Jenkins 2013Rethinking Rethinking Convergence Culture.pdf

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Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’ Henry Jenkins Published online: 28 May 2013.

To cite this article: Henry Jenkins (2014) Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’, Cultural Studies, 28:2, 267-297, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.801579 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.801579

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Henry Jenkins RETHINKING ‘RETHINKING

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CONVERGENCE/CULTURE’

Responding to the September 2011 special issue on ‘Rethinking Convergence Culture’, this essay seeks to identify ways that the author’s thinking about convergence and participatory culture have shifted over time, often in ways that are closely aligned with the issue’s contributors. Throughout the essay, the author addresses the links between cultural and political participation, the challenges in using new media in support of democratic change, the ways that institutional power structures continue to exert strong influence on our culture despite or perhaps because of significant expansion of who has access to the means of cultural production and distribution and the challenges and opportunities for doing cultural theory in an era of neo-liberal capitalism. Keywords democracy

participation; convergence; fandom; activism; feminism;

In September 2011, Cultural Studies devoted a special issue to ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’ (Hay and Couldry 2011), which the editors Nick Couldry and Jim Hay defined in terms of a cluster of writers, including myself (Jenkins 2006a), Yochai Benkler (2007), Manuel Castells (2009), Charles Leadbeater (2008), Clay Shirky (2010), John Hartley (2008), Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2009) and Axel Bruns (2008), whose work has sought to explain the ways that media change might be enabling new forms of grassroots communication and collaboration. However, in practice, the editors and authors seemed to have limited interest in exploring the differences and connections among this particular assortment of writers; many
though certainly not all
of the critiques focus on my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Jenkins 2006a).1 Understandably, I confronted the issue with a certain degree of apprehension. However, at the same time, I was grateful for the courtesy and respect displayed by many of the contributors. I found this debate highly productive, rather than divisive, and the criticism mostly constructive, rather than destructive. For that, I want to thank all of those who contributed. I hope this response (and any counter-response it may engender) continues in this spirit, seeking common grounds and shared goals; I also hope that the Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 28, No. 2, 267
297, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.801579 # 2013 Taylor & Francis

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airing of differences continues to be constructive and mutually respectful. There’s no way that I can fully address the range of critiques posed throughout this special issue (given that the contributors, themselves, would not agree on many of the core premises of their critiques).2 Rather, I will use this essay to address a few core themes that cut across the issue’s contents, hoping that conversation can and will continue across other venues.3 At its heart, the special issue centred around the political and economic implications of convergence culture and especially on the adequacy of the concept of participatory culture to address the full range of experiences people are having in and through digital media. I am going to use this response to clarify what I see as the core stakes in focusing on ‘meaningful participation’ as a central element in the agenda of cultural studies in the twenty-first century. Cultural scholars from varied traditions have much to learn from each other if we can move past a history of internal culture wars and towards a more productive dialogue that balances critique and advocacy.4

Towards a more participatory culture Across the twentieth century, critical and cultural theorists of many flavours have pushed to expand opportunities for grassroots participation in the core decisions shaping cultural production and circulation or informing democratic governance. In Spreadable Media (2013), co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, we point towards several previous struggles over media and participation, including Bertolt Brecht (1932), who expressed some hopes for the democratic potentials of radio if ‘it knew how to transmit as well as receive’ (p. 53), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970), who advocated for the development of new strategies for ‘publicity’ and ‘mobilization’ as expansions of new media promised to place the means of media production ‘in the hands of the masses themselves’ (p. 69). Such concerns were central to the discourses of the 1960s counterculture (for example, the Port Huron Manifesto, which included demands that citizens should have a say in those ‘social decisions determining the quality and directions of his life’ and a call to ‘provide media’ for citizens’ ‘common participation’, Delwiche 2012, p. 12). We might also add the critical pedagogy advocated by Paolo Freire (1972), which has been summarized in Richard Shaull’s foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (Shaull 1972, p. 13)

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And we might see at least an implicit theory of participation in Raymond Williams’ ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958), which argues that ‘the making of a society’ requires ‘the finding of common meanings and directions’, a process which comes only through ‘active debate and amendment’ among the people themselves (p. 93). This push to expand popular participation in core decisions (whether cultural or political) has helped to inform many core debates, with each new media technology anticipated in part because of the tools it might put into the hands of ‘the people’ and with these theoretical models taking shape alongside grassroots efforts to experiment with and deploy those tools to promote democratic participation and cultural diversity. This history should be sobering, as we encounter such a record of bold predictions, promises delayed and deferred, partial successes and unintended consequences. Understanding this history helps us to put current debates about digital media into a larger perspective, one that should make us slow to construct triumphant narratives of technological inevitability, but one that should also leave us reluctant to walk away from new opportunities without exploring them fully. This history tells us that change comes most often at moments of hope and crisis, and we have both in great abundance in the early twenty-first century. As Nick Couldry (2011) acknowledges, my focus on promoting participatory culture does not rely on assumptions of technological determinism. Many different factors, not simply the growth of networked computing, have served to make the current moment one where the stakes for participatory culture are especially high. See this passage from Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies. Rather than talking about interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur amongst media consumers, between media consumers and media texts, and between media consumers and media producers. The new participatory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends: (1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content (2) a range of subcultures promote Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies (3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship. (Jenkins 2006b, pp. 135, 136)

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Given my focus on cultural and economic factors, I saw Convergence Culture as offering a corrective to the excesses of ‘digital revolution’ rhetoric, including John Perry Barlow’s belief (1996) that ‘Governments of the Industrial World’ would no longer exert ‘sovereignty’ over digital citizens, or the faith held by Nicholas Negroponte (1996) and George Gilder (1985) that the mass media empires were dissolving in the face of the expansion of cottage industries and artisanal modes of cultural production. Instead, Convergence Culture argues that any democratic potentials held by grassroots media production and circulation coexist with increasing concentrated mass media, hence the subtitle ‘where old and new media collide’. In the book, I identify multiple battles that will impact whether we can achieve a more participatory culture: Right now, convergence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding opportunities for grassroots communities to speak back to the mass media....That’s why it is so important to fight against corporate copyright regimes, to argue against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize these emerging forms of participation, to publicize the best efforts of these online communities, to expand access and participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind, and to promote forms of media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed to become full participants in their culture. (Jenkins 2006a, p. 259) In the afterword for the paperback release of the book in late 2008, I expressed my growing concern that networked communications would not necessarily result in a more progressive, inclusive, or democratic culture: Those of us who care about the future of participatory culture as a mechanism for promoting diversity and enabling democracy do the world no favor if we ignore the ways that our current culture falls short of these goals. Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as somehow ‘resistant’ to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-up means to keep others down. Too often, we have fallen into the trap of seeing democracy as an ‘inevitable’ outcome of technology change rather than as something which we need to fight to achieve with every tool at our disposal. Too often, we have sought to deflect criticisms of grassroots culture rather than trying to identify and resolve conflicts and contradictions which might prevent it from achieving its full potential. Too often, we have celebrated those alternative voices which are being brought into the marketplace of ideas without considering which voices remain trapped outside. (Jenkins 2008, pp. 293, 294)

