Should we worship at the altar of convergence? It might take a great leap of faith to do so — as even Jenkins himself notes in his introduction to Convergence Culture, the questions about convergence are primarily ones of uncertainty, and the possibilities of convergence are primarily still waiting to be realized.
But talk of convergence usually centers on consumers, Tara McPherson points out in “Reload:
Liveness, Mobility, and the Web.” She writes about corporations espousing convergence and the possibilities of “participatory entertainment.” But what about the possibilities of convergence for participatory democracy?
“Choice,” “presence,” “movement,” “possibility” describe the experience of Web surfing for the consumer, Jenkins writes. But they could also describe the experiences of a political participant in the convergence age. Participatory culture is an important part of convergence. As media consumers rethink their relationship to media, they grow more participatory and invested in their partial ownership of the medium. Jenkins’ concept of collective intelligence as consumption-as-collective-process poses even more intriguing questions about government-as-collective-process, even if he admits to being more interested in the former.
But, he writes, “we are mostly using this collective power through our recreational life, but soon we will be deploying those skills for more ‘serious’ purposes.” In this way, the transformation of political culture will echo the transformation of popular culture.
One way in particular new media has offered a flattening of the political hierarchy is through new ways of digesting the news, as blogs and podcasts and “citizen journalists” gain power. McPherson calls neo-Fordism the process by which the worker is incorporated into capital rather than subjected to it. Similarly, these new alternative outlets have set their own agenda, picking up on stories the mainstream media misses and even forming temporary “flash mobs” to bring an incident like Trent Lott’s comments about Strom Thurmond to the forefront of the nation’s attention. These neo-Fordists are invested in their product, the news, to such an extent that they form a virtual army of fact-checkers for every statement made by a politician and every claim make in a newspaper article. McPherson writes about the empowerment of the media consumer as the old TV idea of “controlling the audience” is replaced by a consumer-centered way of thinking—a process that is evident in the way television news is no longer able to unilaterally set the agenda. But the assertion, which Glenn Reynolds made in his book An Army of Davids, that citizen journalism will mean “the end of the power of Big Media” was too optimistic.
This leads us to the point that the political changes convergence may cause, like the pop-cultural changes, will be limited. Old media don't die but are transformed by their contact with newer media, as Jenkins writes; likewise the old political patterns will likely manifest themselves in newer ones.
Because convergence is, once again, a two-way street, with elements of divergence built right in. McPherson rightly points out that just as the grassroots are using convergence, so are corporations; even as technology empowers the individual it is empowering the powerful. Corporations try to continue to control media consumption the way they could with television by carefully programming Web sites, even while Internet users feel the illusion of volition and mobility that the Web creates. But even so, consumers in the age of convergence are trailblazing a path for a new breed of citizen.
