Convergence Culture | Henry Jenkins | Talks at Google

I'm really excited to introduce Henry

Jenkins who I is going to give a great

talk um he's been a professor at MIT for

over 16 years and he's currently the

director of the comparative media

studies program which is just down the

street um he's authored over authored or

edited over nine books on media and

popular culture including the one he's

going to talk about today convergence

culture um he's been a columnist in

numerous magazines he's been a strong

advocate for popular culture when it's

been under severe attack such as post

Coline he has a great blog named

Confessions of a aaan and he can also

bust a mean move to uh Soulja Boy Crank

dad um so his blog acan stands for

academic fan and I think it's a real

good description of of him and the book

The academic thing comes it really shows

in the book through tying it into a lot

of media Theory uh viewing the idea of

convergence culture through multiple

perspectives

Etc and his fan comes through and how

exciting the book is to read and how

sort of deeply involved he is with the

details of the fan culture and the fan

niches and um and I think it's a great

combination of the two so without

further Ado hry

CH well it's great pleasure to be here

today and uh to meet our neighbors up

the street uh just kind of curiosity how

many of you were tied to MIT at one time

or another clearly a large number of uh

MIT folks the Google at Google I noticed

a number of brass rats as I was standing

around talking to people so it's always

exciting to to meet some of our alums

and share with you some of what's been

going on in in the Humanity's part of

MIT and I I'm I'm finding to myself I

always joke that I end up going where no

humanist has gone before uh which is

sort of go into companies go into

technical spaces engage in dialogue

about the directions our culture is

taking as culture social and cultural

change and technological change

interface with each other in more and

more powerful ways and so while it might

have been true a decade ago that the

central challenges of our time were

going to be technological as the web has

sort of settled in as we begin to live

with the reality as this stuff becomes

embedded in people's everyday life then

there needs to be a different

dialogue about between those of us who

look at culture and society and those of

you who work on technology and that's

why I welcome opportunities like this

one to come in and just share some of

the things I'm seeing on my side of

things many many of which touch on

things your company is already involved

with uh but to see if we can mix it up a

little bit now before I start let me say

a word or two about comparative media

studies comparative media studies is in

its ninth year at MIT as a master's

program we are the largest undergraduate

program in the humanities at

MIT uh we are involved in a whole

variety of research initiatives

involving Humanity's databases involving

New Media literacies uh the design of

computer games uh for both education and

recreational purposes um we have a

corporate Consortium which consults

regularly with companies about some of

the challenges they're facing and and

especially in dealing with areas like

user gener

content um and we've just launched with

the Knight Foundation a center for the

future Civic media which is a joint

venture with the media lab at MIT so

what we look for are ways we can apply

what we know as humanist about culture

and Society just Cutting Edge issues

that are affecting the larger society so

we're trying to build a space where

students can learn what humanists know

but do so in a way that may actually

make them valuable as future employees

for companies like Google and while

Google tends my bet is that most of you

who are from MIT come from the technical

side of the Institute My Hope Is that 5

years from now that you'll start to see

people from the cultural side as well

mixing it up with you because I think I

think the kinds of challenges you face

every day in a company like this are

best addressed in that

intersection so as Chris uh so today I'm

going to talk a lot I'm going to talk

about some ideas from convergence

culture but I'm also going to try to

bring it up to date uh in interestingly

enough convergent culture was written

two years ago it's only been on the

market for a year but the book predated

the real Buzz about YouTube it predated

the real Buzz about second life it

predated the the launch of the word Web

2.0 so if anything the tendencies that

book is talking about have been more

fully realized by more recent

developments it was sort of looking

toward an era of participatory culture

that we saw already emerging a shift in

the ways we live in an in relation to

Media but these developments in the last

year or so have last couple of years

have really made this even more profound

a change than we once Envision and so

what this talk is designed to do is both

lay out some core ideas from the book

but also apply them to some of the

Cutting Edge issues that are affecting

media and I begin with a quote from um

this and this should not say Kevin

O'Reilly Kevin O'Reilly is a character

from Star TR The Original Classic St trk

this should say Tim O'Reilly he in his

essay what is Web 2.0 now the central

principle behind the success of the

Giants born in the 1.0 era who survived

the lead the 2.0 era appear to be this

that they've embraced the power of the

web to harness collective intelligence

the lesson Network effects from user

contributions are the key to market

dominance in Web 2.0 era so this is

O'Reilly saying we really this is

O'Reilly's point about the focus on how

we generate Community participation

because a central part of what drives

all of these companies and clearly this

map of Web 2.0 includes uh you know many

of the search engines many of the

companies that sort of you guys are

doing business with here's a more

cynical description of Web 2.0 someone

has asked please describe Web 2.0 to me

in two sentences or less and the answer

is you make all the content they keep

all the

revenue right and that's the neg so what

we've seen in the last we've already

this phrase Web 2.0 has already gone

through an interesting cycle that last

year was a year of enormous excitement

about Web 2.0 this year we've seen more

and more friction and tension as

communities are speaking back to Web 2.0

companies in a variety of ways and

challenging the implicit social contract

that that that under Web 2.0 and it look

does often look like this idea that

labor is being transferred into the

hands of consumers but wealth production

is being kept in the hands of media

companies and so how we think about what

the E how value is produced how value

get monetized and how value gets

rewarded in a Web 2.0 economy is a

central part of what I think web the

work of convergence culture helps us to

try to understand so here's the story as

of last year right time puts you on the

cover as the person of the year I know

about you but I bought the the issue

that had my picture in the cover um

putting the Wei in the web is on the

cover of Newsweek and the power of us is

on the power of business week and it's

all in the pr pronouns it seems to me

because times cover is really

interestingly ambiguous as is the name

YouTube because in the English language

U is both singular and plural and the

tension I saw in times coverage was

between the idea of YouTube as a space

for individual expression anyone in

America can produce something put it out

there and YouTube is a site for

