One of the ways in which the Internet has become so central to contemporary media is through the way in which its symbiotic relationship with media culture has offered audiences participatory opportunities. The history of the take-up of these opportunities shows how the marginal possibilities offered by the net for audiences to interact with media is now refashioning the whole enterprise of what Kellner above terms ‘Big Media’.
As audiences have become ‘users’ and user-generated content has started to become a real competitor to traditional media the impact of the Internet on traditional media institutions is stronger than even Poster and Kellner above might have predicted ten years ago. As we will see below these developments dovetail with the claims and practices of ‘Web 2.0’ in ways that suggest that contemporary developments in media are at the heart of powerful forces for change across state and corporate sectors.
The growth of the blogosphere, the impact of peer to peer music distribution and the explosion of YouTube in 2006 have all challenged the foundations of mass media industries. The traditional gatekeepers of culture, the filters of news and guardians of quality have all had to adjust to the realities of participatory culture.
On the one hand, this seamless lattice of mediation can be seen as the extension of mass mediation into more and more of our time, more and more of our space. On the other, it also brings within our reach the possibility of becoming producers in our own right. Every SNS post, or conversation in a chat room, every home page and downloaded MP3 playlist facilitates the individual communicating in a pseudo public mode of address. What is clear is that a great deal of web use facilitates a feeling of participation in media space.
Users are here able to participate in the space of media representation. The conversations, interactions and arguments about TV that active audience researchers have studied are here enacted in numerous interactive chat rooms linked to the primary information based parts of the site. For instance, in the UK in 2000 Channel Four’s biggest hit programme was the formatted Reality Gameshow Big Brother. Demand for access to the chat rooms to talk to the recently evicted member of the household far outstripped the ability of the servers to keep track. ‘Overflow rooms’ were filled with viewers eager to discuss the latest episode with one another.
Significantly the climactic moment of the entire first UK series occurred in the daytime and was therefore seen first by viewers to the programme’s live webcams in a moment already spoken of as a breakthrough for UK web use. This desire to ‘be part of it’, to continue the moment of the text through its constant reiteration and circulation has a great deal in common with a tradition of work in media and cultural studies around fan cultures (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983; Barker 1989; Jenkins 1992).
Certainly, the web is the place to go to find any aspect of fan culture it is possible to imagine, the sites are out there. This focus on the ‘fan’ as New Media co-creator has been particularly compelling in the recent work of Henry Jenkins (2006). Jenkins has traced the relationships between active fan communities and media producers to analyse the radical shifts between producers and consumers that underpin twenty-first-century media markets. In an essay (2002) based on Pierre Lévy’s avowedly Utopian ideal of ‘collective intelligence’ Jenkins argued that new media offered ‘new tools and technologies that enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content’, and that these tools led to ‘a range of subcultures that promote Do-It-Yourself media production’. The affordances of the web to fans and DIY culture enthusiasts all coincide with the era of ‘transmediality’, ‘economic trends encouraging the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demanding more active modes of spectatorship’.
As media markets fragment producers seek to maximize audiences and revenue by repurposing texts across as many platforms as possible. This distributed form of storytelling and media production demands ‘more active modes of spectatorship’ argues Jenkins, as we navigate between e.g. movie, DVD, online mash ups and computer games. Jenkins suggests that these trends are altering ‘the way media consumers relate to each other, to media texts, and to media producers’ (Jenkins 2002). In the book of Convergence Culture (2006) by Jenkins develops these arguments suggesting that ‘convergence’ is not a technological process but a feature of audience behavior it is us who are ‘converging’. In turn these processes are reflected in the kind of texts that facilitate an ongoing involvement with the storyworld; Jenkins cites The Matrix trilogy as the prototypical transmedial text inviting audiences into engagements that require puzzling out ambiguities, sharing readings and comparing notes across film, game, animation and web.
Jenkins argues that:
It is clear that new media technologies have profoundly altered the relations between media producers and consumers. Both culture jammers and fans have gained greater visibility as they have deployed the web for community building, intellectual exchange, cultural distribution, and media activism. Some sectors of the media industries have embraced active audiences as an extension of their marketing power, have sought greater feedback from their fans, and have incorporated viewer generated content into their design processes. Other sectors have sought to contain or silence the emerging knowledge culture. The new technologies broke down old barriers between media consumption and media production. The old rhetoric of opposition and cooptation assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content and where there were enormous barriers to entry into the marketplace, whereas the new digital environment expands their power to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media products, (Jenkins, 2002).
It is clear that new media technologies have profoundly altered the relations between media producers and consumers. Both culture jammers and fans have gained greater visibility as they have deployed the web for community building, intellectual exchange, cultural distribution, and media activism. Some sectors of the media industries have embraced active audiences as an extension of their marketing power, have sought greater feedback from their fans, and have incorporated viewer generated content into their design processes. Other sectors have sought to contain or silence the emerging knowledge culture. The new technologies broke down old barriers between media consumption and media production. The old rhetoric of opposition and cooptation assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content and where there were enormous barriers to entry into the marketplace, whereas the new digital environment expands their power to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media products, (Jenkins, 2002).
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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