I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the founder of the Education Arcade, an MIT group interested in the intersection of videogames and learning. And so, even though the book addresses games as a minority subject, I offer this review to alert our readers to Jenkins’s current thinking. In a future post, I will attempt to address what convergence might mean for videogames with an agenda.
Convergence is an abused media term these days, and Jenkins’s primary goal in the book is to replace vague uses of the term in mass media, marketing, and consumer electronics with his own concept of convergence. Early in the book, Jenkins blames the confusion on what he calls the black box fallacy: “sooner or later, … all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or,in the mobile scenario, through the black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go).” With Microsoft and Sony both posturing their new game consoles as Trojan horses destined to deliver digital content of all kinds–from videogames to television to film to telephony–Jenkins’s correction is a welcome one. As he points out, we seem to have more rather than fewer black boxes these days, all competing with one another for delivery standards, shelf-space, and attention. Technological convergence, for Jenkins, offers an inadequate account of what’s happening to contemporary media: “there will be on single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes.”
Instead, Jenkins offers another explanation of media convergence, one that is “more than simply a technological shift.” Convergence is the set of new practices that emerge out of the proliferation of media channels or technologies, and the increasing frequency with which content flows across them. Collaboration between industries and consumers’ tendency to flit between media types and formats accelerates the process.