The Question Concerning Convergence

Convergence Culture is the inauguration of a new era in consumption and production – like all of Capital’s epochal changes, its movement is caused by a confluence of forces, “technological, industrial, cultural and social”(3). Convergence is not just a congregation but also a collision, the contradictions between new and old, grassroots and corporate, and consumer and producer grow ever more complex. Jenkins toes the threshold between the pious followers of the Convergence cult and the unwavering dogmatism of “critical pessimists”(258). Convergence Culture is not necessarily good or evil, just potentially dangerous, Jenkins’ critical utopianism resists the view of technological determinists, “rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift – a move from medium specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content” and increasingly “complex relations between corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture”(254).  The changes in media technologies generate new consumption habits, the postmodern economy is not limited to the old marketing strategies and essentialist identity formations but caters to niche markets. American Idol and The Matrix are examples of “affective economics” in which “the line between entertainment content and brand messages” are blurred (20).  The transformation of brands into “lovemarks” entails a shift from passive to “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked” consumers that produce, an example of how the medium becomes the message (20).  The Matrix, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, all fantastic or fictional stories have succeeded in “transmedia storytelling”(93).  Jenkins discussion of political coverage and news media’s cyber-interfaces shows “participatory culture’s power to negate” as well as “old media’s power to marginalize”(278). Ultimately, Jenkins think that “increasing participation in popular culture is a good thing,”(259) a progressive tool that will lead to “a more ideal society”(258).  How we will get there and what technologies will be the machinery of resistance is a question for the democracy-to-come. 

Jenkins Playing Guitar Hero

In the end Jenkins accomplished the goal of his book, which was necessary but insufficient. Jenkins never claimed to possess all of the answers or that he had a specific politics embedded besides his basic normative claim that communication and popular culture are good activities. Jenkins' focus on the way culture circulates rather than is produced  lacks a theoretical framework for evaluating competing claims. The substance of Jenkins’ method of critique has become as virtual as his object of study. Granted dogmatism is a vice, but Jenkins merely seeks out the possibilities of "consumer-based politics"(260). The only discussion of the "process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution)" is posed as an offhanded question (252). Should we really expect any fundamental change in the marketplace if we are only focused on the products created rather the method by which they were given life? Does the liberatory potential of Convergence Culture, within the economic realm anyway, simply mean the expansion of marketing strategies to better assimilate the diversity of identities, social niches, idiosyncratic consumption behaviors etc..?  Jenkins vision of empowerment mystifies an ideological background of exploitation. He attacks the symptom of a process that exceeds his object of concern. Unless you criticize the fundamental structuring principles of media culture one will only end up putting a human face upon one facet of larger systemic forces of irrational violence and destitution. Jenkins is right that convergence culture cannot be dealt with through an all or nothing approach, but bracketing the discussion to how to make corporations respond better to consumer preferences is ultimately an even more disempowering and cynical way of relating to one's own role as a critic and a consumer. It fulfills our desire to conceive of capital as a rational system, that if only we have more information about the products created we can reconcile its contradictions. It feeds the fantasy that if corporations knew what we really wanted they'd make it for us. But this evades the stark reality of the culture industry; the culture industry does not just rationally respond to people's clear-cut demands, but rather produces desires and proliferates them through a leveling process. 

'Critical Utopian': Contradiction or Compromise?

Jenkins' original claim that he is representing rather than critiquing Convergence Culture loses its effect in the concluding chapter. Jenkins identifies the most controversial claim of the book as resting upon "my operating assumption that increasing participation in popular culture is a good thing" (p. 259). He further states that "having a sense of what a more ideal society looks like gives one a yardstick for determining what we must do to achieve our goals" (p. 258). It becomes clear at the end of the work that he is very explicitly making a normative claim about the nature of the way we ought to relate to the phenomena of Convergence Culture. Granted he employs a critique that toes the threshold rather than casting an all encompassing epistemological net.

