Convergence Culture Research Articles

<b>Reprodutibilidade e convergências no ciberespaço: a circulação de obras literárias em adaptações televisivas<b>

In this study, multimodal circulation of literary texts in television adaptations is outlined, emphasizing their implications in the conceptualization and value judgment in the Arts (particularly in Literature). The technological boom in several social segments and new reading practices in the current information revolution age have influenced the circulation of literature in new forms and intersemiotic medias. By congregating theories about cyberculture and media convergence (Negroponte, Levy and Jenkins) and the analysis of specific cases, such as the adaptation of Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew (1593) in O Cravo e a Rosa (2000), a Brazilian telenovela directed by Walcyr Carrasco and Mario Teixeira, a new cultural context emerges. In this new configuration where television and cyberspace are part of the convergence culture, the media and their users interact. This interaction contributes towards the survival of the literary text and the emergence of new reading practices.

Ghosts, Machines, and Asian Law: Some Comments

AbstractThis paper asks how globalization relates to legal culture. It argues that there exists, at least in the developed world, a general global culture; it follows, then, that there must be a global legal culture as well. Not everyone in modern societies is completely drawn into the global legal culture, however, as the research of the David and Jaruwan Engel in Thailand suggests. In general, however, the legal cultures of modern, developed societies are strongly convergent. In particular, there is emerging a global and convergent culture of human rights. Some Asian scholars and political figures have argued that conceptions of fundamental human rights are culturally Western, and may not suit the cultures of the East. The paper argues, however, that the human rights culture is not “Western” so much as modern; it arose in the West, but it is no more unsuitable to Asian societies than the automobile and the computer, which also arose first in the West.

Furiously Franchised: Clueless , Convergence Culture, and the Female-Focused Franchise

Furiously Franchised: Clueless, Convergence Culture, and the Female-Focused Franchise Kyra Hunting (bio) In the summer of 1995 a low-budget comedy that Paramount picked up after Fox put it in turnaround became, in lead character Cher’s parlance, the “totally prominent” sleeper hit of the season.1 Amy Heckerling’s Clueless became a nearly instant teen classic, influencing the language, fashion, and style of a generation and challenging the popular opinion that a film whose core audience was teen girls wasn’t financially lucrative. While Heckerling’s film has received limited academic attention, primarily as an adaptation of Emma, the significance of Clueless extends beyond its cinematic iteration. The success of the film became the foundation for a complete multimedia brand, including a television show, a video game, and twenty-one novels. Heckerling and Paramount Pictures (purchased by Viacom) turned the teen flick into a franchise targeted at tween and teen girls as a niche market. Clueless has been credited by industry observer Isabel Walcott for starting the wave of teen films in the late 1990s by having “opened people’s eyes to the fact that if they could get teenage girls to come to a movie, they could make a killing,” although Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) usually receives credit for the industry trend.2 Similarly, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003) and Dawson’s Creek (WB, 1998–2003) have been discussed as shaping the niche market for television targeted at teen girls and innovating convergence media for that market, they were in fact predated by the Clueless television show (ABC, 1996–1997; UPN 1997–1999).3 [End Page 145] Tracing the history of the film Clueless reveals an extensive franchise that exemplifies media convergence centered on girls. This history destabilizes media myths that discursively posit the franchise as masculine or frame the female-driven franchise as a novel phenomenon. A perusal of the trade press reveals that Hollywood “discovers” that girls and women can support a media franchise fairly frequently. The achievements of Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008; Chris Weitz, 2009; David Slade, 2010; Bill Condon, 2011, 2012) were met with ebullient press accounts touting the surprise of these franchises’ financial success. Summit ended up with Twilight because larger studios passed on it, largely because of the conventional wisdom that “female-driven properties aren’t always the safest bet.”4 A common narrative is that Sex and the City, Twilight, and High School Musical (Kenny Ortega, 2006) changed this attitude, as “films playing mainly to women . . . have gradually been seeping into Hollywood’s consciousness.”5 The acknowledgment of these female-centered franchises is important but all too familiar. After Clueless’s success a number of films targeting this audience followed, leading the Guardian to argue that “Hollywood has re-acquainted itself with the young female audience,” a process that apparently required repeating ten years later.6 When Clueless became a television show, it, along with Sabrina the Teenage Witch (ABC, 1996–2000; WB, 2000–2003), represented the crest of a similar televisual wave.7 Picked up by ABC after a bidding war, Clueless was paired with Sabrina to round out its family-oriented TGIF programming block and to attract young female viewers.8 A year later, Clueless was moved to parent company Viacom’s fledging UPN network to attract a similar audience. Clueless staked out an audience for its multimedia franchise that would later define the WB with programs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which the Hollywood Reporter originally described as “sort of ‘Clueless’ meets ‘Dracula’”; Dawson’s Creek; and Felicity (WB, 1998–2002).9 Clueless can be seen not only as the start of a wave of 1990s teen films and an early iteration of niche teen programming but also as a strong example of convergence culture through its multimedia franchise, driven by the conglomeration that characterized the mid-1990s. The movie Clueless had originally been conceived as a television show called No Worries, when Fox asked Amy Heckerling to develop a television show about high school focused on the popular kids.10 Although Fox ultimately abandoned the project, in part because it desired a...

