Right Now, We Are Converging

I wrote this for my personal blog several months ago, but I thought it would be pertinent here:

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This totally has to be an homage to the Van Halen video for "Right Now." Right? It totally does.







The song they use is even "Right Here, Right Now." Surriously showing some love to Van Halen.

This is interesting stuff, and I'd love to poke around and learn more about how they assessed these statistics. This is like pure nerdgasm fodder for people in my field, especially the parts about communications technologies. Fans of Henry Jenkins will no doubt be thinking of his discussions of participatory cultures and media convergence. However, Jenkins doesn't attribute rapid media evolution to technology alone, but, rather, to changes in protocols - how we use technologies, how we experience them, and how we think about them. Technologies only function as we utilize them, only mean as we make them mean, and these things are constantly changing.

Let us avoid the pitfalls of the "digital revolution" paradigm, which was oh-so-popular in the 90s. Jenkins explains, “In the 1990s, rhetoric about a coming digital revolution contained an implicit and often explicit assumption that new media was going to push aside old media, that the Internet was going to replace broadcasting, and that all of this would enable consumers to more easily access media content that was personally meaningful to them.”[i] According to this view, the televisual medium would completely disappear and be replaced by personalized Internet media consumption. “Yet,” Jenkins writes, “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.…Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve.”[ii] So, while the current iteration of the television set may disappear, Television will not suddenly cease to exist. The desktop computer may go the way of the dodo, but the Internet will not disappear with it. Telephones and mobile telephones may be replaced by chips embedded in our ears for all I know, but we will still be making some version of the phone call for many years to come, even if it’s not still called a “phone” call. These media have changed and will change, but they will not simply be destroyed in one fell swoop.

This is the nature of convergence. As Jenkins explains, “If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways.”[iii] However, convergence does not mean that every medium will merge into one supermedium, or that every delivery technology will merge into one superdevice. This misconception is what Jenkins calls the “Black Box Fallacy”: “Sooner or later, the argument goes, 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). If…folks…could just figure out which black box will reign supreme, then everyone can make reasonable investments for the future.”[iv] However, convergence is a not a static point on the horizon, but, rather, a constantly evolving process. There is no endpoint in which media consumption is pumped through a single channel. Jenkins observes,

I don’t know about you, but in my living room, I am seeing more and more black boxes. There are my VCR, my digital cable box, my DVD player, my digital recorder, my sound system, and my two game systems, not to mention a huge mound of videotapes, DVDs and CDS, game cartridges and controllers, sitting atop, laying alongside, toppling over the edge of my television system…The perpetual tangle of cords that stands between me and my “home entertainment” center reflects the degree of incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the various media technologies.[v]

Even using a television set has not become more streamlined, but, rather, more accessorized. The various technologies associated with Television exist in constant reassociation, not inevitable consolidation into a single machine (even if sometimes functionalities merge). Of course, a television set is not Television any more than a CD player is music. Jenkins maintains, “Part of what makes the black box concept a fallacy is that it reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels we are considering here.”[vi] Convergence is not about shifting usage from an old device to a new replacement device as much as it is about the flow of content among different platforms. It does not follow a singularly linear trajectory, but, rather, a rhizomatic series of associations. This is why Television did not banish radio from the earth, and why the Internet has not, in turn, shut down the Television industry. Are these media changed? Most definitely. Convergence is a process of adaptation and evolution, not extinction.

Moreover, shifts in media are greatly related to shifts in the cultures surrounding them. Let’s take Television as a case study here. Television is a largely communal activity – “research on television suggests that while homes may have multiple televisions, only one set is on during prime time in most households because we still prefer to watch television content socially rather than individually and the shows that do best are those that give us content we can talk about with others.”[vii] Even if one is physically alone when viewing a particular program, as one often is, one can still participate in a viewing culture, whether at the office or online. Whereas some theorists emphasize the individual nature of Television viewing today, Jenkins argues that “the greatest changes are occurring within consumption communities.”[viii] He cites Marshall Sella of the New York Times:

With the aid of the Internet, the loftiest dream for television is being realized: an odd brand of interactivity. Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to consumers, but that street is now becoming two-way. A man with one machine (a TV) is doomed in isolation, but a man with two machines (TV and a computer) can belong to a community.[ix]