subcultural expression that it's a site

where different communities involved in

conversations that have produced media

and separate sites now have a Nexus or

Gateway that the media they're producing

can be shared through to my interest as

a cultural studies guy it is the fact

that there are all of these pre-existing

communities that have gr gravitated into

the space of YouTube and are sharing

their media not only among themselves

but with each other and Innovation is

sped up by the flow of these ideas from

one subcultural Community to the next is

what the real excitement about YouTube

has been it is a mixed media hybrid

media space to use a term that Yan

binker talks about in the wealth of

networks he talks about this being a

moment where spaces are shared between

commercial and amateur but also

nonprofit governmental educational

activist all kinds of groups are

producing media sharing media with each

other and the power of a platform like

YouTube is precisely that all of those

those groups are using it in a variety

of different ways and that those

different groups trade ideas with each

other what once had been

compartmentalized into these different

silos is brought together together into

a shared portal and that brings about

really dramatic cultural change the

problem with Web 2.0 companies is they

start to believe that they created all

that participatory culture right they

start to imagine they built this thing

or you know and instead of imagining

that there's a whole history that behind

any of those communities is decade long

history of a push for more participatory

media that fuels the engagement and

participation that something like

YouTube creates so here I have behind me

a graph of Kirk and Spock enjoying a

nice bubble bath together uh and it's an

image from the Star Trek fan world uh

where for 20 plus years going back to

the 1960s fans have been involved in the

production and circulation of fanfiction

including homorotic fan fiction known as

slash which deals with erotic relations

originally between Kirk and Spock now

all the way up through Harry Potter

characters and you know characters from

Supernatural or any other show that you

might want to imagine there is a whole

sub culture writing it hundreds of if

not hundreds of thousands if not

millions of people involved in the

production and circulation of

stories this story this community

historically has been overwhelmingly

female and when I did studies on it 15

years ago it was about 90% female I

think those num the gender gap has

closed a little it's probably about 70

to 80% female writers at the moment but

it's still overwhelmingly female

Community it has a history of producing

these things first by mograph then by

Xerox then by using the web for their

own amateur distribution this community

comes into play because of a story

involving this company fan lip was a

story that sort of broke the summer and

it's sort of an example of the tensions

that are emerged around Web 2.0 fanb was

started by a number of people from the

digital Industries the media Industries

pooling their resources and they wanted

to create a site a web 2.o company

focused on fan fiction and the initial

move was actually a smart one they went

to some of the Lesser known series The

LW being an example they negotiated with

those producers for the rights to create

a a safe zone for fanfiction so

fanfiction is always an illegal gray

area companies claim it violates their

intellectual property they shut it down

this provided a space for people who

wanted to write L word fanfiction to put

their stuff up on the web they ran

contests there was official recognition

all was going fine until fan Liv decided

it wanted to become the general portal

for all fan fiction the web screw

legality screw rights holders we're

simply going to open it up we're going

to recruit the best fans we're going to

invite them inside and we're going to

encourage them to write stuff for us and

we're going to take all of the money

that's generated by eyeballs hitting the

site and we're going to keep it in sign

so we're going to get these writers to

write for us we're not going to do any

Revenue

sharing we're not going to provide them

any legal protection when the rights

holders come crashing down on them we

potentially put a big red sign around

the fan community which up to now has

sort of got this uneasy truce where

they're now most companies turn a blind

eye to fanfiction as long as no one's

making money on and we're moving into a

space where people are going to make

money on it needless to say this didn't

go down well what angered it even

further is this the ad campaign they

used to launch for a a community that's

80 to 90% female the image is that if we

go a corporate version of fanfiction we

will be more muscular that the old

version is weak but the new version is

muscular and

masculine which invited people to look

for example at the board of directors of

this company which were 100% male so

that 100% male board was dealing with a

female community and doing ad campaigns

that reflect almost no awareness of the

gender politics of the space they were

entering into now adding it the fact

that already flowing around the web were

their commercial pitch to rights holders

and the sort of commercial clients which

gave exactly the opposite message is

what they were giving to the fanfiction

world that they were the telling

fanfiction World we're going to P

Empower you we're supporting you we

think this is really powerful and

meanwhile floating around on the

corporate perspectus are all the fan

live action takes place in a highly

customized environment that you control

as with a coloring book players must

stay within the lines restrictive

players terms of service protects your

rights and property moderated scene

missions keeps the story under your

control full monitoring and management

of sis and players automatic profanity

filter completed work is just the first

draft to be polished by the

pros I put over here an image of a

coloring book which I was looking for

coloring book images rather interesting

it has a picture of rker talking to

peard and it says when will I get to be

Captain suggesting that even coloring

books can be used in subversive ways at

least by communities determined to use

them that way but the fan world was just

infuriated by this gap of information

which is easy enough to Trace down your

search engine made it pretty easy for us

to for the fans to see both sides of

that communication fans were using live

Journal they were using blogs they were

using Myspace they were using YouTube to

communicate about this movement and they

were raising they raised a series of

objections including the concern about

who is making money off this and more

deeply this is a community that's

historically understood itself is

involved in a gift economy in which fans

created stuff to give to each other and

the idea that anyone was commodifying

this and making money of it was already

a destruction of the core values there

had been 20 years of debate about

whether Zen should charge money it was

okay to recruit the cost of a Zen uh so

forth and into that blindly comes a

corporation which wants to immediately

generate Revenue off of what fans had

created and so there was enormous anger

over this that generated in the end some

several things happened one was a lot of

backlash against the company and I think

it's really slowed the growth of this

company enjoyed on the other hand when I

talked to Chris Williams at Fan lib a

couple of weeks ago he said they had

