(JENKINS, Henry) Rethinking 'Rethinking Convergence-Culture'

Cultural Studies
ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20
Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’
Henry Jenkins
To cite this article: Henry Jenkins (2014) Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’, Cultural
Studies, 28:2, 267-297, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.801579
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Download by: [177.34.126.127] Date: 11 December 2016, At: 07:56

Henry Jenkins
RETHINKING ‘RETHINKING
CONVERGENCE/CULTURE’
Responding to the September 2011 special issue on ‘Rethinking Convergence

Culture’, this essay seeks to identify ways that the author’s thinking about
convergence and participatory culture have shifted over time, often in ways that
are closely aligned with the issue’s contributors. Throughout the essay, the author
addresses the links between cultural and political participation, the challenges
in using new media in support of democratic change, the ways that institutional
power structures continue to exert strong influence on our culture despite or
perhaps because of significant expansion of who has access to the means of cultural
production and distribution and the challenges and opportunities for doing
cultural theory in an era of neo-liberal capitalism.
Keywords participation; convergence; fandom; activism; feminism;

democracy
In September 2011, Cultural Studies devoted a special issue to ‘Rethinking

Convergence/Culture’ (Hay and Couldry 2011), which the editors Nick
Couldry and Jim Hay defined in terms of a cluster of writers, including myself
(Jenkins 2006a), Yochai Benkler (2007), Manuel Castells (2009), Charles
Leadbeater (2008), Clay Shirky (2010), John Hartley (2008), Jean Burgess and
Joshua Green (2009) and Axel Bruns (2008), whose work has sought
to explain the ways that media change might be enabling new forms of
grassroots communication and collaboration. However, in practice, the editors
and authors seemed to have limited interest in exploring the differences and
connections among this particular assortment of writers; many though
certainly not all of the critiques focus on my book, Convergence Culture: Where
Old and New Media Collide (Jenkins 2006a).1 Understandably, I confronted the
issue with a certain degree of apprehension. However, at the same time, I was
grateful for the courtesy and respect displayed by many of the contributors.
I found this debate highly productive, rather than divisive, and the criticism
mostly constructive, rather than destructive. For that, I want to thank all of
those who contributed.
I hope this response (and any counter-response it may engender) continues
in this spirit, seeking common grounds and shared goals; I also hope that the
Cultural Studies, 2014
Vol. 28, No. 2, 267297, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.801579
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
268 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
airing of differences continues to be constructive and mutually respectful.

There’s no way that I can fully address the range of critiques posed throughout
this special issue (given that the contributors, themselves, would not agree on
many of the core premises of their critiques).2 Rather, I will use this essay to
address a few core themes that cut across the issue’s contents, hoping that
conversation can and will continue across other venues.3 At its heart, the
special issue centred around the political and economic implications of
convergence culture and especially on the adequacy of the concept of
participatory culture to address the full range of experiences people are having
in and through digital media. I am going to use this response to clarify what I
see as the core stakes in focusing on ‘meaningful participation’ as a central
element in the agenda of cultural studies in the twenty-first century. Cultural
scholars from varied traditions have much to learn from each other if we can
move past a history of internal culture wars and towards a more productive
dialogue that balances critique and advocacy.4
Towards a more participatory culture

Across the twentieth century, critical and cultural theorists of many flavours
have pushed to expand opportunities for grassroots participation in the core
decisions shaping cultural production and circulation or informing democratic
governance. In Spreadable Media (2013), co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua
Green, we point towards several previous struggles over media and
participation, including Bertolt Brecht (1932), who expressed some hopes
for the democratic potentials of radio if ‘it knew how to transmit as well as
receive’ (p. 53), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970), who advocated for the
development of new strategies for ‘publicity’ and ‘mobilization’ as expansions
of new media promised to place the means of media production ‘in the hands of
the masses themselves’ (p. 69). Such concerns were central to the discourses of
the 1960s counterculture (for example, the Port Huron Manifesto, which
included demands that citizens should have a say in those ‘social decisions
determining the quality and directions of his life’ and a call to ‘provide media’
for citizens’ ‘common participation’, Delwiche 2012, p. 12). We might also
add the critical pedagogy advocated by Paolo Freire (1972), which has been
summarized in Richard Shaull’s foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate

integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system
and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the
means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality
and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
(Shaull 1972, p. 13)

R E T H I N K I N G C O N V E R G E N C E / C U LT U R E 269
And we might see at least an implicit theory of participation in Raymond

Williams’ ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958), which argues that ‘the making of a
society’ requires ‘the finding of common meanings and directions’, a process
which comes only through ‘active debate and amendment’ among the people
themselves (p. 93). This push to expand popular participation in core decisions
(whether cultural or political) has helped to inform many core debates, with
each new media technology anticipated in part because of the tools it might put
into the hands of ‘the people’ and with these theoretical models taking shape
alongside grassroots efforts to experiment with and deploy those tools to
promote democratic participation and cultural diversity. This history should be
sobering, as we encounter such a record of bold predictions, promises delayed
and deferred, partial successes and unintended consequences. Understanding
this history helps us to put current debates about digital media into a larger
perspective, one that should make us slow to construct triumphant narratives
of technological inevitability, but one that should also leave us reluctant to
walk away from new opportunities without exploring them fully. This history
tells us that change comes most often at moments of hope and crisis, and we
have both in great abundance in the early twenty-first century.
As Nick Couldry (2011) acknowledges, my focus on promoting
participatory culture does not rely on assumptions of technological determin-
ism. Many different factors, not simply the growth of networked computing,
have served to make the current moment one where the stakes for
participatory culture are especially high. See this passage from Fans, Bloggers,
and Gamers:
If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of
media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being
liberated through improved media technologies. Rather than talking about
interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur
amongst media consumers, between media consumers and media texts,
and between media consumers and media producers. The new participa-
tory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends:
(1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate,

appropriate, and recirculate media content
(2) a range of subcultures promote Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media production,

a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies
(3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglom-

erates encourage the flow of images, ideas, and narratives across multiple
media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship.
(Jenkins 2006b, pp. 135, 136)

