Reading 2 - Khoi Tran

Reading Henry Jenkins' "Convergence Culture" rekindles in me many thoughts about the changing state of the current world of media. For sure, the change is happening very fast and unpredictable of its direction.  A few points that I am able to walk away with are the power of technology as an very effective transporter and the coexistence of old and new information.

It is quite interesting that the author opens his book about the convergence by a story about the power of a decentralized media world where everyone is given a relatively equal power that can change almost anything they want. The meaning of convergence in this case, the author argued, is "the cooperation between multiple media industries" and the participation of the almost constant feedbacks from the real world where those media industries operate upon.  What more interesting to me however, is the infinite loop of information within these convergences. The new technology has solved many of the most difficult problems which prevented media world from flourishing such as data storage and constant streamline that allows sharing and collaborating.  Media nowadays don't disappear but only transforms to more various replicates as time proceeds, which predicts an exponential rate of increase in information.  As a participant in the flow of media, each individual doesn't only receive information and being affected by media but also contributes to it.  The differences in the social context of the participant therefore is reflected in the media, which in turn create the change if the surrounding of the participants.  We in fact have observed this kind of constant loop before as in the case of history where a few winners decide what information is recorded and becomes influential for people of many further generations.  The new convergence allows such process to happen in seconds and thus opens precious opportunities for feedbacks.  This constant loop turns out to not only provide much more information than necessary but also verification about those information.

I also find the coexistence of old and new information a very interesting point.  Also happening parallel to the process of information convergence is the rapid proliferation of data.  The inevitability of these opposite processes gives a puzzling question about what will happen next in media world from where we are standing now.  For instance, the mobile phone has developed very quickly from a single purposed call receiver into a multitasking device with many converged abilities.  But we currently end up using more devices than we used to (Iphone, Ipad, Laptop, Kindle, etc. ) It is hard to believe that this process of convergence will settle any time soon, which results in us living in an era with much more instabilities and uncertainties than we thought.