about 10,000 subscribers at the present

time now these subscribers seem to be a

mixture of those people entering fandom

for the first time because they

discovered it by this commercial site

and um and fans who were already

disenchanted with the existing fan

community and wanted a place that they

knew there's other fans wouldn't go and

I suspect those two things combined

meant there was a market here for those

people that fan Li tapped but at the

same time it alienated much of the base

of the fanfiction movement and there's a

great deal of concern that it may

endanger the kind of uneasy status of

fanfiction at the present time what's

example of one of a number of Web 2.0

controversies this past year that sort

of reflect the consumers growing

awareness of them their own value as

create cultural creators as cultural

Distributors their own participation

means is has has some importance behind

it and they're beginning to Rally using

all The Social Network Technologies they

have to speak back to companies that

simply want to go in colonize strip mine

whatever we want to call it take their

content turn it into a revenue generator

for them and offer neither be

accountable to these communities nor

offer Revenue back and I think it seems

to me one of the big challenges as we go

forward is how do we think about what

those relationships should look like as

we begin to engage with these new

communities now to understand the story

we need to take a step back and think

about what's going on in terms of

convergence now in the book I use that

the book's title is Convergence culture

and it flies in the face of a largely

technological notion of what we mean by

convergence that is when the industry

talks about convergence most often I it

falls into what I call the Black Box

fallacy that is trying to figure out

which Black Box all the media in our

lives are going to flow through and I

think the reality is that we are going

to use a variety of of medium media

platforms for the foreseeable future

those platforms will be

interconnected but it doesn't follow

that we want a single device single

media device that does everything

something that the confusion of this

world is suggested by this cartoon says

no sir I was not talking on my cell

phone I was watching TV show on my iPod

and the sense of us carrying content

from one platform to another is part of

the world we live in you know but in my

living room I got more black boxes than

never before I also have multiple black

boxes on my body at the present present

time we carry technology around with us

and I think part of the challenge is

moving beyond a technological notion of

convergence to think about convergence

in cultural sense as a world where every

story every image every sound every

relationship plays itself out across the

maximum number of media channels a shift

that's shaped top down by decisions in

corporate boardrooms and bottom up by

decisions made in teenagers bedrooms

decisions that are shaped by the desire

of media companies to be in every

possible media sector and the maximum

touch points with consumers and shaped

by the desire of consumers to have the

media they want where they want it when

they want it in the form they want it

and their willingness to take it there

illegally if it's not provided there

legally and those two things come

together to result in a world where

content spreads really rapidly across

media platforms so this technical idea

of convergence is suggested by this

little device that knify made for

himself which had an iPod a camera a

shaver a

taser a a machine a Swiss army knife a

circular saw a robot arm a guitar a

Pepsi a laser this device in other words

that did everything that kny wanted

looks something like this right that the

the idea of packaging it all together

into the iPhone or some other sort of

device we sort of we reach the point

where these become the digital

equivalent of the Swiss army knife that

every media function we possibly want in

a single device which no one knows how

to use

you know my experience is constantly

taking pictures of my ear and sending to

my entire mailing list you know it's

like we push the wrong buttons we're

startled we grab things the idea of

putting all on the same device seems to

be fundamentally the wrong direction and

I think as things sort themselves out we

will have a better sense of which

devices should serve which functions and

how these things are going to work

together but I think we're at a period

of a lot of clued Technologies literally

on the ground five or six black boxes in

my living room patched together to do

what I want my living room on the other

hand a lot of converged Technologies

which often create confusion for users

and we're sing out how these things fit

together as that's going on though we're

seeing an explosion of what I call Trans

media entertainment in the book I talk

about the Matrix in this regard that is

the Matrix is a story that spread across

three films uh about a dozen anime

shorts about a 20 comic book episodes

that were distributed via the web about

three or four video games and and

massively multiplay player games at the

present time and the information of the

Matrix is dispersed across all of them

Heroes is another example of a very

successful media franchise it is

partially TV show partially comic series

partially a variety of web- based

experiences mobile episodes it'll be a

second television series that fills in

the CRA the cracks between reruns of the

of of um Heroes a lot of stuff going on

Geico's caveman is the The Branding

version of this right starts out as a

television commercial becomes a website

now has generated his own TV sitcom so

that we're seeing that stories spread

across media platforms almost without

regard to technical bearers and that

people seem quite eager to follow these

stories and pursue bits of information

about them across as many media

platforms as possible and that's the

heart of what I mean by convergence when

I talk about convergence culture it's a

cultural logic it's a system of the ways

in which our culture operates all right

second big idea in the book

in a network Society people are

increasingly forming knowledge

communities to pull information and work

together to solve problems they could

not confront individually and we call

this collective

intelligence um this this is a pretty

interesting illustration of it this is a

a a command chart for the Zion

resistance underground movement in the

Matrix movies right and the people who

put it together had to put it together

across all of those media sources that I

talked about right they have to figure

out all the ships who the captains are

what the organizations are who reports

to who all of this is pieced together by

a large group of people pooling

knowledge that's gleamed across a large

number of of of media text this is the

world of the discussion list it's a

world where Pier Levy tells us uh nobody

knows everything everybody knows some

things and what any given member knows

is available to the group as a whole at

a moment's notice on an ad hoc basis if

you ever belong to a discussion list

it's probably true you watch an episode

show you ask a question about it dozens

of people will send answers in and that

knowledge gets shared and it becomes

part of the shared resources of that

particular Community this fundamentally

changes the way we consume culture so I

first started noticing this 16 years ago

when I started following Twin Peaks

online and Twin Peaks was one of those

