In my honest opinion, convergence culture is nothing new. With the advent of any emerging technology comes speculation and a giving away of the old to new. For example, the invention of typewriters and printing was likely also met with uncertainty. Scribes likely feared for their jobs and machine producers were ecstatic.
There is only one difference between convergence in its historical context and the media convergence of today. The old form of convergence was around functional positions, physical skills like making a machine or writing words. Convergence, as discussed by Jenkins is around the mental, creative outputs v.s sweat of brow. The internet and technology has allowed convergence to take place on greater heights than it has ever been in the past, but it IS still convergence and comparable to any other event in history where new technology was introduced.
To put this into context, consider Grumpy Cat.
He is an online phenomenon known and held dear by millions. What started his rise to fame was an individual who works as a cashier at Target, no one of notable fame or wealth. The point is, in convergence today any individual can have a large impact upon society as a whole due to the ultimately intellectual basis of the outputs. Whereas "back in the day", an individual only had access to a small subset of the population with new outputs like typed papers. The media convergence of today and historic convergence are very similar with one key difference: intellectual content v.s physical content.
No comments:
Post a Comment