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This passage reflected my growing awareness of what Nick Couldry (2011) describes as ‘the socio-economic and cultural forces which are stratifying technological access, use and skills in a convergent media environment . . . .the broader stratifying factors which shape the spheres of action of different types of people in contemporary societies’ (p. 498). Since Convergence Culture’s publication, discourses about participation have both intensified and diversified. In politics, as Manuel Castells (2012) notes, grassroots movements around the world have embraced networked computing (as both a technology and as a model of social relations) as a key tool for their struggles. In the arts, many high-profile artists have experimented with various forms of crowdsourcing or participatory design processes. In journalism, traditional news organizations have sought to make their peace with ‘citizen journalism’ (i.e. blogging, Twitter, podcasting, video-blogging, user-generated footage). In education, the Digital Media and Learning movement has sought to reshape schools to incorporate ‘connected learning’ and to insure that young people acquire the skills needed for meaningful participation. In health, there has been a movement to build online communities where patients can compare notes and, both collectively and individually, assert greater control over their own treatment. In management studies, the focus has been on creating stronger horizontal networks within companies that might allow employees to feel a greater stake in the firm’s success and to be capable of contributing new insights that might inform strategic and tactical decision-making. And the entertainment industry, the primary focus of Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2006a), has integrated notions of audience engagement and fan participation more deeply into its logics and practices. In some of these cases, the call for participation is largely rhetorical, with mechanisms offering only limited and mostly meaningless ways of entering the process, whereas in others, significant shifts are occurring which are providing the people greater voice and influence in the decisions that impact their everyday lives. It becomes more and more urgent to develop a more refined vocabulary that allows us to better distinguish between different models of participation and to evaluate where and how power shifts may be taking place. As a consequence of this ‘participatory turn’ in cultural theory and politics, I have found myself increasingly pushed into the role of a public intellectual, seeking more effective strategies for intervening in such important debates. Like many other contemporary cultural scholars, I am speaking with increasing frequency to corporate audiences, where I have consistently argued for greater responsiveness, transparency and accountability (more about this later). But, again, like others in our field, I have also been engaged in ongoing efforts towards educational reform to insure that more young people acquire the skills and competencies, as well as the technological access, required for meaningful participation. Most recently, I am engaging in efforts to better understand how new media platforms and practices have been and can be deployed by activists to promote social justice. These interventions grow out of my own sense that

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the push for media reform needs to be a multi-front struggle, as much focused on expanding access and skills required for meaningful participation as it is on battling the growing concentration of corporate media. My experiences at intervention have tempered some of the exuberance people have identified in Convergence Culture with a deeper understanding of how difficult it will be to make change happen. Across all of these industry and policy spaces, I have found people who shared my goals of increasing popular participation, in expanding the diversity of our culture, but I have also developed a deeper appreciation for all of the systemic and structural challenges we face in changing the way established institutions operate, all of the outmoded and entrenched thinking which make even the most reasonable reform of established practices difficult to achieve. Today, I am much more likely to speak about a push towards a more participatory culture, acknowledging how many people are still excluded from even the most minimal opportunities for participation within networked culture, and recognizing that new grassroots tactics are confronting a range of corporate strategies which seek to contain and commodify the popular desire for participation. As a consequence, elites still exert a more powerful influence on political decisionmaking than grassroots networks, even if we are seeing new ways to assert alternative perspectives into the decision-making process. The growth of popular discourse about participation has been matched by a growing body of scholarship that seeks to nuance and refine this core concept. Christopher Kelty (2013) writes: ‘Participating’ in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic governance of a state . . . .Participation is about power, and, no matter how ‘open’ a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing power and its distribution. (p. 29) Kelty’s own team at University of California
Los Angeles (UCLA) (Fish et al. 2011) has proposed a rich typology for identifying different claims being made about participation and the ways power gets negotiated at all levels, from the design of platforms to policies regarding their governance and use. My graduate student, Ioana Literat (2012), has offered a similar typology for thinking about competing claims made about participation within collaborative and crowd-sourced art projects. Nico Carpentier (2011) has argued for the difference between maximalist models of participation (which emphasize an active public role in governance) and more minimalist models. I read this special issue of Cultural Studies as another contribution towards refining and sharpening our theories of participation, one particularly advanced through case studies by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2011), Jack Bratich (2011), Laurie

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Ouelette and Julie Wilson (2011) and others. These worked examples provide new insights into the contradictions and challenges of achieving meaningful participation in the current context. In many cases, these critiques mirror directions I have taken in my writing since 2006. I certainly agree with Ginette Verstraete (2011, p. 539) when she writes: What is often missing [in the first wave of scholarship on participatory culture] is a sustained reflection on what the terms may be under which who exactly is going to do what and with whom, and under which one can begin to decide whether something is politically rather than economically productive. This is precisely what I meant when I suggested at various points across Convergence Culture that the key struggles over the next few decades would be over ‘the terms of our participation’. I agree with many of the contributors here that it is time to pull back from both utopian and dystopian rhetoric and offer a more nuanced account of the different mechanisms for participation being proposed. This process may best be achieved if we are able to create a more productive dialogue between those of us whose work is primarily focused on identifying the potentials of a more participatory culture and those who have offered the most sceptical accounts of how those same mechanisms may insure corporate and governmental control. Such debates may help us to model what constitutes ‘critique in the public interest’ (McGuigan 2006) for the twenty-first century. Graeme Turner (2011, p. 686) suggests that work within a ‘convergence culture’ paradigm has projected too far beyond current realities, suggesting that such theory is ‘about 20 per cent fact and 80 per cent speculative fiction’. I would have thought that my ratio was a little better than that. Convergence Culture was based on a series of concrete case studies, each of which was well documented and each of which demonstrated some of the specific ways that particular groups were taking advantage of the affordances of new media and the structures of participatory culture. At stake in our debate is the question of how we might move from such case studies towards larger generalizations, a conversation worth having, but, clearly, any meaningful critical intervention is going to need that capacity to move productively between the abstract and the particular. By the same token, we should constantly revisit and re-appraise any general claims we develop (as a natural part of the process of scholarship) and I would freely acknowledge that work written with hindsight may see things different than work which is seeking to project future implications of still unfolding events. In hindsight, many of the writers cited by this Cultural Studies issue (myself among them) underestimated the barriers to achieving what we see as the potential for transformative change emerging as the public has gained greater control over the means of cultural production and circulation. We have seen many recent efforts where there was mass mobilization, significant media