Given my focus on cultural and economic factors, I saw Convergence Culture as

offering a corrective to the excesses of ‘digital revolution’ rhetoric, including
John Perry Barlow’s belief (1996) that ‘Governments of the Industrial World’
would no longer exert ‘sovereignty’ over digital citizens, or the faith held by
Nicholas Negroponte (1996) and George Gilder (1985) that the mass media
empires were dissolving in the face of the expansion of cottage industries and
artisanal modes of cultural production. Instead, Convergence Culture argues that
any democratic potentials held by grassroots media production and circulation
coexist with increasing concentrated mass media, hence the subtitle ‘where old
and new media collide’. In the book, I identify multiple battles that will impact
whether we can achieve a more participatory culture:
Right now, convergence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding

opportunities for grassroots communities to speak back to the mass
media....That’s why it is so important to fight against corporate copyright
regimes, to argue against censorship and moral panic that would
pathologize these emerging forms of participation, to publicize the best
efforts of these online communities, to expand access and participation to
groups that are otherwise being left behind, and to promote forms of
media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed
to become full participants in their culture.
(Jenkins 2006a, p. 259)
In the afterword for the paperback release of the book in late 2008, I expressed
my growing concern that networked communications would not necessarily
result in a more progressive, inclusive, or democratic culture:
Those of us who care about the future of participatory culture as a

mechanism for promoting diversity and enabling democracy do the world
no favor if we ignore the ways that our current culture falls short of these
goals. Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as
somehow ‘resistant’ to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging
that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-up means to keep others down.
Too often, we have fallen into the trap of seeing democracy as an
‘inevitable’ outcome of technology change rather than as something which
we need to fight to achieve with every tool at our disposal. Too often, we
have sought to deflect criticisms of grassroots culture rather than trying to
identify and resolve conflicts and contradictions which might prevent it
from achieving its full potential. Too often, we have celebrated those
alternative voices which are being brought into the marketplace of ideas
without considering which voices remain trapped outside.
(Jenkins 2008, pp. 293, 294)

This passage reflected my growing awareness of what Nick Couldry (2011)

describes as ‘the socio-economic and cultural forces which are stratifying
technological access, use and skills in a convergent media environment . . . .the
broader stratifying factors which shape the spheres of action of different types
of people in contemporary societies’ (p. 498).
Since Convergence Culture’s publication, discourses about participation have
both intensified and diversified. In politics, as Manuel Castells (2012) notes,
grassroots movements around the world have embraced networked computing
(as both a technology and as a model of social relations) as a key tool for their
struggles. In the arts, many high-profile artists have experimented with various
forms of crowdsourcing or participatory design processes. In journalism,
traditional news organizations have sought to make their peace with ‘citizen
journalism’ (i.e. blogging, Twitter, podcasting, video-blogging, user-generated
footage). In education, the Digital Media and Learning movement has sought
to reshape schools to incorporate ‘connected learning’ and to insure that young
people acquire the skills needed for meaningful participation. In health, there
has been a movement to build online communities where patients can compare
notes and, both collectively and individually, assert greater control over their
own treatment. In management studies, the focus has been on creating
stronger horizontal networks within companies that might allow employees to
feel a greater stake in the firm’s success and to be capable of contributing new
insights that might inform strategic and tactical decision-making. And the
entertainment industry, the primary focus of Convergence Culture (Jenkins
2006a), has integrated notions of audience engagement and fan participation
more deeply into its logics and practices. In some of these cases, the call for
participation is largely rhetorical, with mechanisms offering only limited and
mostly meaningless ways of entering the process, whereas in others, significant
shifts are occurring which are providing the people greater voice and influence
in the decisions that impact their everyday lives. It becomes more and more
urgent to develop a more refined vocabulary that allows us to better
distinguish between different models of participation and to evaluate where
and how power shifts may be taking place.
As a consequence of this ‘participatory turn’ in cultural theory and politics,
I have found myself increasingly pushed into the role of a public intellectual,
seeking more effective strategies for intervening in such important debates.
Like many other contemporary cultural scholars, I am speaking with increasing
frequency to corporate audiences, where I have consistently argued for greater
responsiveness, transparency and accountability (more about this later). But,
again, like others in our field, I have also been engaged in ongoing efforts
towards educational reform to insure that more young people acquire the skills
and competencies, as well as the technological access, required for meaningful
participation. Most recently, I am engaging in efforts to better understand how
new media platforms and practices have been and can be deployed by activists
to promote social justice. These interventions grow out of my own sense that
the push for media reform needs to be a multi-front struggle, as much focused
on expanding access and skills required for meaningful participation as it is on
battling the growing concentration of corporate media.
My experiences at intervention have tempered some of the exuberance
people have identified in Convergence Culture with a deeper understanding of
how difficult it will be to make change happen. Across all of these industry and
policy spaces, I have found people who shared my goals of increasing popular
participation, in expanding the diversity of our culture, but I have also
developed a deeper appreciation for all of the systemic and structural
challenges we face in changing the way established institutions operate, all of
the outmoded and entrenched thinking which make even the most reasonable
reform of established practices difficult to achieve. Today, I am much more
likely to speak about a push towards a more participatory culture, acknowl-
edging how many people are still excluded from even the most minimal
opportunities for participation within networked culture, and recognizing that
new grassroots tactics are confronting a range of corporate strategies which
seek to contain and commodify the popular desire for participation. As a
consequence, elites still exert a more powerful influence on political decision-
making than grassroots networks, even if we are seeing new ways to assert
alternative perspectives into the decision-making process.
The growth of popular discourse about participation has been matched by a
growing body of scholarship that seeks to nuance and refine this core concept.
Christopher Kelty (2013) writes:
‘Participating’ in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free

Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic
governance of a state . . . .Participation is about power, and, no matter
how ‘open’ a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing
power and its distribution.
(p. 29)
Kelty’s own team at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) (Fish et al.
2011) has proposed a rich typology for identifying different claims being made
about participation and the ways power gets negotiated at all levels, from the
design of platforms to policies regarding their governance and use. My
graduate student, Ioana Literat (2012), has offered a similar typology for
thinking about competing claims made about participation within collaborative
and crowd-sourced art projects. Nico Carpentier (2011) has argued for the
difference between maximalist models of participation (which emphasize an
active public role in governance) and more minimalist models. I read this
special issue of Cultural Studies as another contribution towards refining and
sharpening our theories of participation, one particularly advanced through
case studies by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2011), Jack Bratich (2011), Laurie
Ouelette and Julie Wilson (2011) and others. These worked examples provide
new insights into the contradictions and challenges of achieving meaningful
participation in the current context.
In many cases, these critiques mirror directions I have taken in my writing
since 2006. I certainly agree with Ginette Verstraete (2011, p. 539) when she
writes:
What is often missing [in the first wave of scholarship on participatory

culture] is a sustained reflection on what the terms may be under which
who exactly is going to do what and with whom, and under which one can
begin to decide whether something is politically rather than economically
productive.
This is precisely what I meant when I suggested at various points across

