing on the wall and began new relationships... video games and traditional media was one. 

From Jenkins:

1. Convergence is coming and you had better be ready.
   
2. Convergenceisharderthanitsounds.
   
3. Everyone will survive if everyone works together. (Unfortunately, that was the one thing
   nobody knew how to do.)
   

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IN this article, Jenkins also points out that nobody can be in a silo anymore. In one company, the print and web sections had to work with each other. This didn't happen before. It changed the way companies ran. 

More article:

Yet, history teaches us that old media never die— and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content—the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling’s project lists falls under this category. Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.