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media:Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture Online Roundtable on Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, with participants Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Melissa Click, Sam Ford, Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Sharon Ross. Moderated by Lousia Stein, Book Review Editor Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York University Press. 2013. $29.95 hardcover; $12.10 e-book. 352pages The following conversation is an edited excerpt from a broader roundtable discussion, organized and moderated by Cinema Journal between June and July 2013. In this section, the conversation focuses on popular culture, fans, and niche cultures. The contributors responded to a series of prompts that asked them to consider the relationship between Spreadable Media and past and current work in fan studies (including Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture).1 Participants also explore Spreadable Media’s relationship to fan studies scholarship and ask whether Spreadable Media represents a shift in the way we think of fans in relationship to popular culture. The full conversation addresses Spreadable Media’s engagement with questions of transmedia, digital culture, and online social activism more broadly, and it will be published online in an upcoming edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. [End Page 152] Kristina Busse: Although Spreadable Media is ultimately not a fan studies book, nor does it try to be, it purposefully engages the concept of the fan and thus gets read in conjunction with fan scholarship, including Jenkins’s previous works, Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture. Given that trajectory and the way the book repeatedly deploys specific examples of fan activities within its larger project, it raises the question as to how Spreadable Media uses the fan and how it engages with fan scholarship. Looking at the way Spreadable Media stretches the concept of being a fan to a point of seeming unrecognizability, I would suggest that the book is ultimately not interested in fans, except what they tell us about larger audiences. There are obviously strategic reasons to expand the term fan from the narrow confines that Henry Jenkins’s earlier Textual Poachers set out. In the intervening years, many aspects of fandom have mainstreamed, a move that Henry has both described extensively and partly helped bring about. There are many benefits to conceptualizing active audiences as fans, but I’d like to look at some of the drawbacks. In particular, I’d like to look at what happens when the definition of fan changes from one based on identity to one based on action. I’d like to look at what gets left out when the definition of fan is as broadly conceived as it is in Spreadable Media, when any “like” click on Facebook, any forwarding of a YouTube link, constitutes a fan activity. I am concerned that such a broadening of the concept facilitates a shift from the fans studied in Textual Poachers to general audiences. Such a shift moves the focus away from the marginal media fan, who was mostly commercially nonviable, often resistant, and uncooperative, and whose dedication to a gift economy was often in spite of capitalist alternatives and not because they didn’t exist. In its stead, the fans who take center stage in Spreadable Media are the commercializable audiences, who happily seem to collaborate in their own exploitation, free laborers creating value of which they cannot even assume ownership. What gets excluded and marginalized in Spreadable Media, then, are the very founders of the concept of fan, the unruly and aggressively anticommercial, the queered and sexually explicit, the anticapitalist and anticopyright. What gets excluded are the audiences whose practices may have been adapted and adopted and celebrated but whose presence is ultimately not desired in this brand-new, commercially viable fan universe. Spreadable Media acknowledges this danger: “We all should be vigilant over what gets sacrificed, compromised, or co-opted by media audiences as part of this process of mainstreaming the activities and interests of cult audiences.”2 But when reading through the chapters, I am distressed by observing that very compromise the authors warn against. I fear the actual driving force of...