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attention and yet power structures moved very little in response. All of us need more robust and precise models for change than currently animates our work. However, my critics here and elsewhere have dismissed too quickly and too sweepingly the consequences of expanding the communicative capacity available to many compared to the far more narrow communication channels at play during the broadcast era. Cultural studies (and especially cultural politics) is better off remaining open to new possibilities and emerging models rather than giving way to a discourse of inevitability, whether that be the technological determinism that assumes new media will necessarily democratize culture or the economic determinism that assumes consumer capitalism will always fully contain all forms of grassroots resistance. For a classic example of a rhetoric of inevitability in critical studies, consider this statement by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2011, p. 594): The lesson of the newer media technologies is the same as print, radio and television: each one is quickly dominated by centralized and centralizing corporations, regardless of its multi-distributional potential, and each one depends on a massive contribution from the Earth and workers. So, is this an immutable law that negates any possibility of alternative outcomes, or are there moments of vulnerability when one system is giving into another when it makes sense to focus criticism and mobilization in hopes of impacting what happens next? Is the distribution of power necessarily blackand-white, all-or-nothing or might we imagine each new media allows us to gain some ground, even in the face of compromises and losses on other levels? Should we imagine that the domination of new media by ‘centralized and centralizing corporations’ is already a battle lost and, if so, is resistance futile? What is the value of critique in a world that always must move towards the same inevitable consequences? There have been times when I saw ‘a glass half full’, my critics ‘a glass half empty’, while both of us ignored the common ground that we were still describing ‘half a glass’. There remains an urgent need for us
as public intellectuals and educators
to help shape the directions social, cultural, economic, political and technological change might take.

The march of time The timetables of peer-reviewed scholarly publication make it almost impossible for these kinds of meaningful exchanges to take place between researchers with different ideological visions or theoretical commitments. Though we are debating the best frameworks for discussing contemporary and emerging media practices, this debate will have unfolded across a decade by

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the time this response is published in the pages of Cultural Studies. Convergence Culture was written in 2004
2005 (with some material produced earlier), even though it was not published until 2006, and then it was updated in 2008 for a paperback edition that came out much later that same year. Most likely, the contents of Cultural Studies were written between 2008 and 2010, and the issue came out at the end of 2011. My new book, Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al. 2013), was written between 2008 and 2011 (before most of the current wave of work on participation described above had been published) and came out in early 2013. Now, I am writing in early 2013, with the expectation that this piece will be published in 2014. Meanwhile, the reality is shifting underneath our feet, and new scholarly work has probably been completed and is in the process of being published that may well change our perspectives, and each of us continue probing deeper into the issues we are exploring here. The difficulty of such back-and-forth scholarly exchanges through print already indicates why I value the faster, more fluid, and more open exchanges that are possible through digital media. While some of the Cultural Studies contributors have accused me of developing a totalizing account, the introduction of Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2006a, p. 12) seeks to qualify its claims about the future implications of the developments it documents: It is beyond my abilities to describe or fully document the changes that are occurring. My aim is more modest. I want to describe some of the ways that convergence thinking is reshaping American popular culture and, in particular, the ways it is impacting the relationship between media audiences, producers, and content . . . .Writing this book has been challenging because everything seems to be changing at once and there is no vantage point that takes me above the fray. Rather than trying to write from an objective vantage point, I describe in this book what this process looks like from various localized perspectives. I intended Convergence Culture to provoke a new round of discussion about the potentials of participatory culture (as it did) but not to serve as ‘the book’ on the topic, closing off future inquiry. And I have been fortunate that so many scholars have responded to its provocation, challenging its conclusions, revising its observations and complicating its analysis, in ways I would not have been able to achieve on my own. I hoped people would take from this account a greater sense of the importance of examining the complex relationship between mass media industries and their increasingly participatory audiences, the value of pursuing questions across medium specific categories and the urgency of intervening in the policies that will determine the next phase of development within the new media environment. None of us can write outside our own historical contexts, and none of us can foresee how future developments may overtake our best guesses about

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where the culture may be heading.5 For example, Convergence Culture’s discussion of American politics was very much shaped by the aftershocks of the 2004 US presidential election (and, for that matter, the continued debate around the mechanisms of voting point back to the disputed 2000 results); the afterword for the paperback edition was composed in January 2008, well before Barack Obama’s election. James Hay’s discussion in the special issue (2011), for example, focuses on the Tea Party but does not anticipate Occupy Wall Street. Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al. 2013) can speak about the foiled Iranian uprising but cannot fully engage with the Arab Spring (which unfolded as the manuscript was nearing completion). All of us have found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change, the shifting fortunes of popular political and cultural movements or the various struggles over the terms of participation within ‘Web 2.0’ platforms, all of which should impact our theories. Cynicism may be the one sure way to be right at least some of the time
after all, a broken clock rings true twice a day and sack cloth never goes out of fashion
but fatalism is not the best way to support struggles for expanded democratic participation and cultural diversity. By the same token, Tim O’Reilly’s foundational ‘What is Web 2.0’ appeared in 2005, too late to have impacted my discussion of ‘affective economics’ and ‘emotional capital’ in Convergence Culture. The book registers some of the shifts in industry thinking that would give rise to Web 2.0, but does not describe how the Web 2.0 business model would seek to capture, commodify and control the public’s desire for meaningful participation. In fairness, my initial response to Web 2.0 was more one of curiosity than outrage: early Web 2.0 language seemed to open up more space for collective expression and offer more responsiveness to public opinion than some previous industry structures. Many of the young entrepreneurs followed the Web 2.0 banner with idealistic as well as mercantile motives, even if they would quickly discover how difficult it was to change the relationship between producers and their audiences once corporate ownership and venture capital entered the picture. And, after years of debates around media concentration, there was some excitement about a more diverse set of entrepreneurs entering the marketplace. In an essay (Jenkins 2007a) for Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, I jokingly referred to Web 2.0 as ‘fandom without the stigma’, noting, as I do in Convergence Culture, that many of the practices and logics that emerged when fandom was seen as a subculture were becoming more widespread as participatory culture logics were being mainstreamed. For me, the key turning point came in response to several debates within fandom about the terms being offered by Web 2.0 companies: most dramatically, the much-documented controversy over FanLib, but also debates about censorship on LiveJournal, privacy on Facebook, compensation on YouTube and terms of service on a range of other social media sites. These debates forced me to assess and revise some of my earlier perspectives, a reappraisal which surfaced first on my blog (Jenkins 2007b) later in a sidebar