Jenkins might argue that the phenomenon is not inherently linked to having these “two machines” specifically, but, rather, to having access to a network of fans. In turn, these fan networks can have a measurable effect on Television. Certainly in terms of ratings, communities can create buzz or ill-will toward a show, affecting viewership and causing the show to be either more profitable or less profitable for its broadcasters (and thus, either worth or not worth keeping on the air). This is not a terribly new concept, but it is enhanced by greater accessibility to networked communities. Fans have even been known to save a particular show from being canned (“Chuck”),[x] or even bring one back from the grave (“Family Guy”).[xi]

Further than this, however, fan communities can even come to influence content, scheduling, and ancillary media products like websites, text message systems, and official fanfiction forums. Because a great deal of Television is episodic in nature, it has the potential to adapt to feedback with much more ease and swiftness than media like books or movies. Moreover, the feedback itself is more immediate and copious (which, no doubt, can also cause some headaches). Fans are afforded a greater sense of participation in the works of media they consume, and, sometimes, an actual influence on those works of media. Jenkins notes, “Across the past decade, the Web has brought these consumers to the margins of the media industry into the spotlight; research into fandom has been embraced by important thinkers in the legal and business communities….Participation is understood as part of the normal ways the media operate, while the current debates center around the terms of our participation.”[xii]

Fans are not given carte blanche, and surely the acceptance of viewer participation on the part of the producers and networks is motivated by economic opportunity, rather than an egalitarian commitment to “democratizing” Television. (Although Al Gore did in fact launch a cable channel, called Current, whose broadcasts are composed partially of content produced by viewers.)[xiii] And, certainly, sometimes what is really provided is the illusion of participation, rather than actual participation. Do we really know for sure that NBC wasn’t going to bring back “Chuck” anyway? Do we know they didn’t orchestrate the whole Internet-fueled “Save Chuck” campaign, with its largescale “buycot” strategy? Do we know that it was the fans, and not the network, who initiated the campaign to buy sandwiches from Subway (a “Chuck” sponsor) en masse and drop comment cards asking them to help save the show? Doesn’t this have a certain odor about it? (And I’m not talking about that distinctive Subway smell…the one that allows one to detect the presence of a Subway from up to a mile away with only a moderately brisk wind in one’s direction.)

Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m just a Naysayer Nellie. It’s quite possible that the fans did save the show, and, as Jenkins has repeatedly shown, there have been plenty of instances in which fan cultures have enacted demonstrable media change. Does this mean that the fans are in charge? Certainly not. However, Jenkins argues that media participation may afford consumers a greater measure of power in the marketplace. In Convergence Culture’s conclusion, an article entitled “Democratizing Television? The Politics of Participation,” he maintains,

We are just learning how to exercise that power – individually and collectively – and we are still fighting to define the terms under which we will be allowed to participate. Many fear this power; others embrace it. There are no guarantees that we will use our new power any more responsibly than nation-states or corporations have exercised theirs. We are trying to hammer out the ethical codes and social contracts that will determine how we will relate to one another just as we are trying to determine how this power will insert itself into the entertainment system or into the political process.[xiv]

If viewers can jump on the train of rapid media changeability, they can maybe, just maybe, have a seat at the table. He asks, “Have I gone too far? Am I granting too much power here to these consumption communities? Perhaps. But keep in mind that I am not really trying to predict the future.”[xv] He avoids the mistake of making grand pronouncements that will come to haunt him later. “Rather,” he says, “I am trying to point toward the democratic potentials found in some contemporary cultural trends. There is nothing inevitable about the outcome. Everything is up for grabs.”[xvi]





[i] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Updated ad with a New Afterward (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 5.

[ii] Ibid, 13.

[iii] Ibid, 6.

[iv] Ibid, 14-15.

[v] Ibid, 15.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Henry Jenkins, “Catching Up: The Future of Television,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Complete Weblog of Henry Jenkins. July 24, 2006. Available Last accessed Jan. 7, 2010.

[viii] Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 255.

[ix] Marshall Sella, “The Remote Controllers,” New York Times, October 20, 2002, qtd. in Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 256.

[x] See www.chuckmeout.com.

[xi] See “‘Family Guy Returns to FOX,” FOX News Online, Apr. 30, 2005. Available Last accessed Jan. 7, 2010.

[xii] Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 257.

[xiii] Ibid, 251.

[xiv] Ibid, 256.

[xv] Ibid, 257.

[xvi] Ibid, 258.