Leaving Cancerland: Following Bud at the End of Life

Many have written about illness and the end of life. Couser and Frank have both shown how life writing can be a form of reclamation for wounded storytell- ers-a strategy for regaining control over the narrative of one's life, asserting agency over the politics of one's body, and reestablishing one's subjectivity in the face of objectifying treatment, diagnosis, and disability. Beyond the print texts that these scholars examine, there are countless online examples of narratives about illness and the end of life. According to Heilferty, ?Nowhere are illness narratives being relayed more broadly, more vividly and in such detail than in blogs? (1540).Scholars have been attending to the uses of illness blogging in healthcare contexts for nearly two decades. Otherwise known as thanablogs (Sofka), blogs about illness and the end of life have proved useful for informing professionals about the experiences of patients and families (Heilferty; McLellan; McNamara; Lowney and O'Brien), creating opportunities for healing through writing (Mc- Cosker; Rains and Keating; Seale et al.), garnering emotional support from friends and family (Chung and Kim; Keim-Malpass et al.; Kim and Chung; Sofka), and embodying discourses of illness through dialogue (Mahato; Pitts; Segal). In short, blogging has proven to bring into view the divergent and convergent moments of readers' and writers' mutually exclusive experience in the face of illness and the end of life.Reading with Bud Goodall as he writes at the end of his life, I've come to think of illness blogging as an intermedial endeavor. It constitutes a relational, reflexive, dialogic, and collaborative platform for constructing and sharing stories of illness. Where the genre of life writing that Couser and Frank discuss can lead in some cases to post-mortem accounts of sense-making in the face of illness, Bud's blog captures moments when a community of followers witnessed his ups and downs as the story unfolded in (approximately) real time. Each post is not merely an archive of his life and his experience but a digital monument marking a moment in time when others gathered to make Bud present in their lives. To be vulnerable online-to expose one's tenderness in an unfolding chronicle of an end-of-life sojourn-opens opportunities for communicating what it's like to live with terminal illness and for experiencing what it's like to make contact with a person who is dying while he lives.Not only does my story pay tribute to those moments, but it also brings me into an intermedial dialogue about Bud's life, situating myself alongside others who read Bud's blog-and perhaps those who read other illness blogs-and proffering intertextual responses to Bud's story. To tell my story of what it's like to read his writing by juxtaposing my thoughts alongside his is to participate in transmedia storytelling ( Jenkins, Convergence Culture), transposing aspects of his story into a new medium (i.e., a print-based academic journal), which is replete with its own constraints and affordances dictated by [its] material substance and mode of encoding (Ryan, 27). As an academic paper, it channels the content of Bud's blog across multiple media ( Jenkins, Transmedia Storytelling) as well as contributing to the dialogue begun by those who followed it. In short, writing about living and dying through blogging carries Bud's story forward in new realms. According to Bud, that is the most any writer can hope for (Riggs).Performatively, my story resists the representation of an integrated, singular notion of the self (as does Bud's blog), by facilitat[ing] a plurality of subject-po- sitions and identities to be represented within one text (McNamara 25). write in second person as a strategic way of invoking the intersubjective quality and intermedial experience of blogging and following a blog. The you that takes the place of the first-person, reflexive I effectively addresses both writer and reader, honoring the blended subject position germane to digital texts (McNamara). …

“It Belongs to the Internet”: Animal Images, Attribution Norms and the Politics of Amateur Media Production

“It Belongs to the Internet”: Animal Images, Attribution Norms and the Politics of Amateur Media Production

On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual Culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.

Aplikacje książkowe dla dzieci młodszych: między książką a grą komputerową

Artykuł porusza tematykę aplikacji książkowych dla dzieci i młodzieży. Przedstawia krótko historia tego medium i najważniejsze etapy jego rozwoju. Dziecięce aplikacje książkowe są omawiane jako część "kultury konwergencji". Artykuł uwzględnia również zarys zarówno aspektów terminologicznych, jak i również informacje na temat wcześniejszych inicjatyw badawczych ukierunkowane na ten rodzaj aplikacji. Głównym tematem tekstu są relacje między aplikacjami i grami komputerowymi. Autor próbuje zbadać te połączenia na kilku poziomach, począwszy od doświadczenia użytkownika struktur gamifikacyjnych zainstalowanych w narracji, kończąc na mikro-grach zawartych w aplikacjach książki jako rodzaj "bonusu".