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critique of ‘user-generated content’ incorporated in the paperback edition of Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2008), ‘The Moral Economy of Web 2.0’ which I co-authored with Joshua Green (Green and Jenkins 2009), and, most recently, in the ‘What Went Wrong with Web 2.0’ chapter in Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al. 2013). I have repeatedly sought ways to critique Web 2.0 without turning my back on the potentials some of these platforms offer for greater participation
recognizing a distinction, say, between the lack of voice contributors have in the governance of YouTube and the ways oppositional groups have used video-sharing sites to communicate their messages (Thorson et al. 2013). One valuable way to frame such critiques is to take seriously the complaints posed by various participatory culture communities against the terms of service offered them by Web 2.0 companies.

Writing with ambivalence In her new book, Authentic, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012, p. 218) proposes a critical posture that seeks to understand popular ‘ambivalence’ towards contemporary brand culture: ‘To theorize ambivalence as a structuring element of brand cultures means not that all cultural practices are spaces of possibility but rather that some carry more potential than others, that some cultural practices are easier to brand than others’. For Banet-Weiser, ‘ambivalence’ expresses the attitudes with which participants and critics alike seek to identify what gets gained or lost within Web 2.0. While the dominant tone of Convergence Culture was optimistic, the book also strives for a similar kind of ambivalence, pointing towards ‘spaces of possibility’ but also noting some factors limiting our abilities to achieve those possibilities. For example, here’s what I wrote about the branding process: Here’s the paradox: to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified. On the one hand, to be commodified expands a group’s cultural visibility. Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored. That said, commodification is also a form of exploitation. Those groups that are commodified find themselves targeted more aggressively by marketers and often feel they have lost control over their own culture, since it is mass produced and mass marketed. One cannot help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go unrepresented
but one doesn’t want to be exploited either. (Jenkins 2006a, p. 63) This seems to me what Mark Andrejevic (2011, p. 612) is getting at when he writes, ‘If convergence marks the mainstreaming of participatory fan culture, it has the potential to cut both ways: the increasing influence of participatory

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consumers on the production process and the facilitation of monitoring-based regimes of control’. I respect Andrejevic’s insistence that we remain attentive to how mechanisms of audience measurement, such as data mining and sentiment analysis, often operate in the service of neo-liberal logics that fragments the public into exploitable demographic categories and see consumption as a highly individualized practice. Spreadable Media makes many of these same points, critiquing the shifts in the rhetoric of Web 2.0 away from the deliberative logic of collective intelligence and towards the aggregative and anonymous processes associated with tapping ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. I would very much agree with what Andrejevic (2011, p. 612) writes here: The logic of aggregation is distinct from that of collectivity
the former seeks to create an imagined consensus out of an overview that makes up for what it lacks in depth, comprehension and meaning, with breadth, speed and predictive power.6 Today, I am far more focused on these mechanisms of control, after five years’ worth of debates over Web 2.0 platforms, than I was when I wrote Convergence Culture.7 Spreadable Media is a much more ambivalent book in Banet-Weiser’s sense of the word: written with greater engagement with Web 2.0’s critics (both popular and academic), with greater concern for inequalities of access, and with attention to more diverse forms of participation. Yet, the book was also written as an attempt to engage media professionals in core conversations about grassroots circulation of media and in collaboration with writing partners who are rooted in the marketing and strategic communications realms. Spreadable Media is also, by design, a more dialogic book, surrounded online by contributions by more than 30 other scholars and industry leaders, each offering their own perspectives on the issues it raises, each bringing more diverse case studies to the table. Elizabeth Bird (2011) urges us to expand the range of our case studies beyond the digital and beyond the global north. We have taken some effort in Spreadable Media to explore examples of (and challenges to) grassroots participation and networked communication in Latin America, Asia and Africa, including some discussion of Nollywood, the example she cites in her article. Much more work needs to be done along these lines. I am grateful for a number of theorists
including S. Craig Watkins (2010) Sonia Livingstone (2009), danah boyd (2011), Ellen Seiter (2007) and Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko (2008)
who have helped me better understand the structures ensuring inequalities of access and participation and the consequences of these inequalities for my theoretical and political project. My movement along this path has especially been informed by the work of Mark Andrejevic, my most persistent, perceptive, and persuasive critic. I certainly share his very legitimate concern that ‘a shifting logic of media

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engagement is accompanied by revamped strategies for managing and manipulating audiences’ (Andrejevic 2011, p. 606). I write in Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2006a, p. 175):

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Corporations imagine participation as something they can start and stop, channel and reroute, commodify and market. The prohibitionists are trying to shut down unauthorized participation; the collaborationists are trying to win grassroots creators over to their side. Consumers, on the other side, are asserting a right to participate in the culture, on their own terms, when and where they wish. Convergence Culture may place its emphasis on the growing influence of customers, audiences, fans, citizens, within this networked culture, but whatever ground they have gained has been in the face of new efforts by corporate producers to ‘manage’ and, yes, ‘manipulate’ these same groups. However, just as we are pushing towards a more particularized and differentiated account of media audiences, we should also be attentive to the multiple, diverse and contradictory goals people working within the media and marketing industries pursue as they seek to revamp their organizations (Deuze 2007). These media companies are more dysfunctional families than well-oiled machines, with different divisions competing with each other for resources and recognition. And, throughout many of these organizations, there are many cultural workers who would honestly like to reimagine and redesign their relations with the public. When I have had a chance to speak inside corporate boardrooms, I have often seen myself as lending support to the more progressive voices within these organizations, using my academic authority to legitimate directions they are pushing their companies, while pushing them to deepen their thinking through engagement with the insights and provocations offered by our research. There are a growing number of intellectuals positioned within these corporate spaces, including danah boyd, Nancy Baym and Mary Gray at Microsoft or Brian David Johnson and Genevieve Bell at Intel, who have found this a productive space from which to promote social and cultural change.

How do fans fit into the picture? I have also learned much from Nick Couldry’s critique of Convergence Culture (2011), especially his concern about the limits of using active fans, more or less exclusively, to illustrate the potentials of a more participatory culture. In actuality, my book does qualify its claims more than Couldry acknowledges. For instance, I write in Convergence Culture:

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I don’t assume that these cultural practices will remain the same as we broaden access and participation. In fact, expanding participation necessarily sparks further change. Yet, right now, our best window into convergence culture comes from looking at the experience of these early settlers and first inhabitants. These elite consumers exert a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention.

