Media Convergence
‘Convergence Culture’ by Henry Jenkins

Definitions
• ‘By convergence, I mean the flow of
content across multiple media
platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the
migratory behaviour of media
audiences who will go almost
anywhere in search of the kinds of
entertainment experiences they want.’

Definitions Continued...
• ‘Convergence is a word that manages to
describe technological, industrial,
cultural, and social changes depending
on who’s speaking and what they think
they are talking about.’

Changing ‘Audiences’
• Jenkins makes the argument that
convergence is less about a
technological process and more about a
cultural shift as consumers are
encouraged to seek out new
information and make connections
amongst dispersed media content.‘
• The audience itself has become labelled
as ‘eyeballs.’

New Media Audience
Theory
• Media Convergence
• Participatory Cultures
• Collective Intelligence

Participatory Cultures
• A change whereby rather than media
producers and consumers occupying
separate roles, they now interact with
each other ‘according to a new set of
rules,’ which nobody as yet fully
understands.
• Some consumers have a greater ability
to ‘participate’ in this emerging culture
than others.

Collective Intelligence
• A term first coined by French
cybertheorist Pierre Levy
• Media causes a buzz in consumer
communities which are of increasing
value to media producers.
• Subsequently, consumption has become
a collective process by which we pool
our resources and combine our skills.

Representation &
Participatory Cultures
• The term ‘early adopters’ has been used
by Bill Tancer in Click and Malcolm
Gladwell in The Tipping Point. All
point to ‘early adopters’ as ‘white,
Middle Class and college educated.’
• This is the target audience of most
media producers at present because
they help identify new trends, like
Facebook, Twitter etc.

The Black Box Fallacy
• Media theorists have continued to
speculate about the possibility of a
single black box operating within our
living rooms which does everything.
Yet actually the opposite is happening.
• The Cheskin Report (2003) suggested
‘...what we are now seeing is the
hardware diverging while the content
converges.’

Media Ownership
• Helping to fuel this convergence culture
is media ownership. The big media
conglomerates like Disney, News
Corporation & Viacom own a range of
media, unlike the days of The
Hollywood Studio System when the Big
5 studios specialised in filmmaking
(albeit Vertical Integration) only.

New Media Ownership Terms
• Extension- Efforts to expand the
potential market by moving content
across different delivery systems
• Synergy- opportunities to own and
control these diverse delivery systems
• Franchising- A coordinated effort to
brand and market fictional content
under the aforementioned conditions.