blog six

In the introduction of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, the author discusses the concepts of convergence culture (weird – it’s in the title) from the past to the present.  Jenkins talks about old vs. new in terms of technologies, programs, and media and how consumers/viewers differ today. 

The convergence that Jenkins’s discusses is one that will not be resolved.  There is no answer or no way to get ahead or “no magical box that puts everything into order again.”  Instead of attempting to resolve the changes and or issues, readjustments will occur.  Instead of looking back, changes must be made in order to move forward. 

“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…Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives” (Jenkins).

The participation involved in the changes for the consumer will ultimately shape the new media and culture.  Jenkins’s also acknowledges that not all consumers will have skills, resources, etc. that are needed to help shape the new media culture.  This is what we know as the digital divide.  In another class of mine, we discussed the digital divide, and how certain people will be “set back” if they are unable to understand, recognize or have access to certain technologies.  Though media culture is constantly changing and being shaped, as Jenkins’s says, it will be impossible for everyone to keep up with these changes, thus the digital divide will constantly occur and the gap will be widened.

I believe that the passage we read from Jenkins had ideas that were similar to those of Henry Weinberger.  Both author’s discuss a user’s use of the web.  Though Weinberger pays more attention to the organizational aspects and how people find things, Jenkins discusses his idea that people obtain the information they wish to receive out of something.  For example, someone could provide a search for a certain film, but only to find out about a certain actor.  The rest of the page would be ignored, but the person would obtain the information they wanted.  These authors’ primary ideas dealt with usability and how the user navigates or gets information.