Cultural Divergence

I happened to catch an excellent To the Best of Our Knowledge program on our local NPR station last evening. It was an interview with Henry Jenkins, the founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program, who has written a new book, Convergence Culture, in which he addresses from a scholarly perspective the fundamental cultural shift that underlies the whole new media phenomenon. While baby boomers like me still draw boundaries around “professional” media, and take for granted its traditionally assigned roles of author and reader, our kids are becoming more comfortable with story telling that makes the reader a participant in an ongoing, free-form game, one in which the player needs to collaborate with others to find clues outside of the original medium of the story. He uses the examples of "The Matrix" and the television series, "Lost", in which the many threads of a story may lead to multiple conclusions about what is actually going on. Followers of the story either stumble upon or learn from others how to find key clues to the story that are hidden on secret web pages, or (in the case of “Lost”) in what sometimes appear to be “commercials” planted in the shows.

This breakdown (or mash-up?) of media types has already extended beyond popular culture, and it is already changing the business of publishing and distributing content. More books are being released online and edited with the help of self-appointed contributors before ever making it into print, like Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad. Media professionals compete with amateur authors for mindshare, bandwidth, and even advertising dollars. It’s becoming more difficult to define what actually even constitutes a news article these days, since on many sites the author’s contribution serves merely to start the discussion, and the real interesting action is going on in the string of comments growing organically at the bottom of the screen. Many years ago, news publishers in every city in the US built impressive downtown buildings to symbolize the solid foundation of their prominent role within the civic discourse. The symbol for today’s media moguls should more appropriately be the surfboard.