Convergence Culture that the key struggles over the next few decades would be over
‘the terms of our participation’. I agree with many of the contributors here that it
is time to pull back from both utopian and dystopian rhetoric and offer a more
nuanced account of the different mechanisms for participation being proposed.
This process may best be achieved if we are able to create a more productive
dialogue between those of us whose work is primarily focused on identifying the
potentials of a more participatory culture and those who have offered the most
sceptical accounts of how those same mechanisms may insure corporate and
governmental control. Such debates may help us to model what constitutes
‘critique in the public interest’ (McGuigan 2006) for the twenty-first century.
Graeme Turner (2011, p. 686) suggests that work within a ‘convergence
culture’ paradigm has projected too far beyond current realities, suggesting
that such theory is ‘about 20 per cent fact and 80 per cent speculative fiction’.
I would have thought that my ratio was a little better than that. Convergence
Culture was based on a series of concrete case studies, each of which was well
documented and each of which demonstrated some of the specific ways that
particular groups were taking advantage of the affordances of new media and
the structures of participatory culture. At stake in our debate is the question of
how we might move from such case studies towards larger generalizations, a
conversation worth having, but, clearly, any meaningful critical intervention is
going to need that capacity to move productively between the abstract and the
particular. By the same token, we should constantly revisit and re-appraise any
general claims we develop (as a natural part of the process of scholarship) and I
would freely acknowledge that work written with hindsight may see things
different than work which is seeking to project future implications of still
unfolding events. In hindsight, many of the writers cited by this Cultural Studies
issue (myself among them) underestimated the barriers to achieving what we
see as the potential for transformative change emerging as the public has gained
greater control over the means of cultural production and circulation. We have
seen many recent efforts where there was mass mobilization, significant media
attention and yet power structures moved very little in response. All of us
need more robust and precise models for change than currently animates our
work.
However, my critics here and elsewhere have dismissed too quickly and
too sweepingly the consequences of expanding the communicative capacity
available to many compared to the far more narrow communication channels at
play during the broadcast era. Cultural studies (and especially cultural politics)
is better off remaining open to new possibilities and emerging models rather
than giving way to a discourse of inevitability, whether that be the
technological determinism that assumes new media will necessarily democra-
tize culture or the economic determinism that assumes consumer capitalism
will always fully contain all forms of grassroots resistance. For a classic
example of a rhetoric of inevitability in critical studies, consider this statement
by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2011, p. 594):
The lesson of the newer media technologies is the same as print, radio and
television: each one is quickly dominated by centralized and centralizing
corporations, regardless of its multi-distributional potential, and each one
depends on a massive contribution from the Earth and workers.
So, is this an immutable law that negates any possibility of alternative

outcomes, or are there moments of vulnerability when one system is giving
into another when it makes sense to focus criticism and mobilization in hopes
of impacting what happens next? Is the distribution of power necessarily black-
and-white, all-or-nothing or might we imagine each new media allows us to
gain some ground, even in the face of compromises and losses on other levels?
Should we imagine that the domination of new media by ‘centralized and
centralizing corporations’ is already a battle lost and, if so, is resistance futile?
What is the value of critique in a world that always must move towards the
same inevitable consequences? There have been times when I saw ‘a glass half
full’, my critics ‘a glass half empty’, while both of us ignored the common
ground that we were still describing ‘half a glass’. There remains an urgent
need for us as public intellectuals and educators to help shape the
directions social, cultural, economic, political and technological change might
take.
The march of time

The timetables of peer-reviewed scholarly publication make it almost
impossible for these kinds of meaningful exchanges to take place between
researchers with different ideological visions or theoretical commitments.
Though we are debating the best frameworks for discussing contemporary and
emerging media practices, this debate will have unfolded across a decade by
the time this response is published in the pages of Cultural Studies. Convergence
Culture was written in 20042005 (with some material produced earlier), even
though it was not published until 2006, and then it was updated in 2008 for a
paperback edition that came out much later that same year. Most likely, the
contents of Cultural Studies were written between 2008 and 2010, and the issue
came out at the end of 2011. My new book, Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al.
2013), was written between 2008 and 2011 (before most of the current wave
of work on participation described above had been published) and came out in
early 2013. Now, I am writing in early 2013, with the expectation that this
piece will be published in 2014. Meanwhile, the reality is shifting underneath
our feet, and new scholarly work has probably been completed and is in the
process of being published that may well change our perspectives, and each of
us continue probing deeper into the issues we are exploring here. The
difficulty of such back-and-forth scholarly exchanges through print already
indicates why I value the faster, more fluid, and more open exchanges that are
possible through digital media.
While some of the Cultural Studies contributors have accused me of
developing a totalizing account, the introduction of Convergence Culture (Jenkins
2006a, p. 12) seeks to qualify its claims about the future implications of the
developments it documents:
It is beyond my abilities to describe or fully document the changes that are

occurring. My aim is more modest. I want to describe some of the ways
that convergence thinking is reshaping American popular culture and, in
particular, the ways it is impacting the relationship between media
audiences, producers, and content . . . .Writing this book has been
challenging because everything seems to be changing at once and there
is no vantage point that takes me above the fray. Rather than trying to
write from an objective vantage point, I describe in this book what this
process looks like from various localized perspectives.
I intended Convergence Culture to provoke a new round of discussion about the

potentials of participatory culture (as it did) but not to serve as ‘the book’ on
the topic, closing off future inquiry. And I have been fortunate that so many
scholars have responded to its provocation, challenging its conclusions, revising
its observations and complicating its analysis, in ways I would not have been
able to achieve on my own. I hoped people would take from this account a
greater sense of the importance of examining the complex relationship
between mass media industries and their increasingly participatory audiences,
the value of pursuing questions across medium specific categories and the
urgency of intervening in the policies that will determine the next phase of
development within the new media environment.
None of us can write outside our own historical contexts, and none of us
can foresee how future developments may overtake our best guesses about
where the culture may be heading.5 For example, Convergence Culture’s