O ciberespaço como possibilidade para a loucura: estudo de caso do Serviço de Saúde Mental Dr. Cândido Ferreira

From concepts like liquid modernity (BAUMAN, 2001), complexity (MORIN, 2007a; b), cyberspace and collective intelligence (LÉVY, 2007), convergence culture (JENKINS, 2009) and social networks (RECUERO, 2010), the paper presents a case study on the Health Service Dr. Cândido Ferreira (Campinas-SP). The clinic uses cyberspace to create a network of sociability and reintegrate ex-psychiatric patients in society. The service maintains websites and social networks to create spaces for communication to create spaces for communication between the various social actors and modify the representation of madness in society. The pioneering initiative is founded on the ideals of psychiatric reform and proposes a new dimension to the madness.

O The Daily como uma mistura de mídias e uma nova significação do meio jornal

A materialidade (suporte), as linguagens e a edição concederam uma identidade a cada tipo de jornalismo, gerando classificações como: jornal impresso, revista, telejornalismo, radiojornalismo etc. A análise da publicação digital The Daily nos fez questionar até que ponto esta divisão ainda é pertinente. Propõe-se aqui a reflexão sobre o The Daily como representante de uma nova experiência midiática e uma mistura de mídias, nas dimensões de suporte e linguagem, refletindo assim, também, sobre a própria cultura da convergência.

The Cultural Impact of Institutional Remix: The Formalisation of Textual Reappropriation within the ABC

In 2009, Mark Deuze proposed an updated approach to media studies to incorporate ‘media life’, a concept he suggests addresses the invisibleness of ubiquitous media. Media life provides a useful lens for researchers to understand the human condition in media and not with media. At a similar time, public service media (PSM) strategies have aligned audience participation with the so‐called Reithian trinity which suggest the PSB should inform, educate and entertain while performing its core values of public service broadcasting (Enli 2008). Remix within the PSM institution relies on audience participation, employing ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen 2006) as cultural artifact producers, and draws on their experience from within the media. Remix as a practice then enables us to examine the shift of the core PSM values by understanding how audience participation, informed by a human condition mobilised from our existence of being in media and not merely with media. However, remix within PSM challenges the once elitist construction of meaning models with an egalitarian approach towards socially reappropriated texts, questioning its affect on the cultural landscape. This paper draws on three years of ethnographic data from within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), exploring the remix culture of ABC Pool. ABC Pool operates under a Creative Commons licensing regime to enable remix practice under the auspices of the ABC. ABC Pool users provide a useful group of remix practitioners to examine as they had access to a vast ABC archival collection and were invited to remix those cultural artefacts, often adding cultural and fiscal value. This paper maintains a focus on the audience participation within PSM through remix culture by applying media dependency theory to remix as cultural practice and calls to expand and update the societal representation within the ABC.

Disciplining the Vernacular: Fair Use, YouTube, and Remixer Agency

Disciplining the Vernacular: Fair Use, YouTube, and Remixer Agency

Performing Citizenship Online: Identity, Subactivism and Participation

This paper calls for the adoption of a culturalist approach to the study of online participation. Notions of such as “civic cultures”, “public connection”, and “subactivism” represent effective theoretical and analytical tools that help grasp the meaning of online grassroots practices which emerge at the crossroads of politics and culture and are rooted in the realm of everyday life. Therefore, online participation is understood as the outcome of broader social changes and changes in the media environment, usually assumed under the labels “web 2.0” and “convergence culture”, co-determining each other. Drawing on empirical evidence from three interrelated research projects focused primarily on young people, the paper shows how participatory uses are unevenly distributed among social network users and acquire different meanings depending on the civic cultures and the “convergent media ecology” inhabited by the individuals.

