Jenkins - Core Post 5

This is my first time reading Henry Jenkins, and it’s been an interesting experience! In “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” Jenkins lays out the polarized response of how media critics have identified, characterized, and evaluated contemporary trends within the American media environment: those who take up “new media technologies” as allowing greater access, greater diversity of content, greater liberatory potential; and those who worry about the continued production of new and old forms of exclusion, monoculturalism, media ownership monopoly/oligopoly, etc. Jenkins takes up the task of identifying and parsing these tensions, and re-casting the role of cultural and (new) media studies to serve a public function as these tensions are worked out and calcified into certain forms—part of thinking “[c]onvergence [as] a process, but not an endpoint” (34). 

I think there’s a lot to say about this article, and I imagine others will take up problematics laid out by this article and how this article relates to contemporary issues of “collective intelligence.” I’d like to take up just one part, at the final paragraph of page 37; Jenkins writes

Convergence is also a risk for creative industries because it requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media—assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decisions. If old consumers were assumed to be passive, the new consumer is active. If old consumers were predictable and stationary, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or even media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If old consumers were seen as compliant, then new consumers are resistant, taking media into their own hands. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, they are now noisy and public. Much of this is old news to those of us who have been following debates in cultural studies over the past few decades. But, as John Hartley and Toby Miller suggest in this issue, with varying degrees of pessimism, the idea of the active and critical consumer is gaining new currency within media industries, creating new opportunities for academic intervention in the policy debates that will shape the next decade of media change." (37-38)

As I struggled to understand McRobbie on her stances, I struggle to situate Jenkins'. Does Jenkins believe these epochal shifts are 'real' and hard breaks, and/or are these breaks also about certain kinds of interpellation into 'active consumers' produced against their now-constructed-asformer subjectivities as 'passive consumers'? Perhaps the difference isn't stark, and perhaps Jenkins holds them together. When Jenkins notes that this is 'old news,' is that to say that scholars within cultural studies and writers in popular criticism have 'seen this coming' and have long identified it as an essential constitutive element of the 'coming of new media,' or is he drawing a greater genealogy that smooths out epochal shifts?