discussion of American politics was very much shaped by the aftershocks of the
2004 US presidential election (and, for that matter, the continued debate
around the mechanisms of voting point back to the disputed 2000 results); the
afterword for the paperback edition was composed in January 2008, well
before Barack Obama’s election. James Hay’s discussion in the special issue
(2011), for example, focuses on the Tea Party but does not anticipate Occupy
Wall Street. Spreadable Media (Jenkins et al. 2013) can speak about the foiled
Iranian uprising but cannot fully engage with the Arab Spring (which unfolded
as the manuscript was nearing completion). All of us have found it increasingly
difficult to keep up with the pace of change, the shifting fortunes of popular
political and cultural movements or the various struggles over the terms of
participation within ‘Web 2.0’ platforms, all of which should impact our
theories. Cynicism may be the one sure way to be right at least some of the
time after all, a broken clock rings true twice a day and sack cloth never goes
out of fashion but fatalism is not the best way to support struggles for
expanded democratic participation and cultural diversity.
By the same token, Tim O’Reilly’s foundational ‘What is Web 2.0’
appeared in 2005, too late to have impacted my discussion of ‘affective
economics’ and ‘emotional capital’ in Convergence Culture. The book registers
some of the shifts in industry thinking that would give rise to Web 2.0, but
does not describe how the Web 2.0 business model would seek to capture,
commodify and control the public’s desire for meaningful participation. In
fairness, my initial response to Web 2.0 was more one of curiosity than
outrage: early Web 2.0 language seemed to open up more space for collective
expression and offer more responsiveness to public opinion than some previous
industry structures. Many of the young entrepreneurs followed the Web 2.0
banner with idealistic as well as mercantile motives, even if they would quickly
discover how difficult it was to change the relationship between producers and
their audiences once corporate ownership and venture capital entered the
picture. And, after years of debates around media concentration, there was
some excitement about a more diverse set of entrepreneurs entering the
marketplace. In an essay (Jenkins 2007a) for Fandom: Identities and Communities
in a Mediated World, I jokingly referred to Web 2.0 as ‘fandom without the
stigma’, noting, as I do in Convergence Culture, that many of the practices and
logics that emerged when fandom was seen as a subculture were becoming
more widespread as participatory culture logics were being mainstreamed.
For me, the key turning point came in response to several debates within
fandom about the terms being offered by Web 2.0 companies: most
dramatically, the much-documented controversy over FanLib, but also debates
about censorship on LiveJournal, privacy on Facebook, compensation on
YouTube and terms of service on a range of other social media sites. These
debates forced me to assess and revise some of my earlier perspectives, a
reappraisal which surfaced first on my blog (Jenkins 2007b) later in a sidebar
critique of ‘user-generated content’ incorporated in the paperback edition of

Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2008), ‘The Moral Economy of Web 2.0’ which I
co-authored with Joshua Green (Green and Jenkins 2009), and, most recently,
in the ‘What Went Wrong with Web 2.0’ chapter in Spreadable Media (Jenkins
et al. 2013). I have repeatedly sought ways to critique Web 2.0 without
turning my back on the potentials some of these platforms offer for greater
participation recognizing a distinction, say, between the lack of voice
contributors have in the governance of YouTube and the ways oppositional
groups have used video-sharing sites to communicate their messages (Thorson
et al. 2013). One valuable way to frame such critiques is to take seriously the
complaints posed by various participatory culture communities against the
terms of service offered them by Web 2.0 companies.
Writing with ambivalence

In her new book, Authentic, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012, p. 218) proposes a
critical posture that seeks to understand popular ‘ambivalence’ towards
contemporary brand culture: ‘To theorize ambivalence as a structuring
element of brand cultures means not that all cultural practices are spaces of
possibility but rather that some carry more potential than others, that some
cultural practices are easier to brand than others’. For Banet-Weiser,
‘ambivalence’ expresses the attitudes with which participants and critics alike
seek to identify what gets gained or lost within Web 2.0.
While the dominant tone of Convergence Culture was optimistic, the book
also strives for a similar kind of ambivalence, pointing towards ‘spaces of
possibility’ but also noting some factors limiting our abilities to achieve those
possibilities. For example, here’s what I wrote about the branding process:
Here’s the paradox: to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes

commodified. On the one hand, to be commodified expands a group’s
cultural visibility. Those groups that have no recognized economic value
get ignored. That said, commodification is also a form of exploitation.
Those groups that are commodified find themselves targeted more
aggressively by marketers and often feel they have lost control over their
own culture, since it is mass produced and mass marketed. One cannot
help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go
unrepresented but one doesn’t want to be exploited either.
(Jenkins 2006a, p. 63)
This seems to me what Mark Andrejevic (2011, p. 612) is getting at when he

writes, ‘If convergence marks the mainstreaming of participatory fan culture, it
has the potential to cut both ways: the increasing influence of participatory
consumers on the production process and the facilitation of monitoring-based

regimes of control’. I respect Andrejevic’s insistence that we remain attentive
to how mechanisms of audience measurement, such as data mining and
sentiment analysis, often operate in the service of neo-liberal logics that
fragments the public into exploitable demographic categories and see
consumption as a highly individualized practice. Spreadable Media makes
many of these same points, critiquing the shifts in the rhetoric of Web 2.0
away from the deliberative logic of collective intelligence and towards the
aggregative and anonymous processes associated with tapping ‘the wisdom of
the crowd’. I would very much agree with what Andrejevic (2011, p. 612)
writes here:
The logic of aggregation is distinct from that of collectivity the former

seeks to create an imagined consensus out of an overview that makes up
for what it lacks in depth, comprehension and meaning, with breadth,
speed and predictive power.6
Today, I am far more focused on these mechanisms of control, after five years’
worth of debates over Web 2.0 platforms, than I was when I wrote Convergence
Culture.7 Spreadable Media is a much more ambivalent book in Banet-Weiser’s
sense of the word: written with greater engagement with Web 2.0’s critics
(both popular and academic), with greater concern for inequalities of access,
and with attention to more diverse forms of participation. Yet, the book was
also written as an attempt to engage media professionals in core conversations
about grassroots circulation of media and in collaboration with writing partners
who are rooted in the marketing and strategic communications realms.
Spreadable Media is also, by design, a more dialogic book, surrounded online by
contributions by more than 30 other scholars and industry leaders, each
offering their own perspectives on the issues it raises, each bringing more
diverse case studies to the table. Elizabeth Bird (2011) urges us to expand the
range of our case studies beyond the digital and beyond the global north. We
have taken some effort in Spreadable Media to explore examples of (and
challenges to) grassroots participation and networked communication in Latin
America, Asia and Africa, including some discussion of Nollywood, the
example she cites in her article. Much more work needs to be done along these
lines.
I am grateful for a number of theorists including S. Craig Watkins
(2010) Sonia Livingstone (2009), danah boyd (2011), Ellen Seiter (2007) and
Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko (2008) who have helped me better
understand the structures ensuring inequalities of access and participation and
the consequences of these inequalities for my theoretical and political project.
My movement along this path has especially been informed by the work of
Mark Andrejevic, my most persistent, perceptive, and persuasive critic. I
certainly share his very legitimate concern that ‘a shifting logic of media
engagement is accompanied by revamped strategies for managing and