first shows people talked about were

challenging television shows puzzling

shows in one way or another what was

interesting is the television critics

were saying that Twin Peaks had become

so complicated no one could understand

it and the fans online were saying twin

PS was being dummied down to such a

point that no one was interested in

it why was that well because one critic

in their living room watching the TV

show by themselves could only process so

much information whereas the community

of hundreds of people pulling insights

and knowledge and you know hour by hour

in the week between an episode totally

cracked the code mastered it began

proposing theories and ideas of who

killed more Laura Palmer much more

complex than were offered by Any Given

critic or the show could possibly s fun

we've seen this play out more and more

again that these media trans trans

franchises are much more interesting in

the middle when all the theories are

possible that the end when they have to

close it down because the ordiance keeps

generating ideas that are more

far-reaching and more expand more

interesting by far than a small team of

writers could possibly generate on a

television show and this is tied to

stuff that Steph Dunham Stephen Johnson

has his book everything bad is good for

you which argues that television is in

fact more complex and more demanding

than ever before the argument is it in

fact demands much more of us in our

educational system does and the reason

it can do that is because of these large

scale knowledge communities where people

are working together to process

information and there's a really rich

example in the book of Survivor fandom

as an example of that knowledge

community and how people Crack the Code

figure out who the contestants are on

Survivor before they're announced figure

out where the location is before it's

announced figure out who's boot the

order in which they're booted off all of

this stuff worked out through elaborate

Theory construction and a lot of

investigative work by teams of thousands

of people playing together on the

internet and no no for all the Mystique

about you know Mark Bernett protecting

the secrets of Survivor this community

has totally cracked the code and it's

been out there you know season after

season because there no one can keep

secrets from this large scale knowledge

communities that are emerging all right

third big idea we're seeing the

emergence of a new form of participatory

culture contemporary version of folk

culture is consumers take media in their

own hands reworking its content to serve

their personal Collective interest and

this goes back to fanfiction but it also

goes to Machinima here we have the red

versus blue series and I'm sure most of

you know here as an example Machinima

involves taking game engines creating

digital animations with them the streb

them via the web and red versus blue is

probably the biggest success story to

come out of it but this happening all

around this there are all kinds of

pockets of innovation and

experimentation in our culture that are

generated by consumers taking media in

their own hand and generating new stuff

so here's an example of this I had a I

was looking for a slide to illustrate my

ideas and I searched on the internet

under participatory culture and I found

someone had already done a PowerPoint

slide of my talk uh laying out my basic

ideas so I figured user generate content

I take it fold it back into this talk it

was a better slide than I was going to

generate and it makes the same basic

idea that a participatory culture is one

where they're relatively low barriers

for engagement where there strong

support for sharing creations with

others where there's informal mentorship

in which more experienced people help

newer people learn to master the

technology and the cultural processes

where members believe their

contributions matter and where they care

about others opinions of self themselves

and their work and it's not a world it's

a world where not every member must

contribute but all must believe they're

free to contribute when ready and that

what they contribute will be

appropriately valued and the challenge I

think has been for companies to learn

how to build those principles into their

online presences that are actually at

work in these Grassroots communities

that have go back 20 30 years of History

fandom as a whole goes back to the 19s

so it's been mon developing these

practices over a long period of time and

they're deeply embedded in almost

everything that a fan Community culture

does it's never fully successful at

realizing these goals there conflicts

and feuds and so forth but the ideals

are built into the cultural practices of

these communities and I think companying

to think about what those are as they

begin to imagine building these new

kinds of user generated content

relationships so what do we think of

consumers in this new world these are

words that are popping up are just some

of the words we people are using to talk

about oops the new relationship Loyals

media actives producers inspirational

consumers prosumers influencers

connectors multipliers what all these

words have in common is they represent a

world where the Assumption of

participation governs where everyone

involved in the production of media

today assumes the audience will become

more and more participatory but we can't

agree on the terms of participation even

to try to imagine what the roles are

what the relationships are between

consumers and companies that are

entering into the space so here's an

example of that multiplier sort of

function uh you will recognize this as a

spoof of the popular ad campaign on

television here's another example of the

spoof uh that I think captures a little

bit how people think about companies

these kinds of spoofs are all over all

over the web uh and they and sort of

what's interesting about them not only

do they talk about this but I've seen

PlayStation 2 versus the Wii I've seen

Hillary versus Obama that are using more

or less the same template this is

appropriation right but it's not culture

jamming right it's not while it's

playful about these Brands it's not

trying to rip these Brands apart it's

having a good time with the ad campaign

and what's interesting to me about it is

that we cannot see that without

remembering the original campaign so

while it may be a Grassroots comment on

the campaign that suggests a loss of

control over the brand message from one

point of view from another point of view

this stuff perpetuates the brand message

in very powerful ways it spreads it to

New communities so the work we're doing

with the convergence culture Consortium

this term is on what we call spreadable

media and our argument is we're moving

from a world of sticky media where you

suck everyone in and hold them like a

roach motel to a world of spreadable

media where in fact the media that

spreads creates value and if it doesn't

doesn't spread its dead and it's

spreading may seem out of control on one

level but another level it's generating

new senses of connections it's spreading

meaning and messages it's just a more

complex medology that companies are just

learning to work with it right here's an

interesting example of how this plays

itself out these are a series of Star

Trek uh digital films that are out there

on the web hidden Frontier uh the the

new voyages these are fan produced

Cinema we can trace fan produced Cinema

back to Super movies that goes a long

time these are very interesting though

because if you look closely this episode

