Parts of chapter 4 have appeared in “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); “When Folk Culture Meets Mass Culture,” in Christopher Hawthorne and Andras Szanto (eds.), The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts (New York: National Journalism Program, 2003); “Taking Media in Our Own Hands,” Technology Review, November 2004; “When Piracy Becomes Promotion,” Technology Review, August 2004; “The Director Next Door,” Technology Review, March 2001. Material from this chapter has been presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, the MIT Digital Cinema Conference, and the University of Tampiere.
Parts of chapter 5 have appeared in “Why Heather Can Write,” Technology Review, February 2004; “The Christian Media Counterculture,” Technology Review, March 2004 (reprinted in National Religious Broadcasters, October 2004); “When Folk Culture Meets Mass Culture,” in Christopher Hawthorne and Andras Szanto (eds.), The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts (New York: National Journalism Program, 2003). Material has been presented at Console-ing Passions and The Witching Hour.
Parts of chapter 6 have appeared as “Playing Politics in Alphaville,” Technology Review, May 2004; “Photoshop for Democracy,” Technology Review, June 2004; “Enter the Cybercandidates,” Technology Review, October 2003; “The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen and the Culture of Democracy” (with David Thorburn), in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.), Democracy and New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and “Challenging the Consensus,” Boston Review, Summer 2001. Material was presented to gatherings of MIT alumni in Houston and San Francisco, the MIT Communications Forum, Nokea, and the Humlab at Umea University.
Introduction: “Worship at the Altar of Convergence”
A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change
Worship at the Altar of Convergence
—slogan, the New Orleans Media Experience (2003)
The story circulated in the fall of 2001: Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street’s (1970) Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of “Bert Is Evil” images he posted on his homepage (fig. I.1) Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolf Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber, or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.
In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the Web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie. The publisher may not have recognized Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.
Fig. I.1. Dino Ignacio’s digital collage of Sesame Street’s Bert and Osama Bin Laden.
CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden (fig. I.2). Representatives from the Children’s Television Workshop, creators of the Sesame Street series, spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: “We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future.” It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on—the young man who had initially appropriated their images, or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.
Fig.I.2. Ignacio’s collage surprisingly appeared in CNN coverage of anti-American protests following September 11.
From his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. As the publicity grew, Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: “I feel this has gotten too close to reality. … “Bert Is Evil” and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open.”1 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.
This book is about the relationship between three concepts—media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.
By convergence, I mean 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. Convergence wis 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. (In this book I will be mixing and matching terms across these various frames of reference. I have added a glossary at the end of the book to help guide readers.)
In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Think about the circuits that the Bert Is Evil images traveled—from Sesame Street through Photoshop to the World Wide Web, from Ignacio’s bedroom to a print shop in Bangladesh, from the posters held by anti-American protestors that are captured by CNN and into the living rooms of people around the world. Some of its circulation depended on corporate strategies, such as the localization of Sesame Street or the global coverage of CNN. Some of its circulation depended on tactics of grassroots appropriation, whether in North America or in the Middle East.
This circulation of media content—across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders—depends heavily on consumers’ active participation. I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. This book is about the work—and play—spectators perform in the new media system.
The term participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media—still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even