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.

As the book's title suggests, Jenkins's understanding of convergence is primarily cultural. Convergent cultural practices include both the consumption and the creation of media, and Jenkins traces convergence culture in both top-down corporate mass media production and bottom-up consumer reception and creation. On the one hand, media conglomerates now control a variety of platforms, from film to television to music to games to theme parks. On the other hand, consumers have greater choice and control over media, and they are also able to participate in and create media. The majority of the book considers case studies in media convergence, including reality television, "transmedia storytelling" (more on that in a minute), and fandom.

Jenkins draws liberally from Pierre Lévy's theory of collective intelligence, the increased power that large groups of individuals can apply to problems. Jenkins discusses Survivor spoilers through the logic of collective intelligence, showing how small numbers of highly-devoted viewers were able to discover or predict the outcome of the show by collaborating in online discussion groups. Jenkins highlights spoiler hunting as example of participatory culture, where media consumers create new modes of engagement with media content... modes not necessarily endorsed by the creators. The discussion of collective intelligence in the Survivor community offers a welcome counterpoint to prevailing ideas that "puzzling" over apparently complex mass-media offers cognitive and cultural value in and of itself, such as those recently advanced by Steven Johnson; the Survivor spoilers are solving a real problem, rather than becoming drawn in to the elusive, unplanned web of J.J. Abrams telescripts gone awry.

In particular, economic changes like the decreasing value of the 30-second television spot are forcing mass media into cultural convergence. Survivor and American Idol represent instances of what Jenkins calls affective economics, a marketing technique that appeals to consumers' emotional vicissitudes. I found it curious that Jenkins chose to invent this somewhat awkward term for a concept that has many names in contemporary marketing theory, including associative advertising and lifestyle marketing. One might assume that Jenkins knows about these concepts, but chooses not to mention them in order that he can reconnect the same underlying concept to cultural studies and fan communities. Yet, he also argues that affective economics is "on the fringes" in the media industry, suggesting that he may have a greater distinction in mind. In any event, the types of examples Jenkins cites derive principally from product placement and sponsorship. For example, reality television like Survivor, American Idol, The Apprentice, and The Restaurant fund their programming largely through very few high-value sponsorships in which products and services are more deeply integrated into the shows (Reeboks on Survivor, Coca-Cola on American Idol, Pepsi on The Apprentice, American Express on The Restaurant, etc.). Jenkins argues that this type of programming creates more viewer participation with advertising, creating brand "expression," which is more valuable than "exposure," the one-time gold standard for measuring advertising.

The increased collaboration between content providers and sponsors is an example of mass media convergence culture. Content and brand development of the usual sort, such as the Coca Cola cups on the American Idol judge table, offer one example of this type of convergence. But Jenkins makes a convincing argument that the content of these media themselves depict convergence of a much more subtle kind. When we watch American Idol, we learn about the contestants as individuals rather than generic artists: "Viewers get to know the contestants, learn their personality, their motives for competing, their backgrounds, and, in some cases, other members of their families. In American Idol, viewers watch them improve or crash and burn." Similarly, when Levi's executives talk through their reasons for choosing one Apprentice team's solution over another, they expose the logic by which they make product design and marketing decisions.

Jenkins argues that these techniques fuel gossip. Discussion of common experiences allows consumers to participate with media in a way that traditional advertising does not. Bonding advertising to content in this way, argues Jenkins, imposes new obligations on corporations. In particular, the consumption community "may well hold the corporations accountable for what they do in the name of those brands." Jenkins cites AT&T's sponsorship of American Idol as an example. When AT&T wasn't able to handle the volume of voting calls the viewership demanded, the failure impacted both the network and the sponsor.

I was intrigued by Jenkins's willing adoption of lifestyle marketing practices, mostly since I have been such a vocal critic of this type of advertising, both here (1, 2) and, in considerably more detail, in my forthcoming book Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Essentially, my argument is that lifestyle marketing does not address consumers' actual lifestyles, but fashions lifestyles as constructs that marketers manipulate consumers to adopt. A brief excerpt of my position, taken from the forthcoming book:

Jenkins insists on a more moderate view, rightly observing that "moral outrage" does not help us understand the marketing appeal of television like American Idol. He suggests that the "collective bargaining structure" like the AT&T example mentioned above give consumers a new power that opposes consumerism. I tried my best to honor Jenkins's request for readers to "bracket their anxieties about consumerism," but I never felt that he returned to the problem in earnest. Hopeful appeals to future potential are nice, but I expected more vision and leadership on this topic. It's possible that advertising just doesn't bother Jenkins very much; it is, after all, the primary fuel of popular culture.