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(Jenkins 2006a, p. 23) That said, Couldry is correct to suggest I might have been better described such an approach as ‘our only window’ and to insist that we broaden our sample of what people are doing with new media as some of these platforms and practices have become more widespread. While I was waiting for Convergence Culture to come out, I had a chance to read Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2007). While I do not see lots of Benkler fans among the contributors to this special issue, the book does make a strong case that networked culture should not be understood simply in terms of the interplay between amateur media makers and corporate media. Benkler stresses that diverse kinds of media producers
including governmental, activist, religious, educational, nonprofit and semi-commercial content creators
have tapped into the affordances of digital networks. As a consequence, we are dealing with a mixed media ecology where these historically separate forces influence each other in often unpredictable ways. Expanding our frameworks of analysis to consider these other sites of media production allows us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the differences between fan participation in commercial media franchises and, say, the relations of citizens to the state, students to educational institutions, worshippers to religious organizations or activists to the institutions they seek to transform. Looking backwards, the model of participation offered in Convergence Culture reflected my own point of entry into these debates
through the study of fandom. Focusing on fandom meant that my emphasis was on the ways that a community with a much longer tradition was seeking to negotiate the changes being brought about by digital media, as opposed to, say, exploring what happens within other groups without such well-established norms and practices. I was focusing on a community defined around shared interests as opposed to the more ego-centric sets of relationships danah boyd (2006) argues to operate within contemporary social network platforms. I was focusing on activities which inspired high degrees of sociality and imagined community, whereas someone like James Paul Gee (2004) stresses forms of shared activity that do not result in strong social bonds, common interests or shared identities. I was focusing on a group that consciously seeks to participate in the creation and circulation of culture, as opposed to the kinds of ‘implicit

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participation’ (such as data mining). Mirko Tobias Schafer (2011) argues are even more central to the ways Web 2.0 companies operate. The book was accurate in suggesting a shift within the commercial media industries to embrace certain conceptions of the fan as an idealized consumer of transmedia entertainment, and if anything, those trends have only intensified since the book was published. Spreadable Media responds to some of these limitations by seeking to describe a much broader array of participants in the new media landscape and a range of media producers, including discussion throughout of civic and public, religious, independent and transnational media production and circulation. Bird (2011, p. 504), similarly, takes me to task for placing too much emphasis on acts of fan production to the exclusion of ‘the more mundane, internalized, even passive articulation with media that characterizes a great deal of media consumption’. A central theme running through Spreadable Media is the importance of moving beyond active production as a criteria for understanding audience participation and the need to pay much more attention to more causal forms of grassroots circulation, which are much more apt to become routine practices for larger numbers of people in the future. This focus on circulation certainly corresponds to Verstraete’s argument (2011, p. 541) that: this endless circulation and proliferation of objects and images
through physical or virtual channels
are what enables various consumers to have access to convergence culture in the first place and do different things with it. So that we can say that the transmedia mobility and mutability of images and objects constituting the brand are the preconditions for human participation in our convergence culture. While there is no question that brands benefit in various ways from soliciting the public’s help in circulating their messages, participants are also using such practices to advocate for their own interests, whether with corporations or governments. We are seeing more and more spectacular examples of the public’s ability to engage in what Ethan Zuckerman (2012) calls ‘attention activism’, allowing for activists and citizens to deploy networked circulation to insert new concerns into the national and international agenda (as, for example, the struggles over Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), the dramatic speed and scope of Kony 2012’s movement across the net, the backlash by gay
lesbian
bisexual
transgender (GLBT) activists and their supporters against Chick-Fil-A’s support for homophobic organizations, or the feminist deployment of the trope of ‘binders of women’ to call out Mitt Romney’s far from diverse hiring practices). This shift towards greater grassroots influence over how media spreads has also produced considerable anxiety among some media producers who often regard all forms of unauthorized circulation as piracy.

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Gender and fandom I appreciated the efforts here by Catherine Driscoll and Melissa Gregg (2011) and Laurie Ouelette and Julie Wilson (2011) to push us to pay greater attention to the gendered dimensions of convergence culture. My work on fans has always been deeply grounded in feminism and has always been developed in partnership with the many women inside fandom who have been the best theorists of their own practice. It is certainly true that Convergence Culture was less focused on gender than some of my own earlier work, including Textual Poachers (Jenkins 1992), The Children’s Culture Reader (Jenkins 1998) or From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (Cassell and Jenkins 2000). Yet, my commitment to feminism remains strong, as might be suggested by the ‘Gender and Fan Studies’ (2007
2008) and ‘Aca-Fandom and Beyond’ (2011) exchanges I have helped organize on my blog, or the discussion with Suzanne Scott about the fan studies paradigm which opens the recent re-release of Textual Poachers (Jenkins and Scott 2012). Over the past half decade or so, we have seen the emergence of a new generation of fan scholars, many of them explicitly feminist in their orientation, many of them immersed in the fan communities they study, and they have collectively reframed some of the research agenda for this field.8 Through my active engagement with their work and in some cases, collaborations with them around specific projects, I have discovered more productive models for integrating issues of gender politics into my consideration of how fan communities operate within the context of digital networks, focusing on the ways women have and have not gained ground as male fans have gained much greater access to industry insiders and greater visibility through media coverage. There was a strong focus in this special issue on situating women’s fan practices in relation to the work which they perform
both professional and domestic
as opposed to a focus on the ways gender and sexuality might be explored through their fan productions, and I would agree that such an approach seems like an important path forward, as is demonstrated by Ouelete and Wilson’s rich case study (2011) of the Web practices surrounding Dr Phil. Here, and elsewhere in this issue (Bird 2011, for example), there is an emphasis on shifting from ‘spectacular’ to ‘mundane’ forms of participation that may help us to better understand how to connect these developments in new media platforms and practices to the larger politics of everyday life. I would agree that work on the pleasures of fan culture needs to be coupled more explicitly with scholarship that addresses unequal conditions of domestic labour. Even without such a shift, there’s much more gender studies work on fandom that needs to be done, including the ways that the mixed gender composition of some online fandoms (including both the Survivor and Harry Potter networks Convergence Culture discusses) might challenge historic divides between male and female fan practices and a new focus on understanding ‘fan masculinities’.