manipulating audiences’ (Andrejevic 2011, p. 606). I write in Convergence
Culture (Jenkins 2006a, p. 175):
Corporations imagine participation as something they can start and stop,

channel and reroute, commodify and market. The prohibitionists are
trying to shut down unauthorized participation; the collaborationists are
trying to win grassroots creators over to their side. Consumers, on the
other side, are asserting a right to participate in the culture, on their own
terms, when and where they wish.
Convergence Culture may place its emphasis on the growing influence of

customers, audiences, fans, citizens, within this networked culture, but
whatever ground they have gained has been in the face of new efforts by
corporate producers to ‘manage’ and, yes, ‘manipulate’ these same groups.
However, just as we are pushing towards a more particularized and
differentiated account of media audiences, we should also be attentive to
the multiple, diverse and contradictory goals people working within the media
and marketing industries pursue as they seek to revamp their organizations
(Deuze 2007). These media companies are more dysfunctional families than
well-oiled machines, with different divisions competing with each other for
resources and recognition. And, throughout many of these organizations, there
are many cultural workers who would honestly like to reimagine and redesign
their relations with the public. When I have had a chance to speak inside
corporate boardrooms, I have often seen myself as lending support to the more
progressive voices within these organizations, using my academic authority to
legitimate directions they are pushing their companies, while pushing them to
deepen their thinking through engagement with the insights and provocations
offered by our research. There are a growing number of intellectuals
positioned within these corporate spaces, including danah boyd, Nancy
Baym and Mary Gray at Microsoft or Brian David Johnson and Genevieve
Bell at Intel, who have found this a productive space from which to promote
social and cultural change.
How do fans fit into the picture?

I have also learned much from Nick Couldry’s critique of Convergence Culture
(2011), especially his concern about the limits of using active fans, more or less
exclusively, to illustrate the potentials of a more participatory culture. In
actuality, my book does qualify its claims more than Couldry acknowledges.
For instance, I write in Convergence Culture:
I don’t assume that these cultural practices will remain the same as we
broaden access and participation. In fact, expanding participation
necessarily sparks further change. Yet, right now, our best window into
convergence culture comes from looking at the experience of these early
settlers and first inhabitants. These elite consumers exert a dispropor-
tionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media
producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention.
(Jenkins 2006a, p. 23)
That said, Couldry is correct to suggest I might have been better described
such an approach as ‘our only window’ and to insist that we broaden our
sample of what people are doing with new media as some of these platforms
and practices have become more widespread.
While I was waiting for Convergence Culture to come out, I had a chance to
read Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2007). While I do not see lots of
Benkler fans among the contributors to this special issue, the book does make a
strong case that networked culture should not be understood simply in terms
of the interplay between amateur media makers and corporate media. Benkler
stresses that diverse kinds of media producers including governmental,
activist, religious, educational, nonprofit and semi-commercial content
creators have tapped into the affordances of digital networks. As a
consequence, we are dealing with a mixed media ecology where these
historically separate forces influence each other in often unpredictable ways.
Expanding our frameworks of analysis to consider these other sites of media
production allows us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the
differences between fan participation in commercial media franchises and, say,
the relations of citizens to the state, students to educational institutions,
worshippers to religious organizations or activists to the institutions they seek
to transform.
Looking backwards, the model of participation offered in Convergence
Culture reflected my own point of entry into these debates through the study
of fandom. Focusing on fandom meant that my emphasis was on the ways that
a community with a much longer tradition was seeking to negotiate the
changes being brought about by digital media, as opposed to, say, exploring
what happens within other groups without such well-established norms and
practices. I was focusing on a community defined around shared interests as
opposed to the more ego-centric sets of relationships danah boyd (2006) argues
to operate within contemporary social network platforms. I was focusing on
activities which inspired high degrees of sociality and imagined community,
whereas someone like James Paul Gee (2004) stresses forms of shared activity
that do not result in strong social bonds, common interests or shared
identities. I was focusing on a group that consciously seeks to participate in the
creation and circulation of culture, as opposed to the kinds of ‘implicit
participation’ (such as data mining). Mirko Tobias Schafer (2011) argues are
even more central to the ways Web 2.0 companies operate. The book was
accurate in suggesting a shift within the commercial media industries to
embrace certain conceptions of the fan as an idealized consumer of transmedia
entertainment, and if anything, those trends have only intensified since the
book was published. Spreadable Media responds to some of these limitations by
seeking to describe a much broader array of participants in the new media
landscape and a range of media producers, including discussion throughout of
civic and public, religious, independent and transnational media production
and circulation.
Bird (2011, p. 504), similarly, takes me to task for placing too much
emphasis on acts of fan production to the exclusion of ‘the more mundane,
internalized, even passive articulation with media that characterizes a great deal
of media consumption’. A central theme running through Spreadable Media is
the importance of moving beyond active production as a criteria for
understanding audience participation and the need to pay much more attention
to more causal forms of grassroots circulation, which are much more apt to
become routine practices for larger numbers of people in the future.
This focus on circulation certainly corresponds to Verstraete’s argument
(2011, p. 541) that:
this endless circulation and proliferation of objects and images through

physical or virtual channels are what enables various consumers to have
access to convergence culture in the first place and do different things with
it. So that we can say that the transmedia mobility and mutability of
images and objects constituting the brand are the preconditions for human
participation in our convergence culture.
While there is no question that brands benefit in various ways from soliciting
the public’s help in circulating their messages, participants are also using such
practices to advocate for their own interests, whether with corporations or
governments. We are seeing more and more spectacular examples of the
public’s ability to engage in what Ethan Zuckerman (2012) calls ‘attention
activism’, allowing for activists and citizens to deploy networked circulation to
insert new concerns into the national and international agenda (as, for
example, the struggles over Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect
Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), the dramatic speed and scope of Kony 2012’s
movement across the net, the backlash by gaylesbianbisexualtransgender
(GLBT) activists and their supporters against Chick-Fil-A’s support for
homophobic organizations, or the feminist deployment of the trope of
‘binders of women’ to call out Mitt Romney’s far from diverse hiring
practices). This shift towards greater grassroots influence over how media
spreads has also produced considerable anxiety among some media producers
who often regard all forms of unauthorized circulation as piracy.
Gender and fandom

