July 10th: Convergence Culture

Your "Critical Analysis of a Technology" essays are due tomorrow (via moodle). We're going to have a workshop at the end of class.

Mark's Leading Class Discussion

Let's give our attention to Mark while he leads us into a discussion on Jenkins.

Convergence Culture

Jenkins’s “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’” (2006)

Remember, this is just an introduction to his more thoroughly presented discussion of media convergence and popular culture that the rest of the book examines. There is much in this introduction that’s valuable to our discussions, but, there’s much more in Jenkins’s chapters.

Consider this idea during our discussion: Contemporary communication technologies allow users to spread messages instantly and widely (wordly, in fact). Below are some notes:

• p. 2: Convergence culture “…where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”
• p. 2: Convergence: “…the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”
• p. 3: Relation to consumption: “In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”
• p. 3: Not simply a technological influence: “Convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.”
• p. 3: Participatory culture: “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.[**]”
  *This is quite interesting in light of the recent Supreme Court decision that corporations have “free speech” just like individual citizens.
  **Think celebrities, the rich, and other super consumers we talked about earlier.
• p. 3-4: “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.”
• p. 4: Consumption as a collective process.
• p. 9: Video games as immersive experience: “[New Orleans Conference media executives] wanted to use games to explore ideas that couldn’t fit within two-hour films.”
• p. 10: Multitude of media: “A process called ‘convergence of modes’ is blurring the lines between media, even point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television” (Ithiel de Solo Pool [1983], qtd. In Jenkins).
• p. 11: “Freedom is fostered when the means of communication are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available, as are printing presses or microcomputers. Central control is more likely when the means of communication are concentrated, monopolized, and scarce, as are great networks” (Pool, qtd. In Jenkins).
• p. 13: Media evolve; delivery technologies become obsolete.
• pp. 13-14: Lisa Gitelman’s model of media
  • 1st level: “a medium is a technology that enables communication.”
  • 2nd level: “a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology…media are also cultural systems.”
• p. 14: “Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.”
  Think the Theater vs. the Box Office—which is considered “art”?
• p. 15: Black Box Fallacy: “all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go).”
• p.16: “the black box concept…reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels we are considering here.”
• p. 17: “Our live, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels. Being a lover or a mommy or a teacher occurs on multiple platforms.”
• p. 18: “there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry.”
• p. 20: Affective economics: “the ideal consumer is active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked. Watching the advert or consuming the product is no longer enough; the company invites the audience inside the brand community.”
• p. 21: Fan culture in response to mass culture.
• p. 23: “elite consumers exert a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention.”

Questions about Technology

Instead of turning in your essay tonight (or doing a prompt for tomorrow's hybrid fun), I want you to have a classmate read over your essay and offer suggestions for revision. YES!!! Every piece of writing can be revised, so no one will be able to say, "I have nothing left to do..." I will go over a few things related to the rhetoric of technology (time permitting) and then ask you to look for specific things in your classmate's essay.

Consider the following when thinking about technology from a social perspective:

• How would I define my/our culture?

• What constitutes cultural norms, values, ideologies?

• What do the products I use say about the person I am in regard to my social place?

• What makes the Internet uniquely...
  American...
  Western...
  Global...
  Capitalist...
  Individualistic?

• What do nuclear weapons say about society?

As I said before, we must understand the impact science and technology has on our world. But to do that, we have to understand the social and cultural values that created sciences and technologies.

What to Look for in Your Classmate's Essay

Here's what you need to do for this peer workshop on your Critical Analysis of a Technology Essay. Read your classmate's essay and look for the following:

• Identify the American (or just cultural) value
  • Is the value appropriate for the culture?
  • Is there a common example that the writer can refer to in order to help identify the value?
  • Is there enough support to claim it's an American value?
• Identify where the writer explains how the technology embodies the value
  • Is the technology appropriate for the value?
  • Are the arguments (proof) presented valid...do they make sense?
• Appropriate/Any quotations

Have any of you thought about the ways in which you'll communicate in the future? How do you think collaboration will happen (and will it)? What's the importance of collaboration and good communication in science, technology, and industry.

Your Turn on Technology(time permitting...doubt it)

For the next 10-15 minutes in groups of three or fewer, decide on a technology to contemplate and consider the rhetoric of that technology*. Discuss the following with the group:

(*Please avoid discussing mobile phones as your technology since we've talked about them already--branch out.)

• What are the social values that appear embedded in the technology? In other words, if technology is mediated (comes to be) because of prevailing cultural values, from what cultural values does the technology come?

• What are the social implications of its design or use? Is it gendered?

• Is it systemic (meaning, a product of the ever-present "system" aka the man, the culture, ideologies)? Consider if it would "work" in another culture.

• What does your technology say about the culture that created it?

Time permitting, we may go over a brief introduction of rhetoric.

Tomorrow's Class

Keep up with the reading. Tomorrow (7/11) is for finishing your essay and forging ahead in Malpas. For Monday (7/15), you have a short book to finish--Baudrillard's (1991) The Gulf War Did not Take Place. Our very own Dymilah will lead us on that discussion. I hope to have all the notes/activities up for next week by Sunday...let's see if I can get that done.