this fan movie episode is directed by

Tim Russ who those of you are classic

Trek fans know that he was in fact an

actor in the series it features Nicole

Nichols Walter cunning Tim Russ uh Grace

Lee Whitney christe Crystal Allen and

others the sets are sometimes designed

by set direct set designers from the

original Tru the sound effects and music

are provided by people from the TRU cast

these these are people not this is not

commercially sponsored by Paramount but

Paramount hasn't shut it down and it's

tacitly given approval for the

production of these films by not going

after the various members of the cast

and crew who've chosen to work in it so

and this is a world where check off can

command the ship or Sulu can command the

chip ship where the actors get to have

scenes play out scenes they always

wanted to do in the movies and they're

distributed via the Internet and we're

generated a great deal of Buzz at a time

that Star Trek itself is off the air

right we're in a lull between means Tru

no truck series on the air film on the

horizons this period of time has being

filled by fan generated content that's

hybrid in the sense that it's both

commercially involved and amateur

content working together to produce this

new thing now why would they do it one

reason to do it is because that in fact

this is a training ground and a

recruiting ground for future employees

that the best talent to come out of this

can be sucked back into the

entertainment industry when Star Trek

launches again it will prob no doubt

involve people who are involved in this

Grassroots media production now this guy

Robert Kat a business uh scholar calls

this Wikipedia and it's a nice nice

metaphor to think about what's going on

in this in this regard seemed

far-fetched well same thing happened to

Doctor Who was off the air in England

for almost 15 years when it came back

the people who Run Doctor Who now and it

made it a really hot franchise again

were all people involved in Grassroots

ban activities during the lull time when

it was off the air so this is a kind of

value production these communities are

involved with uh with these companies

now here's the story of the fire of the

brown coats many of you know Firefly

Josh Weeden show was taken off the air

there was rallying point it was turned

into film Serenity the far the brown

coats were out there in front

publicizing this film every inch of the

way the studio pulled back its

promotional budget because the

Grassroots promotion was so strong and

the media coverage of the brown coats

were what made most people hear about

Serenity as a film when all of it was

over the company then turned around

Brown and sent a CE and the cyst letter

to the far the brown coats and wanted to

collect money for the illegal use of

images from the show on their t-shirts

and posters they used to publicize the

movie The Fan organization took a

logical step they used the web they

built they collected all of the hours

that their members had contributed to

promoting the film and they sent an

invoice back to the studio for billable

hours the studio took a l look at that

looked at what they were going to charge

them and and sort of conceded public

that in fact the fans had generated more

wealth for the company than they were

going to collect in uh license fees for

the circulation of these photographs and

apologized for the

miscalculation right but this is this

sort of raises this question of how do

we think about value in this new

environment right that the the model the

old model uh was that fans depreciated

the value of this work by seizing

control over it by by running it down by

violating copyright I want to argue then

brands in fact appreciate the work in

the double sense right that they both

appreciate it because they like it and

they appreciate it because they're

generating greater publicity around that

they've increased the value of it in an

economic sense they appreciate the value

of this work through their activity and

so it's about recognizing the kinds of

values that emerge in that space so this

is the new model of consumers if the old

consumer were predictable and stayed

where you told them the new consumers

are migratory showing a declining

loyalty to networks or media media but

not necessarily to shows right they will

chase a franchise across every possible

media partner they scan the environment

looking for interesting stuff when they

find stuff they really like they drill

down deep and that's the could good way

of describing this new Behavior if old

consumers are isolated individuals the

new consumers are more socially

connected and this is U this image show

it's a little dark in here but it shows

Spider-Man and Black and the and the

black widow um sort of looking at each

picture they took on the cell phone

camera at ComicCon but I think it sort

of captures this moment where they're

there to perform and to be seen to share

their media with other people whole

range of relationships but they social

relationships all the talk for the last

decade's been about personalized media I

want to argue we are living in a world

now of socialized media in the sense

that it's about social networks and the

ways people consume media within social

communities and we need to make that

adjustment if the work of old consumers

was once silent and invisible the new

consumers are now noisy and public this

is an image of a a Meetup of fans of the

Matrix in Shula train station in Tokyo

where these fans restage the Burly man

ball brawl uh there in the train station

people captured it with cell phone

cameras it went out via flicker to the

world I got picked up by blogs this

picture I got off boing boing so it

became part of the story of the

circulation of the Matrix films in Asia

where this span fan organized event no

one in the production company had

anything to do with it it's one of many

outpourings of fan report which have

increased visibility around the launch

of New Media

products if old consumers were seen as

compliant the new consumers are

resistant taking media in their own

hands this is the Harry Potter Alliance

which is a new Organization for fan

activism and basically it's the argument

is if if Harry Potter taught a

generation of kids how to read and write

can it also help teach them how to

become activist and fight for what they

believe in the central theme of the

Harry Potter books is about young people

battling evil questioning adult

Authority going out and changing the

world they're trying to harness that to

focus on human rights issues around the

world and the result has been a really

powerful organization that I think is

generating a lot of

interest so in this environment then

what we've got are places where media

mass media content gets appropriated

bottom up content emerges around it and

then those Trends get folded back into

the media economy so here we've got an

image from one of the action figure

movies that was produced by G I write

about in the book called Ethan Mather

uh and and he ma basically created a

series of spoofs of Star Wars using Star

Wars action figures Distributing over

the we we've got Lego site that has that

has a Star Wars C fan Cinema on it and

we've got this is the Skeletor show not

that you can tell it but the Skeletor

show is a you can find on YouTube

someone has redubbed old He-Man episodes

in a kind of smartass kind of snarky way

and it's really a lot of fun uh the sort

of re redubbing that goes on in of these

old cartoons and I put at the bottom

Robot Chicken and I suggest that

something like Robot Chicken we could