As an alternative to the method of 'critical pessimists' (p.258), Jenkins seeks out the possibilities of "consumer-based politics" (p. 260). The changes in the ways people consume and produce culture call for new tools of resistance on the part of consumers; "A politics of confrontation must give way to one focused on tactical collaboration…The new model is that we are collectively changing the nature of the marketplace, and in so doing we are pressuring companies to change the products they are creating and the ways they relate to their consumers" (p. 260-1). The only discussion of the "process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution" is posed as an offhanded question (p. 252). Jenkins ultimately isolates "cultural diversity" and "participation" as the prime social goods of a reformed convergence culture (p. 268 & 269). Should we really expect any fundamental change in the marketplace if we are only focused on the products created rather the method by which they were given life? Does Jenkins give us any normative criteria by which to establish more 'ethical' consumption habits? The Sequential Tarts are used as an exemplary practice of consumer advocacy groups, in which comic book producers were persuaded to create comic catering to women's interests. Does the liberatory potential of Convergence Culture, within the economic realm anyway, simply mean the expansion of marketing strategies to better assimilate the diversity of identities, social niches, idiosyncratic consumption behaviors etc..?

I think Jenkins makes a good point when juxtaposing his mode of engaging Convergence Culture versus the pessimists when he writes, "the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception" (p. 258). The problem with Jenkins however is that what he sees as empowerment is an illusory fiction meant to veil an ideological background of exploitation. Jenkins' political conclusions sound like a Ralph Nader campaign ad, a defense of consumer protectionism and populist reformism. He attacks the symptom of a process that exceeds his object of concern. He indicts "the old politics of culture jamming" in which "resistance becomes an end in and of itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility" (p. 259). Beyond those that argue for abandoning media altogether, there is a valid point to be made that unless you criticize the fundamental structuring principles of media culture one will only end up putting a human face upon one facet of larger systemic forces of irrational violence and destitution. Jenkins is right that convergence culture cannot be dealt with through an all or nothing approach. Yet our questions and criticisms cannot end with the stance of the true pessimist who claims that all forms of resistance which go beyond the limited realm of consumption choices are unrealistic or doomed to failure. Jenkins' scope of direct moral concern becomes extremely limited for claiming to be a utopian. While the role that certain cultural formations play within the reproduction of society should not be underestimated, can we really afford to let our discussions be limited to how to make corporations respond better to consumer preferences? Is this not ultimately an even more disempowering and cynical way of relating to one's own role as a critic and a consumer? This approach fulfills our desire to conceive of capital as a rational system, that if only we have more information about the products created we can reconcile its contradictions. It feeds the fantasy that if corporations knew what we really wanted they'd make it for us. But this evades a very stark point about the nature of the culture industry; the culture industry does not just rationally respond to people's clear-cut demands, but rather produces desires and proliferates them through a leveling process.

I'd like to compare Jenkins' book to one of the most pessimistic pieces of academic work ever written about the culture industry. In 1944 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which went on to become a chapter of their larger work The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer proceed dialectically, harnessing the spirit of the negative with clarity and rigor. The work reminds us that, “Culture is a paradoxical commodity.” The industrialization and mechanization of the production of culture is part of a larger historical process of capitalism. The new possibilities unleashed by changes in technology and culture and their correlative transformations in consumption and production make the superstructure mushroom. The culture industry is caught between two competing forces. It has to appear as offering a huge diversity in its appeal to consumers while it simultaneously “impresses the same stamp on everything.”

Adorno and Horkheimer make a similar claim as Jenkins about the way cultural commodities are valued. Jenkins writes that “Fans…embrace an understanding of intellectual property as “shareware,” something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in various ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of different meanings” (p. 267). A specific good does not have a static or limited value but rather accumulates value based on the way it circulates and the connections it creates. Adorno and Horkheimer write, “So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.” Today, the forces of monopolization have been eroded in certain respects, but advertising functions differently. Now that consumers can actively interact with commodities, the content they produce does the work of advertising for the corporation.