I appreciated the efforts here by Catherine Driscoll and Melissa Gregg (2011)
and Laurie Ouelette and Julie Wilson (2011) to push us to pay greater
attention to the gendered dimensions of convergence culture. My work on fans
has always been deeply grounded in feminism and has always been developed
in partnership with the many women inside fandom who have been the best
theorists of their own practice. It is certainly true that Convergence Culture was
less focused on gender than some of my own earlier work, including Textual
Poachers (Jenkins 1992), The Children’s Culture Reader (Jenkins 1998) or From
Barbie to Mortal Kombat (Cassell and Jenkins 2000). Yet, my commitment to
feminism remains strong, as might be suggested by the ‘Gender and Fan
Studies’ (20072008) and ‘Aca-Fandom and Beyond’ (2011) exchanges I have
helped organize on my blog, or the discussion with Suzanne Scott about the fan
studies paradigm which opens the recent re-release of Textual Poachers (Jenkins
and Scott 2012). Over the past half decade or so, we have seen the emergence
of a new generation of fan scholars, many of them explicitly feminist in their
orientation, many of them immersed in the fan communities they study, and
they have collectively reframed some of the research agenda for this field.8
Through my active engagement with their work and in some cases,
collaborations with them around specific projects, I have discovered more
productive models for integrating issues of gender politics into my
consideration of how fan communities operate within the context of digital
networks, focusing on the ways women have and have not gained ground as
male fans have gained much greater access to industry insiders and greater
visibility through media coverage.
There was a strong focus in this special issue on situating women’s fan
practices in relation to the work which they perform both professional and
domestic as opposed to a focus on the ways gender and sexuality might be
explored through their fan productions, and I would agree that such an
approach seems like an important path forward, as is demonstrated by Ouelete
and Wilson’s rich case study (2011) of the Web practices surrounding Dr Phil.
Here, and elsewhere in this issue (Bird 2011, for example), there is an
emphasis on shifting from ‘spectacular’ to ‘mundane’ forms of participation
that may help us to better understand how to connect these developments in
new media platforms and practices to the larger politics of everyday life. I
would agree that work on the pleasures of fan culture needs to be coupled
more explicitly with scholarship that addresses unequal conditions of domestic
labour. Even without such a shift, there’s much more gender studies work on
fandom that needs to be done, including the ways that the mixed gender
composition of some online fandoms (including both the Survivor and Harry
Potter networks Convergence Culture discusses) might challenge historic divides
between male and female fan practices and a new focus on understanding ‘fan
masculinities’.
That said, I do not share Driscoll and Gregg’s view (2011) that Convergence
Culture had the long-term consequence of draining gender issues from
discussions of fan culture, especially given the ongoing importance of gender
to the articles being published in Transformative Works and Cultures and, now,
The Journal of Fandom Studies. And, I disagree with Driscoll and Gregg’s claims
that, by documenting fan struggles with censorship and copyright regulation or
describing fandom as a site of informal learning, I was dealing with issues
which are more important to ‘corporations and policy-makers’ than fans. After
all, these are the same issues that inspired the Organization for Transformative
Works, perhaps the most powerful example in recent years of fans seeking to
assert greater control over what happens to their culture. Further, many
American fans are educators and librarians in their professional lives and I have
made common cause with a number of fans in my ongoing efforts to promote
core skills and competencies needed to insure more equitable participation
(Jenkins and Kelley 2013). While struggles over gender and sexual politics
have been central to fan politics, we limit the scope of fan concerns when we
assume that these are the only issues fans care about or when we assume that
fan studies, as a field, should be restricted to one framework or methodology.
Collective agency and participatory politics

While the contributors here are generally careful and precise in their
discussion of my work, there are two persistent, interrelated ways some of
them mischaracterize my work (and, to some degree, other researchers
working in this tradition). First, there is a strong tendency here to conflate
participation with interactivity. (See Andrejevic’s reference to ‘the emergence
of participatory forms of interactivity’ [2011, p. 617].), despite the distinction
Convergence Culture draws between the two. For me, interactivity is a property
often designed and programmed into the technology and thus is much more
likely to be under the control of media producers. Participation, on the other
hand, is a property of the surrounding culture and is often something
communities assert through their shared engagement with technologies,
content and producers. An emphasis on interactivity pulls inevitably towards
the idea of technology as itself liberatory (or constraining), whereas my own
work is primarily focused on cultural practices that emerge around and often
reshape the technological infrastructure.
Second, there is a strong tendency to equate my emphasis on participatory
culture with a neo-liberal focus on individual agency. See, for example,
Andrejevic’s reference to ‘individual emotional engagement and investment’
(2011, p. 615), James Hay’s ‘increasingly individualized engagements with
media’ (2011, p. 670), or Hay and Couldry’s ‘empowering expressive and
creative individual generators of content’ (2011, pp. 481, 482). While,
certainly, individuals do gain some greater degree of communication capacity

as a result of their access to new tools of production and circulation, my
primary emphasis is on ‘collective agency’, that is, the capacity of networked
publics to work together towards shared goals and common interests. Within
fan studies, there has always been a sharp divide between those who study
individual fans and those who study fandom as an imagined and imaginative
community; my work has always emphasized the collective dimensions of
fandom. Similarly, my work on media literacies (Jenkins et al. 2006, p. 20)
describes literacy as ‘social skills and cultural competencies’, not as individual
capacities:
The social production of meaning is more than individual interpretation

multiplied; it represents a qualitative difference in the ways we make sense
of cultural experience, and in that sense, it represents a profound change
in how we understand literacy. In such a world, youth need skills for
working within social networks, for pooling knowledge within a collective
intelligence, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the
governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling
conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around
them.
Increasingly, my focus is turning towards various activist networks and