From reality television, Jenkins moves on to fan culture. His first influential work was Textual Poachers, an excellent study of fan fiction practices. He draws liberally from that set of interests in the latter half of Convergence Culture, exploring both mass media- and consumer-created content for large, popular media properties. Jenkins starts with the many works created around The Matrix, from the "original" film trilogy to the Aminatrix animation series to the Enter the Matrix videogame. Jenkins is particularly interested in "integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained with a single medium." He calls this process "transmedia storytelling," a story that unfolds across multiple media platforms.

Here Jenkins makes some good points and falls into some traps. Among the good points, he convincingly argues that we don't yet have a sophisticated critical frame for evaluating artifacts of this type. Film critics might pan a film because they can't follow its plot or character motivations, failing to realize that those features are purposely withheld for other media channels. He relates this charge to participation, the demand that consumers "do research before we arrive at the theater." Jenkins cites examples from Hollywood and the videogame industry where content creators are starting not with films or games, but with broadly licensable content regimes. These "franchises," Jenkins admits, are often driven my economic rather than artistic goals. But smart producers (Jenkins cites EA's Danny Bilson as one), may not full into such traps. Increasingly, they may become "convergent designers" (my term, not Jenkins's), who "do not just move Hollywood brands into a new media space, but also contribute to a larger storytelling system." Not surprisingly, such a task requires an original conception in transmedia terms.

As the sonic boom of the so-called ludology vs. narratology debate dissipates, I find it interesting that Jenkins continues to insist on the terms "narrative" and "storytelling" as the principle units of cultural expression. Even though Jenkins admits that "storytelling has become the art of world building," where artists create environments and situations for a multitude of consumer intersections, he still does not reimagine such a craft separate from the particularity of narrative. Following Roger Shanck and others, Jenkins argues that "stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences." Yet, the examples he cites, from the rich worlds of The Matrix, and Star Wars to transmedial experiments like Dawson's Desktop, readily elude the narrative frame, offering representations of behaviors, fragments, and environments. Michael Mateas and Gonzalo Frasca have called the privileging of narrative expression narrativism, and I have argued that narrativist gestures like Jenkins's occlude representational gestures based on logics and behaviors. Convergence Culture continues Jenkins' narrativist practice.

Interestingly, his own arguments sometimes undermine this position, often in cases where transmedial works become most interesting. For example, in a discussion of Star Wars Galaxies, Jenkins points out that players can adopt the generic alien roles from the series, but they cannot play specific characters. Explaining the authorship techniques that make such interactions possible, Jenkins cites Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler: "Designers cannot require Jedis to behave consistently within the Star Wars universe, but they can design game structures (such as bounties) that elicit Jedi-like behavior (such as placing a high reward on capturing a Jedi which might produce covert action on the part of Jedis." Squire and Steinkueler are describing Jedi behavior, as it emerges from the interactions of rules and incentives designed into the game. This is procedural, not narrative expression. Given the propensity for such non-narrative interpretations of media properties, it is curious that Jenkins did not choose the more general term transmedia authorship over transmedia storytelling.

At any rate, Jenkins flexes his considerable knowledge about fandom, offering detailed and enjoyable discussions of Star Wars and Harry Potter fan film/fiction communities. While mass media designs complex, integrated experiences across media channels, grassroots communities appropriate such properties to extend, customize, and make their own. In the world of fandom, collective intelligence both increases the total volume of a property and facilitates small-scale collaboration and mentorship within a community. Jenkins's main example is a lively and charming one, the story of (then) thirteen-year old Heather Lawver's Daily Prophet, a web-based school newspaper for the Hogwarts wizard academy. Children from around the world participate, many encouraging and assisting others in the rubber-meets-the-road practice of fan journalism. Harry Potter fan fiction communities at fictionally.org and sugarquill.net do the same with fiction writing, offering forms of tutoring and peer-review. Jenkins traces similar practices in the Star Wars fan film communities. Populated by generally older fans, some even use communities and contests as a way of launching a successful filmmaking career. As Jenkins suggests, the value of such activities is unknowable yet promising, and he opposes such active, collaborative learning to the model of "autonomous learning" insisted upon in schools.

