Convergence Culture - An Introduction

"The centralised, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the twentieth century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment ... (and) have died on the barbed wire of technological change" (Jenkins, 2008 pp.13)

This quote, from science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling, is broken down and put to good use by Jenkins as he attempts to describe the process of convergence. Contrary to the somewhat downbeat opinion of Sterling, Jenkins uses this as an opportunity to declare that only the "tools we use to access media content" become obsolete and replaced, calling these particular tools "delivery technologies" (ibid.) It is at this point we are given a definition of what is meant by the term "delivery technology" and how it interacts with media as content.

Delivery technology is defined as being the physical medium used to convey media content, for example a CD being the physical medium used to convey recorded sound. Media as content is described as evolving depending on the medium used to convey it. Continuing with the example of recorded sound then, we track its evolution from vinyl to MP3 via 8-track and CD along the way. Applying Jenkins' logic to this, the sound remains the same, only the delivery technology used to access the media has changed. This evolution has in turn also enabled greater accessibility, as it is much easier now to gain access to music via MP3 compared with vinyl records. According to Jenkins then, "old media are not being displaced, their functions are shifted by the introduction of new technologies" (2008 pp.14).

Jenkins continues in a similar vein, introducing what he calls the Black Box Fallacy to contradict the old idea of convergence, which foresaw the development of a central hub that did everything for the user. In this, he simply makes the statement that we now have far more black boxes than previously envisaged by what was previously understood by convergence. This "fallacy" also backs him up when he makes the argument that convergence is not simply just driven by technological development but also "alters the relationships between existing technologies" (2008 pp. 15) as the multitude of new "black boxes" need to be designed with backwards functionality in mind so they can work with the existing ones.



Jenkins, H (2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press)