trace its genealogy back to a whole wave

of young people who were making films

and photo montages using action figures

and spoofing the content of their CH of

their cold childhood that fed into the

production of a fairly successful comedy

series and I'm a big fan of Robot

Chicken so we see that as B grassroot

stuff bubbling to the top we can see

something similar occurring when you

think about anime's entry into the

American Marketplace which anime is now

one of the leading cultural exports of

Japan a huge Money Maker 20 years ago

you couldn't give it away in the

American Marketplace what changed was

illegal copying amateur dubbing and

subtitling websites that educated people

about anime tested the market for

different genres and basically almost

every successful anime property that's

entered the marketplace did so after it

had been here illegally for a while and

generated buzz and that the fans have

stopped circulating the the illegal

copies as soon as commercial copies

became available and have actually

actively supported the commercial

production of this into the marketplace

so it's a place where the testing of the

market occurred on the on sort of the

illegal side of fan activity and then

the support of the market spread to

these companies that enter into it and

the result is been anime is a really

important influence in our culture today

soldier boy is a beautiful example of

this we there was a joke about Crank

that because we did a music video here

at MIT uh with my students produced of

Crank That Soldier story but the Soulja

Boy story is this guy 15-year-old guy

who puts on his blog I'm going to change

turn the music industry on its head

you're not going to believe it now but a

year from now you will and a year and a

half later he's at the the BET Music

Awards is one of the top performers

right and he did it by using the web

using his blog using Myspace using music

distribution software using you know

music YouTube he generated boss and in

part he did it by encouraging people to

appropriate and perform Crank that so

that there are hundreds of videos of

Crank That of all kinds of groups

performing it all of which spread the

word about soldja boy and pave the way

for his Commercial Success so here's a

guy that was came from nowhere to being

one of the top selling artists uh you

know in recent recent weeks because of

his ability to harness this bottomup

energy of consumers the same energy the

same platforms support the continual

production of Grassroots Music so here's

wizard Rock which is a form of pop music

generated by fans of Harry Potter and

there bands like Harry and the Potters

uh Darko and the D and the Mal boys you

know who have songs like Voldemort One

Stop The Rock or my dad's Rich your

dad's dead great songs great songs the

capture this World of Harry Potter and

there are now more than 200 wizard rock

bands that are using Myspace as their

distribution platform and they're

producing whole albums and spreading

them they have no desire to break into

the commercial media space for the most

part they're simply creating a

Grassroots distribution of music that

allows them to Comm to say what they do

I was an incredible concert of some of

these groups in the storyville district

of New Orleans this summer and this jazz

club was completely taken over by wizard

Rock performers and people you know

their fans so that it's it's really

created its own kind of cultural

phenomenon that's not on the radar by

and large of the commercial music

industry here's foury monsters an

independent film which is used this

publicizing itself through second life

is has set up an interesting system

where people can register to desire to

see the film and local area when they

get X number of local patrons they go to

independent movie theater and say would

you show the film for the week because

we can show you we got about 500 people

in your city who want to buy tickets and

you'll sell out for the first couple of

nights anyway uh if we show this film

and that's helped this independent film

get into many many markets around the

country it's a successful strategy which

is cooperating between fans and

producers so we're at a moment in time

in which we see this two sides of a

divide on the one hand there I I this is

a debate that I think is going on in

almost all media companies between the

prohibitionist who want to hold on to

tight control of intellectual property

if anything want to extend control of Ip

in response to the digital media and the

collaboration is to want to open up a

space for people to for fans and

consumers to actively participate in the

production of value around that

intellectual property and it's the

struggle between those the

contradictions between those are what

makes it really difficult for us for

consumers to make sense of what role

they're supposed to play in this new

culture it's not that consumers are

confused about IP it's companies are

confused because companies can't decide

where they want to harness the marketing

potential of all these participatory

culture fors we've been talking about or

whether they want to M way they want to

hold on to their old model in the face

of the challenge those things represent

to them and I think that's the challenge

we need to think about as we go forward

and the poster boy of all this debate

might be Steven coar and I want to end

with talking about step for a minute I'm

a big fan of the co be report and he's

someone who really gets Web 2.0 right

he's had Min number of contests this is

the blue the green screen contest he did

around the Star Wars kid where he took

you know Star Wars kid video reenacted

it himself created a green screen

encourag people to remix make their own

versions of it distributed via YouTube

get it on to the show he did one more

recently where he created a whole

routine which is only funny when you

anticipate how it was going to be re

remixed by people so he has this mock

interview and encouraged people to

recontextualize what he said and send

out versions of it constantly generating

this level of interest of course most of

us know about Co bear because of the

Washington Press Club dinner where he

spoke truth to power he he made fun of

bush like 10 feet away from the guy on

na on National Television but you didn't

probably hear about it on C-Span which

is where it first aired you probably

heard about it via YouTube where it

circulated very wise widely and

generated a great deal of Interest among

people the mainstream media missed the

story The YouTube Community discovered

and put it out there and people talked

about it and naturally cpan had it taken

down off YouTube because after all what

why should people be watching cpan

content uh but you know nevertheless not

so fast the co Bear's ver the co the the

book on print version of the book on

tape version of it is one of the top

selling spoken word uh albums on iTunes

at the present time so it's took great

root in the culture it generated a great

deal of

Interest W coar took took aim Wikipedia

and kind of playful thing where he

encouraged people to go on Wikipedia and

change the entry about elephants so if

you look at this entry closely it says

the amount of African elephants has

tripled the number of African elephants

that has tripled in the last four months

the number of African elephants has

tripled recently according to Steven col

right the whole entry got taken over and

I talked to J to Jimmy well Wales the

Wikipedia guy about and he described how

they had to organize the wikipedians to

