AALIYAH”S GROUP LEADER DISCUSSION FOR 2/17 CONVERGENCE CULTURE:

INTERACTIVITY WITHIN FAN COMMUNITES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF MEDIA LITERACY LEADING TO PARTICIPATION ON A LARGER SCALE

Henry Jenkins illustrates the importance of fan communities on the Internet as a means of education and media literacy by looking at the fandoms of Harry Potter. In the exploration of the different Potter communities there rises an issue of collective intelligence as a mode of learning. The emotional connection that Potter fans experience leads them to further explore the text, while improving their writing skills and the ability to understand themselves and others by engaging the Potter Text. This community created its own “knowledge culture” to evaluate the characters of the story and also allowed students to develop an emotional attachment to the text and their interaction in the community. In a sense the text creates a sense of authorship and ownership in the participants within the online community. Illustrating inter-connectivity, this case leads to larger issues of media literacy and the idea of intellectual property and the fair use of content on the web.

Literacy’s definition has to be expanded to include media literacy and how print is used within digital media. The print is used on the web to create a community where boundaries are broken down and people are able to function anonymously. Also it creates a place where many dynamics of culture and society intertwine: participatory culture, education, religion, corporate media, and producers. Students are given the opportunity to help teach each other within the context of transparency and interaction that does necessarily happen in real world classrooms. Also, these same students create and define the rules online versus real life where they do not have the power the boundaries of learning and writing.

The online community also gives children an opportunity to mobilize online to fight back against corporate media and the constraints that are placed upon them. This is also illustrated through Harry Potter, which contests the idea that children are helpless and not able to defend themselves. Jenkins makes the case that the community functions as a grassroots movement that only needs to be threatened in order to take action in society and it also fosters an environment where children engage with media to create a more collective idea of society and its participants. Heather Lawver used The Daily Prophet to help mobilize different Potter communities against Warner Bros. to broaden their rights of the fandoms and the use of Potter characters.


Jenkins explores the idea of “affinity spaces” and the draw of people to communities that spring up out of pop culture.

• Why do people learn when participating more actively in pop culture (emotional investment)?

• Can affinity spaces be translated to school? What would make it effective? Often fandoms have do not constrain themselves to a strict hierarchy but there is an established hierarchy in the classroom, are schools locked into an autonomous culture and power dynamics between students and teacher?

• Will affinity spaces discourage school and the rigid structure of school?

REALITY VS FICTION AND FANTASY

Parody and satire force people and analyze information and decide what is reality and what is not fact. It also creates an environment where participants are analyzing sources to define the truth. As seen in fandoms, there is an added dimension in which people define their own truth within the community. This leads to the development and mastering of critical analysis skills. Jenkins contents that participants are being flooded with so much information that there has to be a way to figure out what is valuable.

• In the context of fandoms and Harry Potter, there is an issue of whether not online interaction in fantasy world is a valid way of learning because it leads to another problem of whether fact and fiction can be differentiated.

• In regards to children, if the participant is so immersed in fantasy why would they want to participate in the “real world” or school?

CORPORATE MEDIA’S NEED TO REORGANIZE PARTICIPATION

Jenkins visualizes a dynamic role between corporate media and participants within media: they both need each other to survive and thrive in a knowledge culture. Corporate media is motivated by profit and are looking for ways to gage pop culture and participants’ consumption of media. At the same time participants want the attention of corporate media to reach people that may not look online for different information. This was the goal of the True Majority Action and The Apprentice parody. True Majority Action’s founders also used the guise of talking about ice cream to draw attention to a Frisbee outlining the federal budget.



On the other hand, Fandoms create an environment where fans are contributing to the expansion and popularity of a pop culture phenomenon but Corporations want to control how and to what extent this is allowed to happen. Jenkins contend that companies are entitled to protect their rights against commercial competitors but they need to distinguish what is true fan interaction.

• Do the participants in role-playing and fan fiction have some stake ownership in their work? Or are they allowed to use the characters in the story online as a form of expression? Can they publish their work? Do they want to?

• Is fair-use dead in terms of media on the net?

Applications of fan participation/ fan communities in the real world:

• Can media literacy and the model of the fandom translate to classrooms?

• Who participates online in fan communities?

• How does transparency help people to participate online while maintaining their anonymity? Do people need anonymity to truly be honest online?

• Is the Harry Potter community a form of “adhocracy”? Is this is where we are headed online?

