The arrival of widespread digital and inter-networked media has dramatically reshaped the nature of spectatorship and cultural and media consumption, alternatively amplifying, accelerating, shifting, disrupting, and in some cases, inverting the consumption/production/distribution cycle. This cycle has become increasingly interlinked, and the distinction between these activities increasingly blurred.
Jenkins tries to document the changing interaction of the consumer/text/producer relationship. He talks about the "new participatory culture" centering around the intersection of three trends:
His argument is that the way media consumption relationships have been altered are not binary and that there are both positive and negative results.
Jenkins spends a large portion of his essay discussing on-line fan communities, specifically as how commodity and knowledge interact and the resulting shifts in the production/consumption/distribution cycle. Jenkins ends by covering the development of jamming/activism/blogging in online environments (the opposite end of the knowledge/commodity culture dialectic).
Overview: talk about commodity culture, then about what pops up when you slap it in a 'knowledge' environment.
"What media companies need to do is ... take advantage of self-creating content," Duke observes. "The problem with the way that entertainment companies are approaching marketing on the Web is that they approach it the same way they approach marketing in every other medium: uni-directional, things going out. They need to open up the channels to also allow things to come in."
Take any well-branded cereal, for instance -- one of those packages of sugar-coated corn meal with a recognizable cartoon character mascot on the box. What's the content there: the cereal, or the cartoon character? Is the animal cartoon a communicator of the product's brand image, or is the food itself merely a medium through which the character is communicated? It's a tricky distinction.
something of interest, an August 4 BBC News article entitled Stopping the pop-swappers:
According to the RIAA, CD sales dropped by 10% in 2001 and a further 6.8% last year, largely because of file sharing.
But the figures tell a different story.
In America and the rest of the world the biggest culprit in falling music sales is large-scale CD piracy by organised crime.
In just three years, sales of pirate CDs have more than doubled,
according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
(IFPI).
Every third CD sold is a pirate copy, says the federation.
The IFPI's Commercial Music Piracy 2003 report, produced in early
July, reveals pirate CD sales rose 14% in 2002 and exceeded one billion
units for the first time.
Of course, by blaming file sharing, the RIAA has and will continue to scare up all kinds of legislation which will further extend and strengthen its control of the market (and their IP rights in general)...
Posted by leonard on Wednesday, Jun 25 @ 12:21AM
I'll be updating the links / resources above. In the meantime, I'd like to invite people to participate on the comments section here.
Is there anything in particular you want to discuss on Thursday? Any great links? Thoughts on the reading? It's all fair game. Feel free to follow up, or post a new topic.