defend the Integrity of information on

the elephant site and to calculate where

those crazy coar fans were going to go

and tamper with their data and they had

to figure out when it was going to rerun

because they knew there'd be another

wave of this stuff and it was like this

information war between the coar fans

and the wikipedians over

elephants right fascinating stuff great

deal of fun when you think about the

ways that just old media playing with

New Media and creative ways so in the

midst of all of this what happens you

guys buy YouTube and the their the

parent company for this Co beer show

sues Google to have all of their that

content taken down including hundreds of

segments from the colar report so it's a

beautiful example of one side of the

company getting this new world embracing

that collaborationist logic seeking new

value by tapping the energies of fans

and the other side of the company

holding on to this prohibitionist model

of shutting down intellectual property

riging it in and not allowing media to

be spread and circulate and generate new

meanings and new associations and I

think that's the struggle so on the one

hand I began with the struggle of user

drained content and the tension between

the gift economy of participatory

culture and the commodity culture of of

of media companies and we end with this

tension between media companies over

this question of collaboration versus

prohibition and they represent two sides

of a kind of series of tensions that I

think are we are struggling with as we

imagine what a more particip

culture might look like and as we

understand what the long-term

implications of so-called Web 2.0 might

be so with that I'm going to open up for

questions H so one of the things in a

lot of these participatory culture that

I've heard and I believe this actually

originated with Yahoo is this sort of 1%

rule that is that in any sort of large

participatory Community actually only

about 1% of people participate and based

on the communities that I've been part

of that seems to line up about right it

seems to vary between somewhere between

a quar per and 2 to 3% it is it your

opinion that that's a sort of relative

truth that is that's just sort of human

nature or is there or you can you

identify any sort of salient features in

the communities that succeed in getting

substantially different participatory

well I don't think it's an inable truth

I it's not the law of gravity it's

probably not even More's law you know

it's it's someplace you know clo it's a

social variable I definitely think

there's always going to be people people

with different levels of intensity of

involvement in any on any participatory

culture but I'd say for example the

traditional world of the fanzine those

ratios were much the the ratio of

participation is significantly higher I

think there are other communities that I

think the ratio of participation is

significantly higher and there're ones

that have really built in mechanisms to

encourage participation I and I I the

one of the reasons I'm I'm involved in

the MacArthur Foundation on work on new

media literacy is because I think it's

about empowering people to feel like

they can participate and their

participation matters we talk there a

lot about the participation Gap since

the participation Gap is different from

the digital divide the digital divide

would had to do with access to

technology if we look statistically

we've largely closed the digital devant

that is most kids in America have access

to network computing through schools and

public libraries if not through their

home there's some Pockets the Indian

reservations being a very notorious one

where but many of those have never had a

telephone system that worked let alone

an internet system that works and I

think there's some big problems we need

to address there but the participation

Gap is modeled by something like Pew

Foundation which looked at the Pew

Center for internet and American Life

found that 57% of teens online had

produced media content and about a third

of them had circulated media content

beyond their immediate friends and

family that's a pretty compelling

statistic this is suggested

participation is first of all partially

generational that the kids who've grown

up with this technology are more likely

to participate more likely to generate

content of their parents because their

parents numbers would be significantly

lower than it but the 43% who aren't

producing content right now or the 70

77% who aren't Distributing content

right now should pose us to also

question all right what's going on with

those people how do we generate a level

of Engagement and participation with it

is it based on familiarity with skills

and exposure to kind of defining

experiences which allow them to make it

over that pump or the ways that

leadership in these communities can help

bridge that Gap to me it's consistent

with say studies that show if Art

Museums open their doors free to the

public it's still mostly upper middle

class people who go because there's a

sense of entitlement about the art

museum and many of these spaces we take

for granted it's okay to post stuff not

every everyone feels that and I think

that's that's one of the factors we need

to look at it's also of course the case

that not everyone wants to be totally

active all the time we definitely want

to still consume good content made by

other people it's not about displacing

professional entertainers with amateurs

contrary to what Andrew Keane talks

about in his book The Cult of the

amateur it's about building a community

where wom feels like they could

contribute if they were able to and

building a space where everyone could be

bad and get

better and what's important about these

spaces is in fact that if you have only

professional stuff and you've got am and

you've got stuff that doesn't circulate

how do you get up here which you've got

stuff down here at all levels that's

good bad and indifferent and you sort of

say I could do better than that I'm not

quite as good as that that then people

began to have an incentive to

participate so the question of do people

see the range of what's produced or they

only see the best I think is actually a

variable to think about as well as how

what's the in what's the sort of social

mechanism that pull people up the other

thing we're discovering is that

participation does not equal diversity

so you look at this John McMurray has

done some research on YouTube if you

look at the top 100 post on YouTube the

most popular post overwhelmingly created

by white middle class males

right that it's the minorities

participate in YouTube they distribute

content but from the mechanisms of

majoritarian the majoritarian mechanisms

that move content up in that system

results that those things that are most

like the majority of users move to the

top and those things that don't look

like that are weight to the bottom and

so how do you get a point where there's

enough diversity in that top tier that

people feel like their contributions

matter if if you were a black teenager

would you feel looking at YouTube as it

constituted today day that your content

was welcome there or would you feel

looking at that top if you looked at the

top 100 and saw nothing by black

kids would you feel like there was a

place that as a black kid you were

allowed to come and that's I think the

fundamental problem it's a social and

cultural question but it's tied to

things like the mechanisms by which you

weigh and measure audience feedback and

the systems we have tagging right now