organizations that have been particularly effective at using new media tools and
participatory practices in order to recruit and mobilize young people within
the political process. Couldry (2011) argues that my definition of what
constitutes a community requires further explanation, a project I will not
tackle here, except to say that we acknowledge in Spreadable Media (Jenkins
et al. 2013, p. 54) some of the challenges of applying this concept to the social
structures we find online that almost always are ‘more fragmented, divided
and certainly more dispersed than the corporate entities with which they
interface, making it much harder for them to fully assert and defend their own
interests. Fan communities are often enormously heterogeneous, with values
and assumptions that fragment along axis of class, age, gender, race, sexuality
and nationality, to name just a few’. But, for me, this focus on how we
increase the collective capacity of networked publics is central to my efforts to
promote a more participatory culture.
I would agree with James Hay (2011, p. 666) when he writes, ‘it would be
too simplistic to generalize blogging, photo-shopping and social networking
(media revolution) as the condition for an enhanced democracy, a grassroots
politics or (in Joe Trippi’s terms) the ‘‘overthrow of everything’’’. (See Trippi
2005.) These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of
collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast
model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular
outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared
ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily
provide key educational resources and do not ensure that anyone will listen
when groups speak out about injustices they encounter. Moreover, there are
many forces, some of which these authors identify, which might deflect or
defeat efforts to use these tools towards political ends.
There are, nevertheless, some signs that engagement with forms of
participatory culture does increase the likelihood of other forms of political
participation. A large-scale survey conducted by Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne
(2012) found that young people who were highly involved in interest-driven
activities were five times as likely as those without such involvements to
engage in participatory politics and nearly four times as likely to participate in
all political acts measured in their survey. While the majority of youth of all
races did not participate in any kind of political activity, 43 per cent of white,
41 per cent of black, 38 per cent of Latino and 36 per cent of Asian-American
youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior
12 months.
Granted, the practices of participatory culture can produce complicated
and contradictory results when read according to traditional ideological
categories. I would agree with James Hay’s analysis (2011) that the Tea Party
movement is a complicated example top-down broadcast media (Fox News)
and the Republican political establishment has worked alongside more
grassroots and populist efforts in order to seek to de-legitimate the Obama
presidency (Skocpol and Williamson 2012). Similarly, the Tea Party needs to
be understood as an unstable coalition across many groups with often
contradictory ideologies (some free market, some socially conservative, some
libertarian, some racist, some populist) which are often at war amongst
themselves. And we might want to think about the range of different
organizational and leadership structures in right wing politics today, which
range from the charismatic leaders of the religious right to much more
hierarchical and institutionalized groups which tend to dominate the
conservative landscapes to the more populist and participatory groups that
Hay notes.9
Hay and I would seemingly agree that there is nothing about participatory
culture that would inevitably lead to progressive outcomes. Even if we do
succeed in broadening cultural and political participation, this will not make all
other ideological conflicts go away. Rather, for me, the fight for a more
participatory culture has to do with insuring as many people as possible have
access to the platforms and practices through which future struggles over
equality and justice will take place. Alongside the rise of the Tea Party, we
have seen some dramatic developments in recent years, as, for example,
undocumented youths are using the circulation of grassroots videos to call out
the Obama administration’s record of deporting more people than in the
previous Bush administration and, through this process, pushing him to pass
the DREAM act by executive decree (Zimmerman 2012). Whatever other
concerns we have about the state of American democracy, we can point

towards significant increases in the political influence of youth, women,
Latinos and African-Americans over the past two election cycles, and at least
some of these increases reflect their ability to mobilize around their common
interests. One of these trends is not more illustrative of the politics of
participatory culture than another.
Couldry (2011, p. 496) critiques the lack of attention within Convergence
Culture to the pathways which might bridge between forms of cultural
participation and more robust forms of political participation: ‘no account is
provided of the wider forces that might connect such pockets of talk and action
to wider mechanisms of social change and political challenge’. This call actually
reflects the trajectory of a significant portion of my work since publishing
Convergence Culture, including my current research initiative for the MacArthur
Foundation. My team of graduate students and postdocs has interviewed
several hundred young activists to better understand the ‘civic paths’ that
fostered their involvement with politics as well as to map the tactics they have
used to spread their message and mobilize their supporters. Even though I start
with the assumption that culture is always already political, I have also long
been frustrated with the inability of cultural scholars to demonstrate strong
links between ‘cultural resistance’ and more ‘institutionalized’ forms of
politics. With this new work, my research team is doing in-depth case studies
of specific activist networks including Invisible Children, Occupy Wall
Street, the DREAM activists, the Harry Potter Alliance, Nerdfighters, Students
for Liberty and American Moslem youth (Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova
2012). These groups reflect a diversity of ideological perspectives and political
identities. These cases were also selected because these networks and
organizations had proven successful at recruiting, training and mobilizing
young people in core political debates.
Couldry (2011, p. 496) also suggests that Convergence Culture failed to
provide ‘examples of online consumers using similar practices to ‘‘strik[e] back
economically’’ to challenge the labour policies of corporations or Wall Street
bankers’ bonus culture (i.e. important corporate power in other domains)’.
Fair enough, but we can now produce a range of such examples: accounts by
Jonathan Gray (2012) and Kurt Squire and Matthew Gaydos (2013) of the way
popular culture references and new media tactics were deployed against
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s efforts to crack down on public unions;
Thorson et al.’s research (2013) into Occupy Wall Street’s use of YouTube and
Twitter; Lori Kido Lopez’s account (2011) of the anti-racist campaigns
launched by anime fans in collaboration with more traditional Asian-American
anti-discrimination groups; and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik’s accounts (Kligler-
Vilenchik et al. 2012, Kligler-Vilenchik forthcoming) of the work of the Harry
Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters, and Imagine Better, including its campaigns
in support of labour unions picketing Wal-Mart, marriage equality and (most
recently) the need for Warner Brothers to shift its chocolate contracts to Fair
Trade producers (Jenkins 2012). Sangita Shresthova and I (2012) also co-edited
a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which included case studies
of ‘fan activism’ with varying degrees of success from around the world.
Each of these accounts suggests that these groups are actively deploying skills
acquired through recreational consumption towards political and economic
struggles around social justice, a development that Convergence Culture
anticipates.
Critique in the public interest?

