Core Post 4

Henry Jenkins’ article, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” reminds me of an article we read before, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,” because it is obvious that his research on fans and fan culture provides his theory of media convergence with a foundation. When he talks about media convergence, he focuses on the relationship between production and consumption, producers and consumers, to explore the cultural logic of these relationships in the new media ecology, i.e., to discuss the future development of media convergence and to rethink the effect of media convergence on the social structure. As he claims, “media convergence is more than simply a technological shift.” He points out that “convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences.” In the article, using the term “convergence” liberally, alone, without placing “media” ahead of it, indicates that he prefers to emphasize a macroscopic analysis of the new communication pattern. Meanwhile, he points out that uneven social development would be reflected in the uneven rate of convergence, and the power of the collective intelligence would reshape the forms of social community and balance the hegemonic power of the traditional media environment. However, the power of the collective intelligence embodying the active behavior of the consumers raises an ambivalent and more complicated media system that involves economy, politics, and law. We have to be dialectical to talk about the sentence that “some fear that media is out of control; others that it is too controlled. Some see a world without gatekeepers; others a world where gatekeepers have unprecedented power” (34).

Just think about the presentation I gave in week 8. In the “we media age,” the consumers of traditional media became the grassroots producers of new media, and they use the new media as a communication means to make the social experiment videos. Nevertheless, when they record others’ behavior candidly and blame them, it is a way of social supervision or "medium Justice," which is to intervene in the judicatory independence by reason of press freedom; that is, judicatory justice is replaced with morality justice.