Jenkins anticipates a number of objections to fandom, most notably the fear that kids are merely copying existing media rather than creating their own work. Instead, suggests Jenkins, parents and educators should think about the practice as "a kind of apprenticeship." Original expression, he insists, is a "difficult burden" for youngsters. There is some value in this objection, and the collective intelligence of a writers community seems to do more good than harm for young authors. Likewise, Jenkins ably anticipates the common objection that children obsessed with Harry Potter or other popular properties may become unable to discern fantasy from reality. But Jenkins does not adequately answer another objection, namely that a fixation on existing media properties like Harry Potter may reduce a child's interaction with the cultural, literary, and historical traditions that made such works possible in the first place. The success of Harry Potter and similar books may have duped us into the belief that reading in itself is honorable, no matter the content (Jenkins cites such a librarian's defense, that Harry Potter can "excite kids about reading and learning"). Jenkins correctly observes that the world of Harry Potter subsumes a multitude of historical and mythological figures. While numerous "tie-in" books on these subjects have been published, such efforts don't count as convergent and thus enjoy little fanfare from Jenkins's quill. Instead, he offers a set of interesting examples from Christian groups who use Harry Potter as a catalyst for discussions about faith and ritual in a secular society. For me, the latter examples were much more convincing specimens of desirable convergence culture than the fan fiction communities. The religious discourse begins with the fictional accounts of the book, abstracts to the mythological and historical references they appropriate, and further abstracts to discussions of the intersecting role of the pagan and the divine in contemporary Christian life.

Perhaps more concerning than becoming lost in fantasy is becoming lost in commerce. Doesn't fandom reorient children and adults alike toward the consumption of more and more commercial products from the franchise? Even the Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) that Jenkins briefly discusses as examples of collective intelligence and transmedia storytelling are funded and constructed in support of mass media properties (The Beast for A.I.; ilovebees for Halo 2). Jenkins hopes that fan communities actively resist commercial pressures by appropriating a property like Harry Potter and refashioning it for their own ends. Furthermore, argues Jenkins, directly engaging with issues of commercialization and intellectual property may better prepare young people for informed debate about such topics. Distinguishing between high and low culture is not an adequate answer to this question. As it happens, popular culture has no special purchase on fandom, as Jenkins recently admitted on his new blog.

This in mind, the omission of convergence communities that opt for more historically-entrenched creative practices in lieu of outright commercial commodities seems to reflect Jenkins's own preference for contemporary popular culture, and perhaps his own libertarian politics. The subversive undertones in Convergence Culture remain squarely on the side of mass market global capitalism. While Jenkins admits that many corporations are pushing convergence as a strategy of control, he frames consumer resistance as a struggle to get media companies to be more responsive to consumer tastes and interests. Despite the diffusion convergence brings, Jenkins seems to direct both mass-media and consumer attention around a few, large mass-media cultural properties. To become "full participants in our culture" seems to entail filming Star Wars action figures, decoding reality television puzzles, or authoring Harry Potter fanfic. Jenkins intends these examples to be paradigmatic, but the chasm between the book's examples and the set of possible niche-market or grassroots media properties is tremendous. Jenkins does believe in such properties, but it's a shame that they failed to make an appearance in Convergence Culture, even in the sporadic sidebar mini-essays that pepper the book. Among others, easy examples could have come from Second Life, where both creation tools are provided and intellectual property rights are conferred onto players. The classic 2L case study is the game Tringo, which 2L member Nathan Keir both licensed in-game for Linden dollars and sold rights to out of game for real dollars. Other examples abound.

