Jenkins' introduction is about the various ways our media is changing. The way we access it, what it means to us, the services we use, and the conglomeration of multiple media are all topics he covers. His take-home point is that businesses need to learn to keep up or face "declining goodwill and diminished revenues."
There are many implications in the digital age for what both Jenkins is talking about. Almost all of the media, services, content that Jenkins refers to can and is digitized. Video, images, text, conversation, and more can be converted into a digital form and let loose into the world of the Third Order of Order. There may be no unifying device, or "black box" that all of the media is centralized through, but there is a central platform that all of it is stored on, a central source that more and more devices are able to access. That platform is the home of the Third Order, the internet. Cell phones, computers, game consoles, and the giant stack of black boxes Jenkins refers to can mostly all interface with the internet. More consistently today the services of yesterday are being hosted online and streamed to the world.
A statement Jenkins makes near the end caught my eye, and it would probably give Weinberger a fit. "There will
be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). If everything is miscellaneous, the idea of a black box should never be to put everything in order. Weinberger might argue that this convergence our culture is experiencing would benefit from being miscellanized, let loose on the internet to be tagged, reordered, and subject to the Third Order. Essentially while companies are trying to keep up with the ways media is converging, they might consider the miscellaneous and not amalgamation into a single black box.
I agree that the Black Box is, as Jenkins described it, a fallacy. The idea that we will be using a singular device (mobile or not) to access all the content out there faces two important hurdles. Simple rules of economics and more advanced concepts pertaining to media consumption show this.
ReplyDeleteFrom an economic standpoint, a single Black Box is very very unlikely. Take Apple products as an example. Everyone got the iPhone. Great product, but there was competition. Even if the iPhone was everything to everyone, its popularity would cause Apple to become much slower in responding to consumer needs and as a result, a smaller group could slice off bits and pieces of the market with a different Black Box.
More importantly, consumption of media is not a function of technology. That is, we don't consume media, be it news, text, video, or audio, because we have a Black Box, rather we get the Box to consume the media. A new or different Box might serve this purpose better or in a different way, and consumers will then own two.
The take home is that Black Box ideas seem to say the technology is enabler. Maybe, years ago, but more than ever before, it is the desire an individual has to be connected, that creates our digital age.
Your post illustrates you have the gist of Jenkins, but I would've liked a few more specifics, particularly about some of his key terms/concepts. It'll be useful to have yourself a working definition of participatory culture and convergence culture for sure. I like your (dis)connection between W and J, and I think J makes a good point on this front. I'd be curious to see the 2 of them talk it out.
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