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That said, I do not share Driscoll and Gregg’s view (2011) that Convergence Culture had the long-term consequence of draining gender issues from discussions of fan culture, especially given the ongoing importance of gender to the articles being published in Transformative Works and Cultures and, now, The Journal of Fandom Studies. And, I disagree with Driscoll and Gregg’s claims that, by documenting fan struggles with censorship and copyright regulation or describing fandom as a site of informal learning, I was dealing with issues which are more important to ‘corporations and policy-makers’ than fans. After all, these are the same issues that inspired the Organization for Transformative Works, perhaps the most powerful example in recent years of fans seeking to assert greater control over what happens to their culture. Further, many American fans are educators and librarians in their professional lives and I have made common cause with a number of fans in my ongoing efforts to promote core skills and competencies needed to insure more equitable participation (Jenkins and Kelley 2013). While struggles over gender and sexual politics have been central to fan politics, we limit the scope of fan concerns when we assume that these are the only issues fans care about or when we assume that fan studies, as a field, should be restricted to one framework or methodology.

Collective agency and participatory politics While the contributors here are generally careful and precise in their discussion of my work, there are two persistent, interrelated ways some of them mischaracterize my work (and, to some degree, other researchers working in this tradition). First, there is a strong tendency here to conflate participation with interactivity. (See Andrejevic’s reference to ‘the emergence of participatory forms of interactivity’ [2011, p. 617].), despite the distinction Convergence Culture draws between the two. For me, interactivity is a property often designed and programmed into the technology and thus is much more likely to be under the control of media producers. Participation, on the other hand, is a property of the surrounding culture and is often something communities assert through their shared engagement with technologies, content and producers. An emphasis on interactivity pulls inevitably towards the idea of technology as itself liberatory (or constraining), whereas my own work is primarily focused on cultural practices that emerge around and often reshape the technological infrastructure. Second, there is a strong tendency to equate my emphasis on participatory culture with a neo-liberal focus on individual agency. See, for example, Andrejevic’s reference to ‘individual emotional engagement and investment’ (2011, p. 615), James Hay’s ‘increasingly individualized engagements with media’ (2011, p. 670), or Hay and Couldry’s ‘empowering expressive and creative individual generators of content’ (2011, pp. 481, 482). While,

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certainly, individuals do gain some greater degree of communication capacity as a result of their access to new tools of production and circulation, my primary emphasis is on ‘collective agency’, that is, the capacity of networked publics to work together towards shared goals and common interests. Within fan studies, there has always been a sharp divide between those who study individual fans and those who study fandom as an imagined and imaginative community; my work has always emphasized the collective dimensions of fandom. Similarly, my work on media literacies (Jenkins et al. 2006, p. 20) describes literacy as ‘social skills and cultural competencies’, not as individual capacities: The social production of meaning is more than individual interpretation multiplied; it represents a qualitative difference in the ways we make sense of cultural experience, and in that sense, it represents a profound change in how we understand literacy. In such a world, youth need skills for working within social networks, for pooling knowledge within a collective intelligence, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them. Increasingly, my focus is turning towards various activist networks and organizations that have been particularly effective at using new media tools and participatory practices in order to recruit and mobilize young people within the political process. Couldry (2011) argues that my definition of what constitutes a community requires further explanation, a project I will not tackle here, except to say that we acknowledge in Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al. 2013, p. 54) some of the challenges of applying this concept to the social structures we find online that almost always are ‘more fragmented, divided and certainly more dispersed than the corporate entities with which they interface, making it much harder for them to fully assert and defend their own interests. Fan communities are often enormously heterogeneous, with values and assumptions that fragment along axis of class, age, gender, race, sexuality and nationality, to name just a few’. But, for me, this focus on how we increase the collective capacity of networked publics is central to my efforts to promote a more participatory culture. I would agree with James Hay (2011, p. 666) when he writes, ‘it would be too simplistic to generalize blogging, photo-shopping and social networking (media revolution) as the condition for an enhanced democracy, a grassroots politics or (in Joe Trippi’s terms) the ‘‘overthrow of everything’’’. (See Trippi 2005.) These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared

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ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily provide key educational resources and do not ensure that anyone will listen when groups speak out about injustices they encounter. Moreover, there are many forces, some of which these authors identify, which might deflect or defeat efforts to use these tools towards political ends. There are, nevertheless, some signs that engagement with forms of participatory culture does increase the likelihood of other forms of political participation. A large-scale survey conducted by Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne (2012) found that young people who were highly involved in interest-driven activities were five times as likely as those without such involvements to engage in participatory politics and nearly four times as likely to participate in all political acts measured in their survey. While the majority of youth of all races did not participate in any kind of political activity, 43 per cent of white, 41 per cent of black, 38 per cent of Latino and 36 per cent of Asian-American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months. Granted, the practices of participatory culture can produce complicated and contradictory results when read according to traditional ideological categories. I would agree with James Hay’s analysis (2011) that the Tea Party movement is a complicated example
top-down broadcast media (Fox News) and the Republican political establishment has worked alongside more grassroots and populist efforts in order to seek to de-legitimate the Obama presidency (Skocpol and Williamson 2012). Similarly, the Tea Party needs to be understood as an unstable coalition across many groups with often contradictory ideologies (some free market, some socially conservative, some libertarian, some racist, some populist) which are often at war amongst themselves. And we might want to think about the range of different organizational and leadership structures in right wing politics today, which range from the charismatic leaders of the religious right to much more hierarchical and institutionalized groups which tend to dominate the conservative landscapes to the more populist and participatory groups that Hay notes.9 Hay and I would seemingly agree that there is nothing about participatory culture that would inevitably lead to progressive outcomes. Even if we do succeed in broadening cultural and political participation, this will not make all other ideological conflicts go away. Rather, for me, the fight for a more participatory culture has to do with insuring as many people as possible have access to the platforms and practices through which future struggles over equality and justice will take place. Alongside the rise of the Tea Party, we have seen some dramatic developments in recent years, as, for example, undocumented youths are using the circulation of grassroots videos to call out the Obama administration’s record of deporting more people than in the previous Bush administration and, through this process, pushing him to pass the DREAM act by executive decree (Zimmerman 2012). Whatever other