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Boys' Love anime and queer desires in convergence culture: transnational fandom, censorship and resistance

Despite its ever-growing international popularity, Japanese anime and the industries that support it are in the middle of a crisis. In an era of media convergence, popularity has not translated into consistent profits as anime producers continue to lose money at home and overseas to rampant file sharing and ubiquitous streaming video sites illegally hosting copyrighted content that can be viewed for free. As a result, convergence is simultaneously fuelling the current anime industry crisis while also opening up new opportunities to make participatory culture work for both fans and producers – especially for niche markets like Boys' Love. This article explores how Boys' Love fans in Japan and other countries often operate in contradictory tension with and against anime industries and socio-cultural values as they access, consume and create around a form of homoerotic media that they do not want to be assimilated into mainstream culture and its norms. As more transnational publishers and distributors are licensing and selling Boys' Love manga and anime, the boundaries between margin and centre have begun to blur, producing intersecting and divergent desires among fans and producers around the commodification and adaptation of queer texts. The first part of this article focuses on how convergence is shaping the dynamic between anime producers and fan consumers, where niche markets have begun to figure into this situation, and what is politically at stake in the consumption and circulation of Boys' Love texts. The second part of the article examines several examples of Boys' Love television anime and Original Video Animation (OVA), with particular attention to Youka Nitta's Embracing Love and Shungiku Nakamura's Junjo Romantica, to assess how deliberate censorship in anime adaptations can sometimes efface important queer meaning in a text while in other instances it can open up new fantasies and ways of reading for viewers that are in keeping with the queerness the author ascribes to the genre.

Rethinking ‘Rethinking 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.

More than a desire for text

Why and on what bases do people choose content and share it in an online environment? At the centre of Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture lie in the transforming links between active, participative audiences, media content and media corporations. However, the ‘textually motivated’ desire to participate in the circulation of and control over texts is just one among other key motives for the dissemination and recirculation of content. Ethnography-based research conducted at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic suggests that when exploring participation in textuality, performative self-exposure and self-presentation must be taken into account as well as the context of audiences’ everyday life. Thus, I propose to approach participation as based not only on a ‘will to text’ but also on a dialectical relationship between a ‘will to self-performance’ and a ‘will to conformity’. These three factors then impact on the social curation of content – a reflexive process in which members of the audience construct texts for consumption and recirculation.

CBC and the Science Academy: A Participatory Journey

The publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has a unique, participatory relationship with the science academy that showcases scientific discovery on the Geologic Journey II website—a site run by CBC. Although academics work on interesting projects that have great relevance to those outside academic circles, their work is generally published in journals or texts that are not often accessed or, in some cases, understood by the general public. On Geologic Journey II, a site created in conjunction with the development of a documentary project, contemporary research is highlighted in a manner that makes it easily accessible to a much wider audience. Through the lens of media logic, using the theories of convergence culture and the public sphere, in this paper, I explore how the partnership between CBC and the science academy invigorates public discourse, and why building relationships with community partners makes good business sense for a public broadcaster.

Archiving the Digital Transition in the Boomer TV Sitcom Remake

The article examines contemporary film remakes of 50s and 60s American family sitcoms, in particular how these films figure old media (primarily the TV console) and the constructedness of the boomer sitcom family. The films include The Honeymooners (Schultz, 2005), The Beverly Hillbillies (Spheeris, 1993), The Addams Family (Sonnenfield, 1991), and Leave It to Beaver (Cadiff, 1997), with particular emphasis on Bewitched (Sony, 2005) as a case study. The article challenges popular perceptions of nostalgia as unproductive and regressive, as well as the reputation these films garner for being poor quality and derivative, in answer to larger questions on the function of nostalgia in convergence culture an important archival strategy for negotiating the digital transition and changing definitions of family and gender.

Adapting Superhero Comics for the Big Screen: Subculture for the Masses

This essay follows Henry Jenkins’ definitions and examines how adaptation is part of convergence culture and essentially an instance of transmedia storytelling. Focusing particularly on filmic adaptations of superhero comics, it intends to demonstrate how media convergence may actually trigger the integration of the traditionally ‘subcultural’ comics into the mass cultural film and potentially result in the former’s erasure. Although extinction seems to be inescapable, especially because the entertaining industry and its craving for profit are also involved, the two media are actually revealed to be interacting in more complex ways. This relationship is illustrated with examples drawn from Batman films, which eventually prove that filmic adaptations of superhero comics may actually defy stereotypical ideas about audience involvement in mass cultural entertainment, while also enhancing convergence, as they motivate audiences to engage in the hunt for further information in the comics and/or in other media.