6. Reading Comprehension Question: From the Jenkins/Deuze reading, is convergence culture generally more of a centralizing or decentralizing force in the media industry? decentralizing
16. Discussion questions: Name five different “players” who actively participate in the convergence culture (today’s media industry) that Jenkins and Deuze describe.
Convergence the word refers to different media platforms being combined into one. “Convergence culture represents a shift in the ways we think about our relations to media, that we are making that shift first through our relations with popular culture, but that the skills we acquire through play may have implications for how we learn, work participate in the political process, and connect with other people around the world.” Convergence is a process not an endpoint. “The promises of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content.” Jenkins (2006) takes a cultural approach to convergence. Says convergence is more about the social arrangements technologies make possible than the technological configurations of artifacts and devices. “Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms. Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies and desires also flow across media channels.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H09xnhlCQU = The Hunt for Gollum. A fan-made prequel to the LOTR trilogy produced for less than $6000.
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scaleSince August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densha_Otoko
We love that Doritos brought back its UGC Super Bowl ad contest, and we love it even more that two unemployed brothers showed the ad world what’s what by creating a groin-achingly funny spot. Joe and Dave Herbert’s “Free Doritos” commercial not only won the brothers the Dorito’s contest (and a cool $1 million), nabbed the top spot on USA Today’s Ad Meter and was voted favorite ad by the YouTube and Hulu audiences, but according to a new survey released by comScore yesterday, Doritos enjoyed the biggest improvement in consumer perception among advertisers in Super Bowl.
Convergence occurs on a top-down level as a result of media conglomeration (images flow across culture more rapidly if a small number of companies control interests in every media sector), and that it occurs on a bottom-up level as a result of digitization (consumers are taking media in their own hands and demanding that they be able to take it with them wherever they go) - Think of Napster as a struggle over unauthorized media convergence.Commercially driven, ultra-powerful mass market media is primarily loyal to sponsors, i.e. advertisers and government rather than to the public interest. These aren’t public airwaves if only a handful of companies own them.