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concerns we have about the state of American democracy, we can point towards significant increases in the political influence of youth, women, Latinos and African-Americans over the past two election cycles, and at least some of these increases reflect their ability to mobilize around their common interests. One of these trends is not more illustrative of the politics of participatory culture than another. Couldry (2011, p. 496) critiques the lack of attention within Convergence Culture to the pathways which might bridge between forms of cultural participation and more robust forms of political participation: ‘no account is provided of the wider forces that might connect such pockets of talk and action to wider mechanisms of social change and political challenge’. This call actually reflects the trajectory of a significant portion of my work since publishing Convergence Culture, including my current research initiative for the MacArthur Foundation. My team of graduate students and postdocs has interviewed several hundred young activists to better understand the ‘civic paths’ that fostered their involvement with politics as well as to map the tactics they have used to spread their message and mobilize their supporters. Even though I start with the assumption that culture is always already political, I have also long been frustrated with the inability of cultural scholars to demonstrate strong links between ‘cultural resistance’ and more ‘institutionalized’ forms of politics. With this new work, my research team is doing in-depth case studies of specific activist networks
including Invisible Children, Occupy Wall Street, the DREAM activists, the Harry Potter Alliance, Nerdfighters, Students for Liberty and American Moslem youth (Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova 2012). These groups reflect a diversity of ideological perspectives and political identities. These cases were also selected because these networks and organizations had proven successful at recruiting, training and mobilizing young people in core political debates. Couldry (2011, p. 496) also suggests that Convergence Culture failed to provide ‘examples of online consumers using similar practices to ‘‘strik[e] back economically’’ to challenge the labour policies of corporations or Wall Street bankers’ bonus culture (i.e. important corporate power in other domains)’. Fair enough, but we can now produce a range of such examples: accounts by Jonathan Gray (2012) and Kurt Squire and Matthew Gaydos (2013) of the way popular culture references and new media tactics were deployed against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s efforts to crack down on public unions; Thorson et al.’s research (2013) into Occupy Wall Street’s use of YouTube and Twitter; Lori Kido Lopez’s account (2011) of the anti-racist campaigns launched by anime fans in collaboration with more traditional Asian-American anti-discrimination groups; and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik’s accounts (KliglerVilenchik et al. 2012, Kligler-Vilenchik forthcoming) of the work of the Harry Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters, and Imagine Better, including its campaigns in support of labour unions picketing Wal-Mart, marriage equality and (most recently) the need for Warner Brothers to shift its chocolate contracts to Fair

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Trade producers (Jenkins 2012). Sangita Shresthova and I (2012) also co-edited a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which included case studies of ‘fan activism’
with varying degrees of success
from around the world. Each of these accounts suggests that these groups are actively deploying skills acquired through recreational consumption towards political and economic struggles around social justice, a development that Convergence Culture anticipates.

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Critique in the public interest? Publishing Convergence Culture was intended and has functioned as the first step towards a more interventionist approach to cultural politics. Turner’s critiques here (2011) of efforts by (mostly British and Australian) cultural scholars to engage with the creative industries are both painful and ironic. My own inspiration came as a result of a visit to Australia early in my career, especially conversations I had with Australian scholars (including Turner himself) about the tradition of cultural policy work he discusses here. I met and observed Australian academics who were actively shaping their country’s cultural policy and who were engaged public intellectuals, speaking out through various forms of media, particularly public radio. When I returned to America, eager to apply that model to our context, I discovered complications. In Australia, which has a strong public service media tradition, cultural policy is shaped significantly through government initiatives (though the privatization of cultural production is a growing global phenomenon), whereas in America, as a consequence of deregulation, corporations directly determine the cultural policies (often through terms of service) that have the greatest impact on the public’s ability to meaningfully participate in networked culture. To make meaningful change here, we need to engage directly with corporations
and this is the impulse that shaped Convergence Culture and, even more so, Spreadable Media. When people elsewhere intervene in policy discussions with governments, they often do not fully agree with the agendas of the political leadership, and they often find their work used in ways that can run counter to their own commitments. Nevertheless, intervention is so vital that they have no choice but to try to work through this imperfect process. They often have to construct their arguments in language they calculate will be persuasive to policy-makers and political leaders, even if that language differs in substantial ways from that they would use in producing scholarly articles. And speaking as a public intellectual involves stripping aside some of the nuances and complications that engage us as theorists in order to paint the stakes of these debates in broader strokes. The same has proven true when we seek to intervene in corporate policies, though the rhetorical shifts and tactical moves

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necessary for such work may seem less familiar to those in cultural studies. As we enter into this still largely unfamiliar space, we are going to make mistakes, some of which are costly, and I hope that smart and hopefully open-minded critics
Turner among them
will keep us honest as we deal with the contradictions and paradoxes of such exchanges. 10 Turner (2011, p. 693) argues that earlier efforts to shape cultural policy were governed by shared commitments to improve ‘the nation, the citizen and, typically, the state-subsidized cultural organization’, whereas he expresses concern that more recent efforts to influence corporate practices have too often focused on ‘the entrepreneur, the commercial industry and, possibly, the consumer’. For my part, I have always sought to intervene to promote greater opportunities for meaningful participation by both citizens and consumers, to encourage greater educational resources and opportunities to help expand who has the ability to participate, to push back on policies that might disable or exploit participation. In some cases, this struggle has meant interventions towards the public good in dialogue with corporations. In others, this has involved working with governmental bodies, think-tanks, nonprofit organizations, foundations and activist groups. Such efforts may be necessarily ‘compromised’, and they are likely to produce at best ‘partial’ victories. However, as far as I am concerned, the stakes here are too great to disengage from these struggles. In the US context, and perhaps elsewhere, there is another dimension to such efforts: the reality that there are not going to be academic jobs for the massive number of graduate students our programmes are producing and thus the need to demonstrate that cultural expertise has value within other sectors. I am not arguing that cultural studies programmes should be transformed into trade and technical schools fitting students for industry; however, we do need to model how theories can be deployed in more pragmatic ways to address real-world challenges, and we need to prepare students who may be able to question corporate policies from within rather than hurling invective at people with whom you will never directly engage. I do not see this as ‘surrendering the space’ so much as ‘expanding the terrain’ upon which cultural studies interventions will occur. Given the economic realities, why would we not seek to equip our students to make interventions in cultural politics throughout their professional lives
in academia, but also in every other space where they may end up working. There are clearly some substantive disagreements between myself and some of the contributors to this special issue in terms of our emphasis, our tactics, our ideological commitments and our theoretical models. We are all seeking to make sense of a changing media landscape, and we are all working towards progressive politics. There has been some attempts here, implicit or explicit, to label those of us who are optimistic about the prospects of a more participatory culture as neo-liberal or even ‘neo-conservative’, and these charges represent perhaps the least collegial dimensions of this special issue.

