As Much as I Admire What Jenkins is Trying to Do...

Is Convergence Culture a self-help book for marketing? My irritations with Jenkins’ book were really brought in this week’s readings. The main problem I have is that fact that he takes something like “advertising” as a given, as a necessary component to entertainment. It is from this foundation that he attempts to merge “cultural studies” and “the new marketing discourse” (Jenkins 62). Why do we need to merge the two? Who does this benefit more, cultural studies, or the new marketing discourse? The other authors we have read for this class, deal with Industry, yet acknowledge that business as usual is problematic. This does not come up enough in this week’s readings.

I don’t care if something is considered a “‘lovemark’” or a “traditional ‘brand’” (Jenkins 70). If I wanted to, I could come up with terms like these (probably better ones), but it wouldn’t help us understand our situation any better. This is one of the many instances where Jenkins uncritically recycles terms and drops them haphazardly in his book. Throughout the reading I felt like I was wandering around in Jenkins’ web of corporate-marketing-jargon. Yes it is important, if not essential to understand what is going on in Industry so that we (academics) can work in it, and deal with it in a critical manner. However, Jenkins is asking too much, without providing any benefits for those of us outside (at the moment) of Industry.

Jenkins’ “paradox” only provides us with a false dichotomy: “to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified” (Jenkins 62). However, there is a very simple way out of this: if one views the networks as problematic, they will stop wanting to be desired by them, and therefore their tastes will not be commodified. Why do we need networks to make meaning for us? If we are going to attempt to create good user experiences, I think we shouldn’t be limited to Jenkins’ narrow constraints. If users are repeatedly telling us that their lawn mower, “Is not working,” why would we ask them if putting a bow on it would change their mind?  

Maybe the fact that people are purchasing TiVos (Jenkins 66) and changing the channel during commercials, isn’t that the commercials are poorly done (how can they be when so much time and money goes into making them?) but that PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE ADVERTISING! Why isn’t Jenkins allowing us to arrive at this conclusion? The idea of a world without advertising is NOT radical. The fact that people think it IS radical, is itself a very telling sign. As Tim Wu finds in his work The Master Switch, there is no “natural” link between advertising and entertainment.  Although advertising has been a popular practice in our RECNET past (how long have humans lived without it?), it does not mean it is inevitable. There were certain instances (corporate entities sleeping with the government) in the past that made advertising, entertainment, and new technologies come together. The fact that we now see people wanting to separate them for good, is in no way strange: there were reasons/people/new technologies that made the two come together, and there will be reasons/people/new technologies that will attempt to break the two apart.