PARTICIPATION AS A GOVERNING CONCEPT

Consumers participate on their own terms and Jenkins explores how participants impact current politics and their interaction with politics. Participation rests on audience investment and the emotional ties of media culture.

There are different forms of participation from fan communities taking on real world issues, like the HP Alliance, who use the loose context of Harry Potter searching for the truth and Justice and applying that to current global concerns. Participation can also include forwarding of clips that entertain but open up discourse and the search for more information creating a movement and community of people thinking and interacting together.

Participation has led to the movement away from the concept of the “informed citizen” to the more “monitorial citizen” who sits back and takes in all of the information and
decides the moment to participate in greater culture and in the knowledge culture.
Furthermore, participation allows consumers to contextualize mainstream media and add on to the ideas of others.

Redefining the informed citizen:

• For democracy to exist Jenkins states “ there needs to be a social contract between participants and a sense that their actions have consequences within the community”(239). Does this begin with children and arming students with the ability and skills to engage in different communities? If we want children to vote do we have to change the process by which they are socialized into citizenship?

NEW DEFINITIONS OF GRASSROOTS AND THE CONTEXT OF MEDIA

Historically, grassroots may be seen as coming together as a community and eventually taking a stake in an issue and trying to change the situation. Henry Jenkins sees grassroots beginning online and then impacting real world issues. The use of pop culture furthers Henry Jenkins idea that people are more willing to participate if they have some type of interest or emotional connection to an issue. Pop culture plays upon interest and eventually draws individuals in emotionally and it creates a means of mobilization by bringing people together to form communities. Not only has pop culture influenced political campaigns helping to court voters but it also shaped how the public analyzes political conversations, as seen in The Daily Show. Photoshop added to the political conversations by becoming a grassroots interpretation of political cartoons.

Jenkins believes that new media has changed the nature of the debate and why youth is more engaged in information. Blogging adds to this idea because participants on blogs often look up information and investigate thus intervening in the democratic process.

• “ Pierre Levy describes a world where grassroots communication is not a momentary disruption of the corporate signal, but the routine way the system operates." (226)
  
• Is blogging an expansion of “culture jamming” or is it a completely separate aspect of convergence culture?
  

Contested Spaces -- Peachez vs. Oil

As I mentioned in class, about a year and a half ago I was in production on a documentary about a rapper named Ms. Peachez when the Jena 6 incident occurred. As a result of that injustice the hip hop community around the world spoke up. I wanted to post a few interesting, nearly simultaneous situations.

The Shreveport, LA rapper Ms. Peachez reaches the height of her popularity in the local hip hop community. Peachez was fascinating to me because she in and of herself represented a tangle of contested spaces. Despite Shreveport's/the South's tendency for homophobia, she always performs in drag. At the time I was on an assignment to make a documentary, so I was wildly interested in the GLBT issues that this persona brought up. Also, Ms. Peachez had a unique way of playing on/reifying southern black stereotypes. This infuriated some people, but others seemingly faced the reality that many of these stereotypes were often found/confirmed within our region due to poverty, policies of inequality and general racism. Personally, I viewed the stereotype exploitation as a desperate attempt to make brevity of a bad situation, to celebrate a continuing cultural phenomena, which in many instances was born in oppression. When I interviewed Peachez' producer several things made the picture even more interesting. My first question of real value to him was, "What impact do you think Ms. Peachez is having on the view of the local GLBT community?" Of course, I was somewhat naive, expecting some great answer about uniting oppressed individuals in their own struggles. I had actually insulted the producer, who had never intended to even bring up such questions. Peachez then moved into a ground of spectacle for good or bad. I had mixed feelings for the rest of the documentary and eventually lost touch with the contacts. The other thing I found interesting about interviewing this producer was the grass roots authorship, which he employed. These same ideas of cheaper/lower learning curve/faster technologies allows a large hip hop community to flourish, even in a small town in North West Louisiana. This in turn empowers a community, which would otherwise get very little positive media attention.

Here is one of Ms. Peachez most popular videos (sorry embedding has been disabled):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGrqW3nx5HM

If you have a chance check out the comments. They are really interesting.

