One. In the age of social media, what is happening to the “codes” that determine the boundaries between public and private space?
The lines between public and private space are becoming blurred. For many, nothing is private anymore. The most banal, mundane activities, like taking selfies at a restaurant, are “worthy” of “sharing” with everyone. Intimate chat becomes common fare for everyone to see. Explicit photographs of people are for the whole world to ogle at.
While the private becomes normal fare for public consumption and people want more and more attention for their “live stream of banality,” they are becoming more and more narcissistic, a condition that results in disconnection from others and themselves. Therefore, in the age of social media, the promise of greater connection results in greater disconnection.
The term “friend” is a canard, or the idea of “friend” is so compromised that it has lost its meaning. A “friend” is now someone we acknowledge through giving a “like” or a “poke” on Facebook.
Two. What is the double-edged sword of the new media?
On one hand, elitism is media should be over as common people can post and compete with the large corporations. However, the quality of this colossal media expansion is so poor in general that we the readers must sift through a morass of imbecility and banality to find any gold nuggets of truth and quality information.
Another problem is that when a common person, a user, generates content that is popular and that goes viral, then that content can be “appropriated by corporate elites.”
Another problem with the new media is that it’s always on and we feel restless if we’re “disconnected” from that live feed. Some people sleep with their smartphones under the pillow so they can hear the reassuring “activity signals.”
Yet another problem in our social media age is that more and more people are trading in face-to-face contact for digital contact as they prefer the control, convenience, and lower commitment requirements of digital relationships.
Yet another problem is the attraction of false celebrity from becoming popular on Facebook or some other social media site. “I went viral. I’ve finally made it.” This encourages narcissism and imposes more toxicity on our culture.
Yet another problem is feeling irrelevant or shunned when we post something and we’re ignored while we see “lesser folks” get lots of attention for their “crappy posts.”
Henry Jenkins, “Convergence Culture” (455-469)
One. What is convergence culture?
We read on page 456: “Welcome to 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. . . .”
Content merges “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 wants. 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. . . .”
Convergence culture is media on steroids: We read that “every story gets told, every brand gets old, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”
We are not passive consumers of convergence culture. Jenkins argues that we are in the middle of a huge cultural shift in which we “are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. . . .” We now live in a “participatory culture.”
We all create our own personal mythology of the truth, first culling information from multiple media platforms (we select because there’s way more information than we can absorb), and then talking among our own tribe about this shared information and asserting our opinions. The more we converse, the more we generate buzz, which in turn influences more floods of similar information and a cycle ensues.
Two. As we read about convergence culture and the grass roots bloggers and the consumers’ interaction with media as a way of combatting giant corporate enterprises, should we be optimistic that broadcast networks and their corporations will collapse as is suggested on page 259?
I’m skeptical. There are fewer and fewer media sources and whenever a grass roots post becomes viral, the big companies co-opt it for their interests.
However, media convergence is a long, unstable period and the big companies have little idea of what’s next: TV, music, news are all struggling to figure out how to get their market share in this unstable environment (461).
Three. How do we define media?
Quoting historian Lisa Gitelman, Jenkins writes that media is twofold: one, is that media is a “technology that enables communication,” a platform; two, is that “media a set of associated protocols or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology.” The platforms come and go but the cultural practices remain. For example, Jenkins reminds us that printed word did not kill spoken words; cinema did not kill theater; television did not kill radio. The hunger for the content is still there. It’s the launch pad that changes.
Four. What is the Black Box Fallacy?
Many believe that media content will eventually flow through a single black box, like a smartwatch, for example. Whoever invents and/or discovers this black box will have hit the jackpot.
However, Jenkins observes that there are more and more, not less, black boxes, in the living room, for example. As Cheskin Research explains on page 464, “What we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges.” There is, as Jenkins writes, “a pull toward more specialized media appliances . . .”
Jenkins concludes: “There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes.” We have different media needs depending whether we’re at home, at a restaurant, or at work, to name a few examples.
Five. What is the future of media convergence?
Telecooning, “being” with someone all the time, night and day, through digital means without seeing that person face to face. This is already happening in Japan.
Being a mother, a teacher, a lover are roles that will become functions on multi-platforms.
Teenagers will make videos of their scandals and those videos will go viral before the teens are “busted.”
Public monuments have yellow stickers with numbers that access recorded messages that give information about those monuments.
See Reading the Signs, Number 3, on page 469 for one of your typed essay options.
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