This week’s readings provide an overview of the many kinds of “media convergence” occurring with new\/emergent\/digital media. The Jenkins and Boler articles will be required reading; the latter begins our process of thinking about the political uses of new media, which we’ll focus on more next week.<\/p>\n
(Note to non-UVM blog readers: Both the Jenkins and Boler chapters are freely available online; just do a pdf search for them. The Jenkins piece is also readable here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n 1)\u00a0David Bell<\/strong>, \u201cOn the net: Navigating the World Wide Web,\u201d from Creeber and Martin, ed., Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media<\/em> (Open University Press, 2009). Optional.<\/p>\n This is an optional reading that provides some handy reference points for those with little or no background in media studies. Bell provides helpful definitions of the Internet, the World Wide Web, cyberspace and cyberculture, and media convergence (a central term for us this week; see p. 35-6), a useful historical overview of the growth of online social networking, and an intriguing (if brief) portrayal of how new media spaces interact with real physical spaces and in the process \u201crecreate urban spaces as multi-user environments\u201d (p. 37).<\/p>\n 2)\u00a0Henry Jenkins,<\/strong> \u201cIntroduction: \u2018Worship at the altar of convergence\u2019,\u201d Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide<\/em> (New York University Press, 2006).\u00a0<\/em>Required.<\/p>\n Jenkins is a leading scholar of \u201caudience studies\u201d and media uses, and director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. This article provides an overview of some of the ways in which media are converging, both technologically and culturally. Media convergence, as Jenkins describes it, is both a top-down and a bottom-up process. It involves the media industries, with corporations competing \u2013 and often \u201cconverging\u201d and consolidating \u2013 to control an increasingly vast and powerful global market; but it also involves consumers and users making decisions to suit their own needs, which in turn affect the outcomes of social, political, and technological processes. Since the book was published in 2006, convergence has proceeded in more or less the haphazard way Jenkins predicted it will.<\/p>\n 3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Megan Boler<\/strong>, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Boler, ed., Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times<\/em> (MIT Press, 2008). Required: read pp. 1-29, and 37-42 (Glossary).<\/p>\n This is the first in a series of readings that looks at the relationship between new media and political democracy. Boler introduces a number of ways in which activists have used media in recent years. We will be looking at most of these in coming weeks. (See her typology, on p. 28, and the Glossary beginning on p. 37, which consists of quotes from authors and activists from the remainder of the book.) The first few sections of this reading can provide the focus for our discussions in class and online. Other tasks for this week:<\/p>\n A final observation: Note how often MIT keeps coming up in this class: Boler\u2019s book was published by MIT Press, Jenkins \u2013 like Noam Chomsky \u2013 is a long-time employee of MIT, and MIT was the institution that took issue with Aaron Swartz\u2019s theft of their JSTOR files. Keep your eye out for other institutions that keep recurring in our readings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week’s readings provide an overview of the many kinds of “media convergence” occurring with new\/emergent\/digital media. The Jenkins and Boler articles will be required reading; the latter begins our process of thinking about the political uses of new media, … Continue reading
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