Henry Jenkins, author of Worship at the Altar of Convergence, attempts to tackle a problem put forth for many years: how will technology affect the creation, distribution, and consumption of media? This is no small question with no one right answer, but I feel that Jenkins does a good job in his introduction of laying out some basic premises and offering a look into some possible answers. Several key ideas, to me, are the concepts of participatory culture and convergence/divergence.
These terms are by no means complex. Explicitly, their definitions are in a dictionary and those definitions can be applied in general terms to ideas of (new) media, but lets dive a little deeper. Participatory culture is about dispersed contribution. Common examples already discussed at length include Wikipedia, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook. The idea that content is no longer derived solely from a centralized source is almost second nature, especially to students of DTC, but turning back the clock reveals a completely different world. Going back 15 years, news was found on radio, tv, or paper, facts in books, and entertainment on a cartridge. In most cases, there was one primary resource used for understanding something. This led to interesting errors, such as a misplaced decimal point, leading to the incorrect perceived content of iron in spinach, which led to our favorite spinach-eating sailor. Today, such an error would never go so far. With millions of ways to verify and expand upon knowledge, our culture is able to contribute as a whole, not as individual nodes. To me, this is a great thing, but it certainly isn't some end to the discussion. While we now know how much iron is in spinach (not that much, really) participatory culture has had the unique effect of valuating opinions. Everyone can have an opinion no matter how crazy it is. We have yet to fully differentiate between the right to contribute and the privileged. Participatory culture has a long ways to go in that department.
Fortunately, participatory culture is not without its own tools of self regulation. Going back to Weinberger's Miscellaneous, we can see that while the internet as we know it is a literal explosion of information, there is now information about information that allows us to at least stay organized. Wikipedia is an excellent example, where articles are not only the information contained within, but also the history of all revisions and comments on those revisions. Services like Delicious allow users to tag information with information, allowing everyone to benefit from individual action, but avoid the input of rogue elements or outliers. Finally, computer technology itself allows everyone to have the same files, where before objects were limited by their physical nature, now people are not faced with such mundane issues as supply.
The second key point I find in Jenkins' introduction (among many), is the idea of convergence. He describes how convergence is on the opposite side of the coin as divergence and I can't help but agree. It is all a matter of perspective. Data and information can be seen as either converting from centralized control to decentralized (divergence), or that these concepts are now coming from all different places to one destination (convergence). Beyond this relatively straightforward idea is the premise of connectivity. Connections are how we navigate this world. Even without slipping into the philisophical (or existential, see previous post) it easy to point out how objects do not exist in and of themselves. All things have relationships, especially information. The construction of the internet was in fact all just hyperlinks. Connections from one page of text to another. Today we have fancier graphics, but the connections are still there, multiplying. Unfortunately, while I can connect Weinberger to the idea of particapatory culture, the only concept of connections (and convergence/divergence) within his text are strictly within the domain of information organization. While fitting for a book titled Everything is Miscellaneous, I feel that Jenkins does a better job of showing how these ideas are applicable to the entirety of the information age.
You have some really cool ideas here, but one thing I'd caution you against in your writing is the riff. That is, you're really good at riffing off of a topic and saying some interesting/smart things about it BUT sometimes you forget to come back to where the riff started off. In this case, providing some real concise definitions of your terms via Jenkins, and pointing directly to the Jenkins reading via quotes/summaries would've helped out. Thanks.
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