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The new media landscape

I've finished Henry Jenkins' 'Convergence Culture' and need to think about it a bit before uploading some notes. In the meantime, here's a useful out-take from the book - a point by point breakdown of the modern media landscape. Might be of use in terms of building connections with Phil's Home Interaction Research Cluster.

Corporate Friends

Wade Roush has an interesting piece in Technology Review about the way MySpace is changing as corporations move onboard and attempt to use its networks for advertising and marketing. Roush has championed social networking in the past. But he's now worried that sns' potential for democratic communication will go out the window as more products and multinationals get their own MySpaces and declare themselves your friend. Here's a key quote:

"The company interprets the idea of a 'profile' so broadly that real people end up on the same footing as products, movies, promotional campaigns, and fictional characters - not exactly the conditions for a new flowering of authentic personal expression."

Here's another:

"In fact, MySpace can be viewed as one huge platform for "personal product placement" - one different from big-media-style product placement only in that MySpace members aren't paid for their services. There's nothing new, of course, about word-of-mouth marketing. What's sad about MySpace, though, is that the large supply of fake 'friends,' together with the cornucopia of ready-made songs, videos, and other marketing materials that can be directly embedded in profiles, encourages members to define themselves and their relationships almost solely in terms of media and consumption."

Nicholas Carr has a good riff on this on Rough Type - he puts it in the context of digi-utopian rhetoric about the net flattening hieararchies and creating more open networks:

"We do see evidence of this flattening effect all around us today. And yet what MySpace shows us is that the ultimate consequence may be very different from that imagined by the digital utopianists. Putting individuals and corporations on "an equal footing" cuts both ways, as Roush shows. The big story may not be that the Net gives individuals the power of corporations, but that it gives corporations the power of individuals. What is the marketer's dream but to have a product speak to each of us intimately, as a friend? In being "reduced to packages of information," are we simply making ourselves easier to parse and to control? Are we the ones who are being flattened?"

It seems to me that what Roush call 'personal product placement', people defining themselves and their relationships in terms of media and consumption, has been part of blogging for a while now. It's not just a MySpace thing...

The media filtering that people do on blogs is also a kind of identity construction. Now, when that kind of thing happens in a personal fanzine, when a self-defined 'loser' collages a more active identity from the media around them, it's seen as a good thing. When it happens on MySpace - well, I guess it depends on the kinds of relationship you can set up with products and companies.

Think I need to think about this some more. (btw - the pic is by Richard Thompson and is from Technology Review)

Henry Jenkins

So I'm trying to get my head/notes together for the first meeting of Phil's Home Interaction research cluster next week. This means trying to pull together ideas from the various books/blogs I've been reading. 

One key ref I need to get on top of is Henry Jenkins - probably the key researcher into fan cultures. I've ordered his new book - Convergence Culture - which may take a while to arrive. It sounds like the most useful recent attempt to draw links between fan cultures and the whole participatory media thing...

In the meantime, Jenkins has a blog - it began with an intro to 'Convergence Culture'. He did a quick summary of the basic ideas for Vodafone's webzine Receiver. The book has provoked a lot of discussion online - there's a lengthy three part review by Randy Picker on the Chicago Uni Law School Faculty blog - also a useful interview with Jenkins on Big Shiny Thing.