All that said, Jenkins does expect the reader to object to the pulpy, mass-market examples. Instead of imagining convergence culture in relation to the history of human expression, he devotes the last chapter to politics and democracy. Using the Howard Dean-fueled grassroots online campaigning of the 2004 US Presidential election as backdrop, Jenkins argues that collective intelligence on the blogosphere demonstrates how pop culture consumers repurposed their knowledge of convergence culture for political activism. Citing examples from Photoshopped editorial images to Meetup.com, Jenkins argues that informed citizenship now requires active participation and collaboration. As an example of politics in practice, Jenkins describes the Alphaville election in The Sims Online. While one might ask if the now-infamous World of Warcraft Warrior protest might not serve as a better example of MMOG political practice, the very example of a simulated political world makes a welcome addition to the book, even if simulated politics might divert political discourse away from the material world. Jenkins admits that large-scale, ongoing convergent political discourse is still an undiscovered territory, but he does offer the hopeful suggestion that popular culture may have a role to play. There is much greater political diversity, Jenkins rightly observes, in websites about Harry Potter than in websites about public policy. Yet, as with the future of advertising, he is unable to offer any material or hypothetical examples of what such "deliberation" would look like.

Jenkins somewhat ignores the massive disparity in participation among collective intelligences. While he does cite Survivor producer Mark Burnett's claim that the show's 20 million viewers massively dwarfs the community of online spoilers, Jenkins seems to assume that this disparity is a temporary one. In the future, as convergence culture takes hold, participation will become universal. Unfortunately, participation seems to take place more naturally in levels. Raph Koster points to a User Content Pyramid Will Wright used to use when talking about The Sims. A small number of tool makers supplies a slightly larger number of content creators, who publish content on a slightly larger number of web sites, for a slightly larger number of content downloaders, compared to the even larger number of ordinary players. Koster also cites a similar pyramid for Yahoo! Groups, in which 1% of the population starts a group or posts a new thread, 10% participates in the discussion, and the rest benefit from lurking. Koster convincingly argues that flattening the difficulty of content creation also flattens the pyramid--Raph's example is Flickr, where creating a photo is a low-effort process. But Jenkins clearly sees high-effort, low-volume activities as much more indicative of convergence culture, or perhaps just more desirable (it's hard to disagree). This kind of participation or "collective intelligence" still demands a very large base of ordinary mass-market consumers--20 million Survivor viewers are needed to generate 5,000 messageboard spoilers. While it is possible that the increased exposure to participation and convergence may naturally flatten the pyramid over time, it's unclear how long it might take. In any event, Jenkins paints a picture of media participation that may imply greater flattening than actually exists.

Interestingly, appealing to smaller-than-mass-market communities of participation might shrink the total size of the pyramid, effectively creating more opportunities for individuals to participate, and more opportunities for them to explore the transmedial opportunities for a particular subject. Such a direction also naturally opposes the global capitalism of the mass market, without resorting to emptier resistance strategies, like culture jamming, which Jenkins opposes in the book. Jenkins comes closest to addresing this possibility in the book's conclusion, in a discussion of television producer John Rogers's idea to put a TV pilot online and invite fans to pay for additional episodes. Jenkins invites the reader to "imagine a time when small niches of consumers who were willing to commit their money to a cause might ensure the production of a minority-interest program." But, we need not imagine such a time; examples exist today. Perhaps the one closest to the topic in this section is the ransom publishing model. According to journalist Clive Thompson, board game designers Greg Stolze and Daniel Solis invented the ransom model as a way of overcoming the notorious revenue problems of the tabletop game industry. They described the premise of a game (in this case, Meatbot Massacre) on their website, and set a ransom of $600, to be received by September 2005. If the funds came in, the two would create the game and offer it for free download to anyone. In the case of Meatbot Massacre, the ransom was paid, the game was made, and now you can download it for free.

All told, Convergence Culture makes an important contribution to contemporary media studies. Jenkins frames convergence as a paradigm shift away from medium-specificity to media-diffusion. Convergence does not mean technological consolidation, but it does entail both corporate and participatory consolidation. This perspective will become a useful one for analyzing current and future media trends in contemporary (American) culture.

Still, two final problems are worthy of attention.

