Author Henry Jenkins discussed the changing consumer-producer relationship in a lecture entitled "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," on Thursday night in Filene Auditorium.
The lecture was the inaugural piece in a new series of discussions on Film and Television Studies, sponsored by the Rockefeller Center. Jenkins's speech derived from the subject of his upcoming book of the same title, which analyzes the growth of grass-roots media in a high media society.
Jenkins, a professor and the founder of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, amused and interested a crowd of approximately 60 listeners by employing references to pop culture to explain large issues concerning the intermedial public sphere.
Explaining the complex idea of "media convergence," Jenkins employed a description of a cellphone as "convergence par excellence," in that today's cellphones can contain everything from digital cameras to MP3 players.
Drawing examples from Sesame Street to Star Wars, Jenkins went on to explain how "the image of the brand could be shaped completely bottom up by consumer participation."
"Participatory culture is absolutely central to the way the media industry thinks of itself," Jenkins said, noting that this leads to a battle to define what kinds of participation are acceptable, with mixed signals coming from both sides.
He described how a photograph taken by teenagers of a person dressed up as a Star Wars Stormtrooper buying his own action figure became the object of much media coverage, because it circulated on the internet with no involvement from Lucas Arts, the company that owns Star Wars. The organic spread of this photograph provided media attention that Lucas Arts might have had difficulty generating itself.
Jenkins also stressed the idea of collective intelligence, defined as the pooling of information by consumers using media like the internet.
He explained that these combined intellectual resources, which are driven by a hunger to produce and share knowledge, shape the way consumers process culture.
While noting the importance of new media sources like blogs, the professor rejected the idea of a digital revolution in which old media would completely displace new media.
The problem with the idea of a digital revolution, he said, is that it ignores how much corporations influence grass-roots opinions and output.
Jenkins is the author of numerous books including "Democracy and New Media," and has three new books coming out this year. His studies focus on relationships across media industries and institutions that are typically studied independently.
