Media Convergence

Media Convergence

• 1.
  Media Convergence ‘Convergence Culture’by Henry Jenkins
• 2.
  Definitions • ‘By convergence,I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.’
• 3.
  Definitions Continued... • ‘Convergenceis 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.’
• 4.
  Changing ‘Audiences’ • Jenkinsmakes the argument that convergence is less about a technological process and more about a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections amongst dispersed media content.‘ • The audience itself has become labelled as ‘eyeballs.’
• 5.
  New Media Audience Theory • Media Convergence • Participatory Cultures • Collective Intelligence
• 6.
  Participatory Cultures • Achange whereby rather than media producers and consumers occupying separate roles, they now interact with each other ‘according to a new set of rules,’ which nobody as yet fully understands. • Some consumers have a greater ability to ‘participate’ in this emerging culture than others.
• 7.
  Collective Intelligence • Aterm first coined by French cybertheorist Pierre Levy • Media causes a buzz in consumer communities which are of increasing value to media producers. • Subsequently, consumption has become a collective process by which we pool our resources and combine our skills.
• 8.
  Representation & ParticipatoryCultures • The term ‘early adopters’ has been used by Bill Tancer in Click and Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. All point to ‘early adopters’ as ‘white, Middle Class and college educated.’ • This is the target audience of most media producers at present because they help identify new trends, like Facebook, Twitter etc.
• 9.
  The Black BoxFallacy • Media theorists have continued to speculate about the possibility of a single black box operating within our living rooms which does everything. Yet actually the opposite is happening. • The Cheskin Report (2003) suggested ‘...what we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges.’
• 10.
  Media Ownership • Helpingto fuel this convergence culture is media ownership. The big media conglomerates like Disney, News Corporation & Viacom own a range of media, unlike the days of The Hollywood Studio System when the Big 5 studios specialised in filmmaking (albeit Vertical Integration) only.
• 11.
  New Media OwnershipTerms • Extension- Efforts to expand the potential market by moving content across different delivery systems • Synergy- opportunities to own and control these diverse delivery systems • Franchising- A coordinated effort to brand and market fictional content under the aforementioned conditions.