The first is somewhat pedantic. There are a few factual/transcription errors that may quickly obsess popular culture mavens. For one, Jenkins misspells Gandalf (as Gandolf, which is a common mistake but not one a scholar of popular culture can afford to make). For another, he mistakenly calls Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) Alternative Reality Games. Worse, Jenkins attributes the incorrect term to pervasive game researcher and designer Jane McGonigal ("Jane McGonigal ... calls the genre alternative reality gaming"), misciting one of her presentations as "Alternative Reality Gaming." If it were just the name, this might not be such a big deal. But McGonigal actually makes an important theoretical distinction (PDF) between alternate and alternative realities. Alternate realities, she argues, are "real worlds that use games as a metaphor." She contrasts this notion with alternative realities, realities one chooses between. McGonigal further traces the concept of "alternate reality" to science fiction, where the term refers to depictions of a world of changed history, and consequently of changed dynamics. This name, then, is central to McGonigal's claims that ARGs allow players to actively change the nature of their real reality by participating in these alternate ones.

Second, and more importantly, Jenkins may pay a dear price for distancing his analysis so far from technology. Throughout the book, Jenkins reminds the reader that convergence culture is not coextensive with technological progress. He distances media culture from "delivery technologies," for example, 8-tracks, CDs, and MP3s deliver recorded sound. These delivery technologies are fleeting, argues Jenkins, but the media "protocols" that rise up around delivery systems are cultural. One of Jenkins's major innovations in Convergence Culture is identifying the "black box fallacy" and offering a more distributed view of media convergence. His insistence on the cultural tenor of convergence is welcome, but Jenkins takes this emphasis to an extreme, arguing that "if we focus on the technology, the battle will be lost before we even begin to fight. We need to confront the social, cultural, and political protocols that surround the technology and define how it will get used." This point is well taken. But in opposing the cultural against the technological, Jenkins risks missing the importance of the technology. Technologies--particular ones, like computer microprocessors, mobile devices, telegraphs, books, and smoke signals--have properties. They have affordances and constraints. Different technologies may expose or close down particular modes of expression. Part of convergence culture must entail technical media literacy, an ability to consume and create media content that takes advantage of the particular properties of particular technology systems. Most, if not all of Jenkins's examples of computer technology take the computer for a network appliance rather than a processing machine. Marshall McLuhan's notion of a medium always coupled media properties with cultural manipulation, and even though technology fetishism has become an increasing concern, Jenkins strongly downplays technology's role as a participant in convergence culture. The content must be delivered, and technologies are there to do it.

Yet, the technologies we choose to create and consume media structure the type of convergence that is possible in the first place. The iPod emblazoned on the cover of Convergence Culture is essentially a hard drive with a few circuits run for streaming data off the disk. This device is well-suited to playing linear media, specifically audio and video content. The tremendous cultural uptake of iPods makes them desirable targets for creative output, even convergent, transmedial output that Jenkins advocates. But that output is necessarily constrained by the affordances of the device--for example, iPods can't easily run custom-built software.

Technological mastery couples with cultural mastery to help producers and consumers decide how and why to develop and consume the artifacts of convergence culture. Without such an understanding, a counterpart of the black box fallacy rears its head. I might call this counterpart the convergence fallacy: the more a media property is delivered across more devices, the better it is. Or, more convergence equals more expression. The notion that value builds exponentially as nodes in a network increases, sometimes called Metcalfe's Law, has been implicitly extended from infrastructure networks like telephones to social networks like MySpace to product networks like Spider-Man. But this kind of value is principally economic, not expressive. Even if we accept Jenkins's claim that the interpretive interests of fan communities undermine the intentions of mass media, they still support the financial interests of mass media. For consolidated media, convergence mitigates financial risk. And until we overcome the convergence fallacy, there is great risk that the promising grassroots convergence will subsume these mass market goals, even if they do not benefit individual creators. Unless we know why to choose one medium over another, or one set of transmedia over another, how can convergence produce more meaningful expression? Or consume it meaningfully? Or critique it fairly, to address three of the problems Jenkins raises in the book. Without a grounding in technological literacy and critique as well as cultural savvy, convergence risks becoming bricolage, an oddjob pastiche of any old media, rather than a pioneering manipulation of particular media for particular and collective ends.

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