August 23rd, 2010
“Media convergence impacts the way we consume media.” (14).
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.
Black Box Fallacy
Jenkins coined the “Black Box Fallacy” in response to the common argument that “all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go)” (14). He goes on to cite a 202 Cheskin Research report that states that whereas the prevailing thought was one convergence and everything merging into one device, the reality is that we are seeing more divergence with many devices. Jenkins even discusses his own living room entertainment that includes television, cable box, VCR, DVD player, digital recorder, sound system, game system, and a mass of video tapes. Read the rest of this entry »
August 21st, 2010
“Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (14).
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.
OVC as a Medium
As I’ve discussed in the passed, while my research on the online video conversation (OVC) focuses on students’ use of the communication tool Viddler in the classroom, the study and the topic have little to do with Viddler. It is merely a tool that offers certain features that are beneficial to the OVC; it does not create it. Even through the course of this research, various tools and technologies are beginning to offer such features as the ability to comment within the timeline of an online video. As Henry Jenkins states, “[H]istory teaches us that old media never die–and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content…” (13). Regardless of whether Viddler persists, the phenomenon that is the OVC is not dependent on it or any other tool; it refers more to a method and a medium through which we communicate. Read the rest of this entry »
August 18th, 2010
Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power o the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. (2)
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.
Media Convergence
Jenkins defines media convergence as “[T]he flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2). He is in part discussing media (mediums) such as Web, FtF, still image, etc. and also media as in the news media. This definition refers to content that might begin, for example, as a still image that is distributed via the web and might later be downloaded and used in someone’s video, which might then be posted in a different location. Similarly, once an image or video is publicly accessible, the news (or other) media industry could conceivably obtain it and use it for a given purpose, thus (re)distributing it to a certain area or even internationally. In this example, none of the instances are really using the same or original image; it is repurposed, remediated, and transformed in some manner with each iteration. Read the rest of this entry »
May 28th, 2010
McLuhan, M. (1997). Media research: technology, art, communication: Routledge.
“The effect of media, like their “message,” is really in their form and not in their content” (10).
“The spectator or reader must now be co-creator” (12).
In Myth and Mass Media, McLuhan discusses language and mass media in regard to the making of myth. While this particular essay’s topic does not directly relate to my research, McLuhan discusses some concepts foundational to his later essays, and by extension my study.
“If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness” (6).
The Online Video Conversation (OVC), in this sense can be seen as a new language, a new codification of experience. Additionally, those that use the OVC are creating new work habits, by their very use of the tool. Read the rest of this entry »