Convergence Culture by Elias Ribeiro

Transmedia is here to stay.  Convergence culture has been weaving into our everyday lives. In the course of one day, most citizens of our postmodern world will be transiting, communicating, watching, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, through a variety of mediums and medias. 


Have you looked around your living room lately? The amount of black boxes laying around? It is a TV, a DVD player, a satellite receiver, a game console, a sound system, 4 or 5 remote controls and the "i"s. iphone, ipad, itv, imac... This is a clear reflection of how incompatible and dysfunctional different media technologies are. Will there be one black box in the future that does everything? Would that mean convergence maturity? The answer is no, convergence is about the content and not about the hardware.


"Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere... Ready or not we are living within a convergence culture." (Jenkins, 2006, p.16).


Apart from using our phones as communication devices we also use it to play games, watch videos, take and send pictures as well as videos or even to watch a live rock concert from a remote location. You can listen to that same concert through your radio in the car, your DVD player at home, at your computer through a web radio, your ipod, or a good old walkman. 


According to Jenkins (2006: 2) convergence is the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want. 


A student nowadays will digitize an image through a scanner, email it to his classmate, who will then ad some text to it. Then he will print a poster for the classroom presentation or even just bring it to school in a flash drive, plug it to the PC and project it. The same way a follower of a TV series will tweet about the last episode, post an exclusive webvideo on his facebook wall. He will then access the director's blog or play the RPG game that the network developed along with the series to help expand on the different ways the story can be told and how that universe can be explored in order to form a loyal fan base.


Jeff Gomez (2010), responsible for the "transmedialization" of the likes of Avatar, Tron, Coca-Cola, Pirates of the Caribean and Dungeons and Draggons states: "Transmedia narratives invite dialog with the audience. Technology allows producers to remain in listening with our viewers, our participants, allowing them to express themselves and allowing us to act on that expression. The possibilities are gorgeous."


Producers who fail to embrace this new participatory culture will be challenged by declining audience and shrunk revenues. " The resulting struggles and compromises will define the public culture of the future" (Jenkins, 2008, p. 24).


This text was inspired by amazing book by  Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture - Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: 2006


On the video bellow, see how Heroes made use of transmedia story telling in order to consolidate the series as one of the biggest phenomena's of today.