Yet Jenkins is not over idealistic, he writes of the limits as well as the possibilities of Convergence Culture;

Despite the rhetoric about “democratizing television,” this shift is being driven by economic calculations and not by some broad mission to empower the public. Media industries are embracing convergence for a number of reasons: because convergence-based strategies exploit the advantages of media conglomeration; because convergence creates multiple ways of selling content to consumers; because convergence cements consumer loyalty at a time when the fragmentation of the marketplace and the rise of file sharing threaten old ways of doing business. (p. 254).

Jenkins sees the threat however solely within the terms of economics and marketing. The missing link is two fold; first an analysis of what most of the cultural products of capitalism are for, are they merely for whimsical enjoyment or an ideological strategy and secondly, an analysis of the ways changes in convergence culture materially affect those that sustain the system as a whole. Neither of these turning points of analysis should necessitate dogmatic responses; one can see the benefits of becoming conscious of activity outside of the confined notion of the economic sphere or the ways that increased information sharing has made people more globally aware of international living standards etc.

Adorno and Horkheimer were limited in their critique by the horizon of the present. They are not to blame for not envisioning the ways new relationships to media technology would emerge. Take this passage for example;

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

While the new advances in technology were limited to the more passive type and subject to political and ideological forces, the emergence of autonomous knowledge cultures and zones of collaboration challenge the original hierarchies that emerged. Youtube and Vimeo, Internet Radio and Wikipedia are potentially the “machinery of rejoinder.” These advances change the rules of the game because the divide between amateurs and professionals etc is no longer such an obsession. Rather the rise in organic forms of organizing and communicate seem to hold revolutionary potential. Jenkins reading of Benjamin makes this point as well. Yet the question of how relate to the culture industry cannot be limited to just forming rules ethical consumption or social contracts. Convergence Culture often acts as an opiate or mask. The question is not one of being resistant to pragmatic reforms and compromises, but ensuring that the frame by which we approach the problem as a whole does not drop out. Adorno and Horkheimer write;

All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The way in which a girl accepts and keeps the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation, the choice of words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to man’s attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture industry.

While we should not let the process of demystification blind us from the potentials in the present, it remains necessary to expose the ways that the culture industry exists is the medium through which the masses “insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.” The divide between life experienced for work and for pleasurable/cultural activities is a falsity that is sustained by commodified forms of pleasure. Convergence Culture however increasingly blurs the lines, as well as the distinction between the personal and the political. Jenkins occupies a delicate position between Adorno and Levy, yet in a brilliantly reflexive fashion. The question is for all the abstract theorizing about the nature of Convergence Culture the real question becomes how to deploy that knowledge from within to alter the structures above and about.

Worldly Desires

The Matrix trilogy circulates within our imaginaries not as an enclosed cultural artifact but as an ensemble that weaves together “multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium”(97).  Jenkins describes the phenomenon as an example of “transmedia storytelling”(97). The Wachowski Brothers’ dream fashions an entire world fresh for an eager audience to conquer, explore, and build upon.

New Media theorist Janet Murray compares the horizontal integration of media to the works of Faulkner, while perhaps a less modern example I think Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine is most illustrative of the dynamic.

Balzac created a world of his own by writing over 30 novels. La Comedie Humaine is composed of nearly 1000 characters whose lives and stories often intersect. Balzac’s style, however, is characterized as Realism. This seems to be distinct from the most successful styles of transmedia storytelling. The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter all relied on fantasy or science fiction in order to give the author the freedom to invent an entire new world.