At the same time Staten Island rapper NY Oil picks up on Peachez and her following. He releases the video "Ya'll Should All Get Lynched". The song explicitly targets Peachez in several points (including the chorus line at one point) saying she should be lynched. Once again, his message of hate is produced by the sam grass roots authorship in a different region entirely. He was obviously made angry by the persona and the stereotypes. Check this out (make sure you watch the Peachez vid. first):



Not long after, in the majority white town of Jena, Louisiana some two to three hours south of Shreveport, several race based instances of violence/hate occurred. White students hung nooses on trees in the lunch yard of Jena Highschool. The violence that ensued lead to the arresting of six black students, and zero white. In the weeks that would come a time of tremendous hope and fear, as well as new personal experiences would come to pass. By social web/grassroots means, the Free the Jena Six Rally was arranged. Between fifteen and twenty thousand people descended on the town of fourteen thousand. The media swarmed on the event.

I couldn't find any of the original organizational sites (perhaps the temporal nature of Tactical Media), but here is one of the remanence:

http://colorofchange.org/jena/

Finally, at the same time NY Oil releases his song "Jena 6". I think that this is an interesting instance of tactical media, because of its reactive nature and usage of noose imagery, yet again. Also, it's important to note that this song is created with the same web 2.0 era production tools and relied on the internet for distribution. For me his cry to, "...make the Jena 6 a Genesis" was somewhat tainted after his previous messages of hate. Here is a link to the song (it's the last one in the myspace player):

http://www.myspace.com/nyoil

I don't claim that any of these instances are truly related in any deep way, but I did (and still do) find the coincidence of their occurrence pretty interesting. All are moments that employ alternative media to mobilize and empower but also generate hate. In light of our recent class discussions, I'm trying to figure out which instances are truly tactical and which are simply alternatives linked to a specific time and place. Sorry, if this is not entirely coherent I think I'm getting sick and I'm a little loopy. I just felt I had to get this out of my system.

Facebook's BIG Obama Day

The blend of CNN and Facebook Connect generated over 1.5 million status updates related to the Inauguration Day festivities.

Could this be a step towards the model we were talking about in class with the blend of the two different notions of news sharing? Maybe, maybe not. But I think it sure is one step closer to convergence of the two and convergence of media platforms.

Josh's Twitterific Topic

With tools like camera phones or Eye-Fi loaded cameras, applications like Twitter/Twitpic or Qik and platforms from traditional news outlets such as CNN’s iReport how effective has citizen journalism become? Can citizen journalism replace the beat reporter at a traditional outlet? How have these tools, applications and platforms changed how news is shared, and more importantly how news is initially reported?

The news cycle has transitioned from disseminating information every 24 hours, to dozens of times in those 24 hours seven-days-a-week, to the now. Instantaneously news is shared as it happens. Inexpensive tools as well as some that are practically free have altered the manner in which people find out about breaking news. The most recent example of a passerby being present to share a dramatic fleeting moment was Janis Krums’ photo of passengers on the wings of a sinking plane in the Hudson River. Krums sent the image from his phone to Twitpic and the resulting image not only crashed the servers of the online photo site Twitpic, but also virally across the Internet and onto newspaper fronts across the country the following day. Other events have been documented as they occur such as the Gaza invasion by Israeli forces, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, earthquakes in California as well as China and there are several others.

Is the initial flood of raw information enough to inform a collective community? How has the persistent growth of Twitter users altered the news cycle? Have traditional news outlets been able to effectively engage various circles of social groups on Twitter to help drive and direct news gathering or sharing? How reliable can instantaneous dispatches of 140 characters or less be in the realm of facts and quest for truth? There are now news networks being created solely on Twitter. How will these seemingly radical changes of reporting also alter the business models of traditional and even non-traditional news outlets?

These are some of the questions I propose to try and seek answers to. Feel free to add more to the pile or share thoughts on how you learn about breaking news or become informed about stories.

NIN/Trek Fan Video and Participatory Culture

Since we are reading about participatory culture and fan vids. I thought I'd share one of my personal favorites. As both a Nine Inch Nails and Star Trek fan, this really hits a special spot for me. 

In many ways it exemplifies a lot of the elements of participatory culture that Chapter 2 of Networked Cultures discusses. Specifically the paring, which is pulled from sexual tension found in the canon itself. It seems like one way fans can stick mainstream corporate production. Interestingly, the owners of the copyright frequently have big problems with parings their fans come up with. That said, this is a great song-vid.

Here Comes Everybody: What's next

Here's an audio clip from NPR with Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody" and NYU professor, talking with callers discussing how to use new technologies and predictions of Web 3.0. There's also an excerpt from his book on the page.

Lots of things that we have already talked about in class this first week.

Found this via a photojournalist's blog in my RSS.