are based on the Assumption of the

wisdom of the crowd which is good up to

a certain point it's good for finding

quote the right answer or finding the

center of opinion it may not be good for

to ensuring diversity and therefore

enabling participation and those may be

very different questions we actually

have to think about yeah so this is more

of a legal question so maybe there's no

good answer but would Paramount lose

future rights to say start they live too

many of the US generated movies get

distributed or is that not even well

conventional wisdom is that they would

in a sense it's like if you got a piece

of land and you let the neighbor kids

walk past it for 25 years and you sue

one of them for trespassing you probably

don't have the right to do that you're

the courts are going to throw it out

because you've seated your right to that

property in that way and that's the

logic that I think companies have

started to use now what a number of

people in the legal Community are trying

to look at is is there a way to give

blanket permit for nonprofit

non-commercial uses of your content

something like Creative Commons that

would enable the fan generated stuff to

go on and not threaten copyright it's

given that Paramount doesn't want

you know some other Studio coming and

making a Star Trek movie that's their

biggest concern is it actually hurt by

allowing amateurs to make movies that's

debatable and I would argue that more

value is created than lost in that

system but the way the law currently is

operating I'm not a lawyer so I'm take

all this with grain of salt but the way

the law currently is operated it's very

hard for them to differentiate between

those two layers of use that said I

think in fact much more open

appropriation takes place from

commercial competitors who know exactly

what the gentleman's agreement is know

where to draw the line have lawers

protecting them then are comfortably

going on with the amateurs in the

audience and they end up and ironically

enough that they're less likely to hold

up in court an attack on a real critic

of the company a culture Jam or adbuster

kind of critic than a fan because it's

fairly easy to show that the the

adbuster took their content and made it

a focus of critical commentary the fan

who likes it the courts have had much

more difficulty seeing that as a form of

critical commentary despite the fact

that legally critical doesn't mean

negative it's nevertheless in people's

mind it's so associated with that notion

of criticism that it's actually proven

hard for courts to see that someone who

valued what you produced and or

sympathetic to it might actually be

involved in an act of criticism in my

world if you write an essay about

Shakespeare you're a Critic even if you

like Shakespeare and I think most people

who write about Shakespeare like

Shakespeare but it's it's a confusion in

the way we think about the law but

either way it could be f by Creative

Commons kind of license I think A

Creative Commons kind of license might

fix a lot of that I don't know that I'm

not seeing the studios lying up to sign

Creative Commons license what I am

seeing is an open acknowledgement from

some studio spokesman that they're

turning a blind eye to a lot of the fan

creation because they're starting to

appreciate the value and the movement is

toward engagement as the model we

thinking about how value is produced

among television viewers we're moving

from an era of appointment television to

engagement television and that means

they want to find ways in the short run

to figure out who's engaged doesn't mean

they're not limit so a site like TV

links which was an amazing site where

you get hundreds of television shows

around the world you could click on and

watch all the episodes of it because

people had uploaded them the guy got

arrested in England two weeks ago and

the site's gone so they're thing they

limits to what's going on uh but that I

think there's a tolerance right now as

companies are trying to figure out

what's going to work they'll go after an

Appster they go after TV links where

there's actual content being exchanged

but then remix stuff seems to culate

fairly openly at the moment and we see

far fewer ceasing the CIS letters for

that all over the place over here then I

have a question about your take on

community journalism it seems like the

thing to do in in these trying times in

journalism is for a local newspaper to

set up some sort of uh Community page

where people can you know submit

comments and even write stories do you

feel as though this will change the face

of Journalism and ultimately save these

local newspapers or do you think it's

just kind of a passing trend well I

think I think we're I think it's going

to help I mean I I I think the newspaper

is here to stay I wouldn't put any bad

on the future of any given newspaper I

think the the trends are right now in

two directions one is we're moving to

the point where most Americans get their

news from National sources rather than

local sources so more people get news

from USA Today New York Times Wall

Street Journal Christian Science monitor

than get news from their local newspaper

or they get it from from the web or they

get it from some other source I think

that that's a change that's going to

continue and what it probably means is

we're going to start to see in an area

like ours the Boston paper the

Providence paper the Hartford paper will

all three of those survive probably not

long term I think you'll see in the

great megalopolis the consolidation of

those things the reverse has been

hyperlocal and this is where user

generated content actually does make a

lot of sense the P Publications people

are most invested in right now is the

stuff that really just covers the local

community and covers it well and that's

where harnessing the power of everyday

citizens can make a huge difference in

terms of increasing the kinds of

coverage that we can provide and that's

a lot of what we're interested in the

center for future Civic media trying to

figure out how we harness citizen

journalism how we create new relations

between governments and and citizens and

the sad thing is right now in Boston

it's very hard to find out who the

candidates are for a Cambridge election

because we're caught between globe's

tendency to want to go

National and Hyper and not much coverage

filling in the Gap gen in Cambridge

because we've got a good local paper but

we're not still able to find out who the

candidates are for election and who what

they stand for so and I think I think

it's a serious challenge in the ways

information is operating how to figure

out how we get there and citizen based

stuff the old League of Women Voters

sort of questionnaires have historically

filled in the Gap that's not a new trend

that's an old Trend and the web is an

effective platform for doing more of

that kind of thing so it surprises me if

you go to the candidates for local

office you see the equivalent of a

brochure and no real imagine intive use

of social network software to really

begin to communicate with local voters

and I think there's a lot we need to

understand about how we can use this new

media to convey news but yeah I I I

think I think it won't save the

newspaper but I think it will I think

that the uses of it that will make a

huge difference in communities and long

term there's just but I think long term

there's going to be a closing down of a

lot of papers before this is all all

over with over okay uh once again can uh

thank you Henry Jenkins forging a talk

[Applause]