Within the culture of convergence corporations must work harder to captivate their audiences. Transformations in consumption patterns mirror changes in production. Jenkins notes that with the move to a Post-Fordist economy “our workplaces have become more collaborative; our political process has become more decentered; we are living more and more within knowledge cultures based on collective intelligence”(133). The thing that makes The Matrix such an interesting example of Convergence Culture is that it is a meta-commentary and perhaps a dystopian prediction about where the trend itself is taking us. While our minds may not be directly plugged into a machine that sucks our energy out, it is apparent that the shift to affective forms of consumption has some striking implications. There is now an assemblage of diffuse forces that seek to subtly manage and maintain the ways populations relate to different stimuli. The realm of human perception and attention has become commodified. The rift between the flow of material and immaterial forms of capital has shrunk to the point where the opposition between the two is now a sham, if there is an opposition at all.  Jonathon Beller described this process in an article titled “The Spectatorship of the Proletariat” [Boundary 2, Vol. 22, No. 3 Autumn, 1995, pp. 171-228] over 15 years ago. He writes, “The commodification  of  the public sphere and the attendant commodification of the sensorium returns the struggle with capitalism to the senses.” Rather than seeing affect as a solely repressive force, Beller argues that we must use our own potential to resist “in the very arena of domination.” He sees film as an opportunity for that form of resistance itself.

Perhaps The Matrix is an example of this. On the other hand it seems the continued references to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation indicate that the movie is just an attempt to push theory and culture to its extremes, to its point of implosion rather than a political act in the strong sense of the term. In a world already oversaturated with meaning, political struggles that attempt to accumulate and make as much meaning as possible are just another futile wave crashing against the rocks of the status quo. This stance however just feels too nihilist.

Slavoj Zizek a Slovenian, Psychoanalytic Marxist and cultural critic wrote an article on The Matrix titled The Matrix or Two Sides of Perversion [Philosophy Today 1999, Celina 1999, Volume 43. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-matrix-or-two-sides-of-perversion/]. He interprets the concept of the matrix as “the Lacanian "big Other," the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us.” The matrix is the name for the “substance of the social.” It accounts for the structure by which the subject is not master of his own house. It is the paranoiac fantasy that explains the ways in which we are not fully in control of our own actions, that what we do is the result of an entire edifice that determines what and who we are.  The matrix conceals the inconsistencies, gaps, and excesses that prevent us from having a complete or true view of reality. Some interpret The Matrix as meaning reality is a hoax, there are only multiple virtual or fictional worlds we choose to move between or as being a screen that blocks our view of the real world behind the matrix. For Zizek both of these views miss the point of the paradox, “the Real is not the "true reality" behind the virtual simulation, but the void which makes reality incomplete/inconsistent, and the function of every symbolic Matrix is to conceal this inconsistency — one of the ways to effectuate this concealment is precisely to claim that, behind the incomplete/inconsistent reality we know, there is another reality with no deadlock of impossibility structuring it.”

The film gains its power not from showing us that reality is simply artifice, but in the moment of awakening. People realize that there is not a beautiful pristine world outside of Plato’s cave of shadows, but rather a dimly lit claustrophobic space. Zizek notes several inconsistencies within The Matrix, one of which is that such a powerful machine could have easily used a different form of energy than humans. Further, why not give each individual their own reality rather than a shared one? His response is that “the Matrix feeds on the human's jouissance.” Rather than acting as an anonymous machine the big Other requires this constant flow of enjoyment to sustain itself. The scene of awakening produces its opposite, which is “the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being.” The enlightenment belief in the autonomous subject is maintained as a fantasy through positing paranoid stories of control and our ability to free ourselves from them. Zizek sums up his argument as:

Therein resides the correct insight of The Matrix: in its juxtaposition of the two aspects of perversion — on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules that can be suspended; on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity. In other words, The Matrix gets it right, but in a wrong (inverted) way, i.e., we just have to turn around the terms in order to get at the true state of things. What the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true situation, is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being. We are not dreaming in VR that we are free agents in our everyday common reality, while we are actually passive prisoners in the prenatal fluid exploited by the Matrix; it is rather that our reality is that of the free agents in the social world we know, but in order to sustain this situation, we have to supplement it with the disavowed, terrible, impending fantasy of being passive prisoners in the prenatal fluid exploited by the Matrix. The mystery of the human condition, of course, is why the subject needs this obscene fantasmatic support of his/her existence.  