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Surely, your fight should be focused against those who would silence minority perspectives (say, by imposing new requirements on voter registration) and not with those of us who are seeking alternative mechanisms for broadening participation. For me, such passages raise core questions about how inclusive or narrow the discipline of cultural studies can be or should be in terms of ideological perspectives, fields of investigation, theoretical and methodological models, or tactics of public intervention. In some cases, there is an impatience with analytic work that seeks to describe emerging conditions rather than judge them, and in others, there is a tendency to confuse theoretical disagreements for ideological ones. For me, ‘critique in the public interest’ must go beyond ‘critique’ and should include forms of advocacy and intervention. However flawed, the concept of ‘participatory culture’ allows us to describe a set of criteria by which we might judge progress made or battles lost in our struggles towards a more diverse and democratic culture. Stephen Duncombe (2012) argues that all activism requires some element of utopianism, some vision of what a better society might look like, so I want to challenge my critics to use this debate to better articulate what they are fighting for and not simply what they are fighting against. Too often, work in critical and cultural studies sees a narrow conception of critique as the only goal of theory-making and often seeks to protect its independence from commercial interests at the cost of making meaningful interventions in public debates. This is why, perhaps, I described certain strands of cultural theory and politics as ‘critical pessimism’, a rhetorical excess for which I have since publicly apologized (Jenkins 2011). ‘Critical pessimism’ is too simplistic a term to describe legitimate disagreements about what constitutes the best ways forward for the media reform movement
a term no harsher than some of the labels which have been applied to me and my work, but certainly not constructive if the goal is to foster greater dialogue between alternative perspectives within cultural studies. For the record, I never meant the term to dismiss the legitimate concerns raised by critical scholars, but rather to challenge a tendency among some critical studies writers to write in ways that left open very little possibility of meaningful political and social change. For me, critique is a means to an end and that end is the production of a more diverse, democratic and just society. In the opening pages of Spreadable Media, my co-authors and I (Jenkins et al. 2013, p. xii) write: Ours is a reformist rather than a revolutionary agenda, offering pragmatic advice in hopes of creating a more equitable balance of power within society. We accept as a starting point that the constructs of capitalism will greatly shape the creation and circulation of most media texts for the foreseeable future and that most people do not (and cannot) opt out of commercial culture.

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We are seeking to identify mechanisms that allow for meaningful social change under the conditions of Neoliberal capitalism. We want to make the changes we can now, even if this means sometimes working within rather than outside capitalist institutions. Other writers here will disagree with that priority, stressing the need to fight for fundamental and systemic change. These are debates worth having, even if I would argue that the two are not necessarily incompatible goals. The urgency of this current moment suggests that we need to be working together to broaden who gets to participate, to push back against corporate and governmental policies that constrain our capacity to use new media in the public interest, to identify ways groups are engaging in active participation in spite of such constraints, and to advocate ways that corporate, governmental and other organizations might better respond to their constituencies. The struggle to reform media is going to be a multi-front struggle. We should be figuring out how to work together, where we can, rather than refighting the same old culture (studies) wars we have been restaging for the past 20 years.

Notes 1

While it is true that the term ‘convergence culture’ has been taken up by a range of other scholars since the book’s publication, I doubt most of the other authors being discussed would accept the premise that their work should be understood as part of a ‘convergence culture’ model. The differences in our disciplinary backgrounds, institutional settings, discursive goals and theoretical and ideological commitments are important in understanding our work. The editors do make a substantive effort to situate their discussion in relation to historic frictions at the intersection between media studies and cultural studies, an important context for such a discussion, but most of those they identify here probably would not see either field as their primary discipline. I can only speak for myself and my own work. That said, I am not sure you can meaningfully engage with Convergence Culture in isolation from the body of my work: while a commitment to fostering a more participatory culture is a central theme of my work, my theoretical models have evolved dynamically over time due to changing circumstances, shifting realities, engagement with work of other thinkers and so forth. And for me, the academic publications are strongly connected with the work of my blog, a space I use to foster larger conversations, and with my various projects that attempt to translate these ideas into practice. For that reason, I am approaching this paper less with a goal of defending Convergence Culture and more with an emphasis of showing how some of the questions raised are addressed in the context of my larger body of work, especially in works published since the book’s release in 2006.

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For example, there is an important methodological discussion about how we might move from localized case studies to larger theoretical models and there is a key pedagogical debate about what constitutes appropriate curriculum for cultural studies in the twenty-first century, both of which would require deeper discussion than I can provide here. For example, I have already written a very productive dialogic essay with Nico Carpentier (2013), which explores points of contact between our respective models for understanding the politics of participation. See, for example, the balance of critical and more celebratory perspectives within Ito et al. (2013). There is a need for continued historical reflection which might place current developments in larger contexts and which might encourage us to take a longer view on the process of media change. This debate would benefit enormously from more historicized accounts, but I also see value in trying to capture and analyse emerging technologies and practices, so that timely theoretical interventions can help shape future developments before the paint dries. We can see this difference when we compare Andrejevic’s critique of the corporate use of sentiment analysis tools with the forms of ‘conversation maps’ MIT Media Lab alum Warren Sack (2005) describes. Sack argues that mapping the flow of conversations would allow large-scale communities to better understand their own discursive interactions, often with the goal of ensuring diversity of perspectives as well as identifying tactics for working towards shared interests. Sack was designing tools that could move fluidly from large-scale conversation maps towards more qualitative engagement with specific posts and conversations. As Andrejevic (2011, p. 613) suggests, corporate use of sentiment analysis seeks ‘to capture enough data to discern an overall tendency, or an aggregate sentiment’, an approximation which falls short of the tools for democratic citizenship Sack imagines. This is a powerful example of the limits of technological determinist readings: though the initial steps down this path were framed as creating tools for democratic participation, current use of similar tools can be highly exploitative, especially when employed cynically by corporations simply seeking to more effectively market to specific demographics. Yet, we need to remain open to the possibility that those same tools might be deployed differently if the tools or the data they generate were made more widely available to these networked publics as has been advocated by those who are seeking to make easy-to-use visualization tools accessible to a broader range of users (Danzinger 2008). There are plenty of signs throughout the book of scepticism about commercial interests: to cite a few examples, my discussion of the shifting relationships between Lucasfilm and Star Wars fans (pp. 153
164); the conflicts that had emerged between the producers of American Idol and certain segments of their audience over the voting mechanisms (pp. 89
93);

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my expressed concerns about the consequences of moving civic conversations into commercial spaces, such as shopping malls or massively multiplayer games (pp. 242, 243). This generation of feminist fan scholars announced their collective emergence through Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006). For a useful discussion of the structure of conservative organizations, see Amy Binder and Kate Wood (2012). For a brutally honest overview of how one of my teams’ efforts to partner with NBC News to promote news literacy went awry, read Klopfer and Haas (2012).

Notes on Contributor Henry Jenkins is a Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author, with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, of the 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture and the author or editor of another 15 books, including Convergence Culture (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2006), and Textual Poachers (1992).

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