blog post 6. Jenkins and Weinberger

The introduction sample that we read from Henry Jenkin's Convergence Culture was very interesting. I have always been interested in the idea of convergence, especially when applied to popular culture, and it turns out that Jenkin's has gone and made a career out of analyzing the convergence of new media and how new/old media thrive, fall,and eventually coexist... and the guy is an MIT professor!

My summary of this introduction, and thus Jenkin's main points were the focus on the shift in media culture. How convergence has been grouped into this idea of a "single black box" and what it really means when different media converge. The cultural shift towards more gadgets and more information has not lead us down this predicted black box path, but Jenkin's is keen to point out that it might not have manifested anyways. Jenkin's tends to focus less on the physical act of converging things, and tends to look more at how ideas converge and what that might mean for industries in the future. Can we all get together and solve each other's problems?

In comparison to Weinberger, I am seeing a trend in how both authors tend to look at the use of crowds in gathering and manipulating data. Weinberger looked to crowds and focused on how people could gather data and what could be achieved when people lost control and gave the power to the crowd. Jenkins is close to this idea, but his work seems to be looking more at how these acts will affect us culturally and the ways we perceive the different media we use today.