The inversion of the terms of The Matrix, provokes an interesting intersection with the work on affective economics. Products like SNS’s produce the fantasy of an enlightened subject that masters their own virtual world. They control the impressions other people have of them and manage their appearance meticulously. The virtual subject feels empowered and active at the helm of their virtual vessel. But what does not become obvious to them is the ways in which they are prey to the whims of their news feed and comments. Or how their daily life becomes penetrated by the anxiety of checking what they and their ‘friends’ are up to, how the conception of what your attention should be dedicated to has been slowly structured by your investment in a website. Or how people freely give up their labor to a site that profits off them. What appears as an off the cuff comment about an event or a product becomes aggregated for generating knowledge about consumer preferences. The realm of sensibility and feeling has now become so integrated into corporate strategies that people can no longer just ignore the material effects of affect. The only option is not cede the sphere to the right, but rather to cultivate ways to learn to be affected by that which seemed imperceptible before. 

Turning Documents into Monuments

    Jenkins seems to be just as seduced by the objects of convergence culture as those he intends to inform. He claims that his “goal here is to document conflicting perspectives on media change rather than to critique them.” (p. 13) He attempts to take’ a God’s eye view from nowhere’, speaking from a position as somehow above the fray of the structures he’s analyzing. While being reflexive and rigorous in research methods is key, Jenkins seems to fear reaching any semblance of a decisive conclusion. He merely points to the existence of a paradox, without providing a measurement of the way the scales are tipped. Granted the Survivor chapter and others points to the problem of an oversaturation of dogmatic interpretations about the dynamics of convergence, it seems there is an even greater risk in claiming to be apolitical.  

    Jenkins states that, “The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined.”(p.27)It is unclear whether a single causal claim can be made as to whether the internet erodes these ties or if these ties determine  the way we engage the internet; the forces appear to be mutually reinforcing. People have been making statements like “knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence” (p. 20) repeatedly since the Renaissance, what seems more important is to evaluate the trends of its dispersion or concentration. While Jenkins points to the paradoxes that emerge within the particularized cases of reality television or other pop culture examples, it seems that if one is able to pan out and investigate the overall effects of convergence culture Levy’s feet seem more firmly rooted in the ground than at first glance. Knowledge is now able to circulate with increased rapidity and scope than ever before, people are able to check the manipulation of events, and see beyond what immediately given to them. The difference in the available knowledge about the current wars and the First Gulf War that may or may not have ever occurred seem an especially poignant demonstrations of the ongoing transformation. While there certainly are limits, it seems misguided to present the case as just a paradox, without having a yardstick by which to judge it. Perhaps there are contradictory forces which problematize the way one ought to understand the dynamics of convergence, but one can also discern more universal forces emerging amidst all the noise.

    Jenkins uses the most commodified examples of convergence culture to point to the inevitability of consumer capitalism’s stranglehold on resistance. Why would we expect the forms of collaboration that develop out of a reality television show to hold emancipatory potential? If a group’s method of exerting control upon a media corporation is part of the “narrative pleasure” (p. 28 ) or the experience of its product then that only makes people more affectively invested in the process of consumption. Jenkins points are not to be overlooked, it is extremely important " to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions." (p. 62) And to analyze the way "commodification is also a form of exploitation.” (p. 62) But Jenkins analysis is limited, almost threadbare, in scope in certain respects. Why even mention exploitation as an abstract concept unless one is willing to make it felt? It seems the importance in the cases of Survivor or American Idol is to show the way in which these original Frankensteined combinations birthed by convergence culture breed interpassivity among publics. They participate within a larger ideological frame that keeps people distracted from struggles beyond themselves by creating the illusion of activity. People go on voting on their cell phones or really sticking it to Mark Burnett, thinking companies are changing the way they relate to you as a consumer, when in reality nothing changes. 

    Jenkins thinks he is the spoiler of the spoilers. He criticizes Pierre Levy at the points where Levy is “most utopian” (p. 38) or “at his most optimistic” (p. 29) rather than at his most pragmatic level. What about the numerous examples in which convergence has led not to cynical disenchantment with politics but toward cultivating new modes of engagement? What about the use of social media in the Iranian elections? Cell phones documenting human rights abuses? Wikileaks? or whistle-blowing organizations?