Publishing Convergence Culture was intended and has functioned as the first step
towards a more interventionist approach to cultural politics. Turner’s critiques
here (2011) of efforts by (mostly British and Australian) cultural scholars to
engage with the creative industries are both painful and ironic. My own
inspiration came as a result of a visit to Australia early in my career, especially
conversations I had with Australian scholars (including Turner himself) about
the tradition of cultural policy work he discusses here. I met and observed
Australian academics who were actively shaping their country’s cultural policy
and who were engaged public intellectuals, speaking out through various forms
of media, particularly public radio. When I returned to America, eager to
apply that model to our context, I discovered complications. In Australia,
which has a strong public service media tradition, cultural policy is shaped
significantly through government initiatives (though the privatization of
cultural production is a growing global phenomenon), whereas in America,
as a consequence of deregulation, corporations directly determine the cultural
policies (often through terms of service) that have the greatest impact on the
public’s ability to meaningfully participate in networked culture. To make
meaningful change here, we need to engage directly with corporations and
this is the impulse that shaped Convergence Culture and, even more so, Spreadable
Media.
When people elsewhere intervene in policy discussions with governments,
they often do not fully agree with the agendas of the political leadership, and
they often find their work used in ways that can run counter to their own
commitments. Nevertheless, intervention is so vital that they have no choice
but to try to work through this imperfect process. They often have to
construct their arguments in language they calculate will be persuasive to
policy-makers and political leaders, even if that language differs in substantial
ways from that they would use in producing scholarly articles. And speaking as
a public intellectual involves stripping aside some of the nuances and
complications that engage us as theorists in order to paint the stakes of these
debates in broader strokes. The same has proven true when we seek to
intervene in corporate policies, though the rhetorical shifts and tactical moves
necessary for such work may seem less familiar to those in cultural studies. As
we enter into this still largely unfamiliar space, we are going to make mistakes,
some of which are costly, and I hope that smart and hopefully open-minded
critics Turner among them will keep us honest as we deal with the
contradictions and paradoxes of such exchanges. 10
Turner (2011, p. 693) argues that earlier efforts to shape cultural policy
were governed by shared commitments to improve ‘the nation, the citizen
and, typically, the state-subsidized cultural organization’, whereas he expresses
concern that more recent efforts to influence corporate practices have too
often focused on ‘the entrepreneur, the commercial industry and, possibly, the
consumer’. For my part, I have always sought to intervene to promote greater
opportunities for meaningful participation by both citizens and consumers, to
encourage greater educational resources and opportunities to help expand who
has the ability to participate, to push back on policies that might disable or
exploit participation. In some cases, this struggle has meant interventions
towards the public good in dialogue with corporations. In others, this has
involved working with governmental bodies, think-tanks, nonprofit organiza-
tions, foundations and activist groups. Such efforts may be necessarily
‘compromised’, and they are likely to produce at best ‘partial’ victories.
However, as far as I am concerned, the stakes here are too great to disengage
from these struggles.
In the US context, and perhaps elsewhere, there is another dimension to
such efforts: the reality that there are not going to be academic jobs for the
massive number of graduate students our programmes are producing and thus
the need to demonstrate that cultural expertise has value within other sectors.
I am not arguing that cultural studies programmes should be transformed into
trade and technical schools fitting students for industry; however, we do need
to model how theories can be deployed in more pragmatic ways to address
real-world challenges, and we need to prepare students who may be able to
question corporate policies from within rather than hurling invective at people
with whom you will never directly engage. I do not see this as ‘surrendering
the space’ so much as ‘expanding the terrain’ upon which cultural studies
interventions will occur. Given the economic realities, why would we not seek
to equip our students to make interventions in cultural politics throughout
their professional lives in academia, but also in every other space where they
may end up working.
There are clearly some substantive disagreements between myself and
some of the contributors to this special issue in terms of our emphasis, our
tactics, our ideological commitments and our theoretical models. We are all
seeking to make sense of a changing media landscape, and we are all working
towards progressive politics. There has been some attempts here, implicit or
explicit, to label those of us who are optimistic about the prospects of a more
participatory culture as neo-liberal or even ‘neo-conservative’, and these
charges represent perhaps the least collegial dimensions of this special issue.
Surely, your fight should be focused against those who would silence minority
perspectives (say, by imposing new requirements on voter registration) and
not with those of us who are seeking alternative mechanisms for broadening
participation. For me, such passages raise core questions about how inclusive
or narrow the discipline of cultural studies can be or should be in terms of
ideological perspectives, fields of investigation, theoretical and methodological
models, or tactics of public intervention. In some cases, there is an impatience
with analytic work that seeks to describe emerging conditions rather than judge
them, and in others, there is a tendency to confuse theoretical disagreements
for ideological ones.
For me, ‘critique in the public interest’ must go beyond ‘critique’ and
should include forms of advocacy and intervention. However flawed, the
concept of ‘participatory culture’ allows us to describe a set of criteria by
which we might judge progress made or battles lost in our struggles towards a
more diverse and democratic culture. Stephen Duncombe (2012) argues that
all activism requires some element of utopianism, some vision of what a better
society might look like, so I want to challenge my critics to use this debate to
better articulate what they are fighting for and not simply what they are
fighting against. Too often, work in critical and cultural studies sees a narrow
conception of critique as the only goal of theory-making and often seeks to
protect its independence from commercial interests at the cost of making
meaningful interventions in public debates. This is why, perhaps, I described
certain strands of cultural theory and politics as ‘critical pessimism’, a
rhetorical excess for which I have since publicly apologized (Jenkins 2011).
‘Critical pessimism’ is too simplistic a term to describe legitimate disagree-
ments about what constitutes the best ways forward for the media reform
movement a term no harsher than some of the labels which have been
applied to me and my work, but certainly not constructive if the goal is to
foster greater dialogue between alternative perspectives within cultural
studies. For the record, I never meant the term to dismiss the legitimate
concerns raised by critical scholars, but rather to challenge a tendency among
some critical studies writers to write in ways that left open very little
possibility of meaningful political and social change. For me, critique is a
means to an end and that end is the production of a more diverse, democratic
and just society.
In the opening pages of Spreadable Media, my co-authors and I (Jenkins et al.
2013, p. xii) write:
Ours is a reformist rather than a revolutionary agenda, offering pragmatic

advice in hopes of creating a more equitable balance of power within
society. We accept as a starting point that the constructs of capitalism will
greatly shape the creation and circulation of most media texts for the
foreseeable future and that most people do not (and cannot) opt out of
commercial culture.
We are seeking to identify mechanisms that allow for meaningful social change
under the conditions of Neoliberal capitalism. We want to make the changes
we can now, even if this means sometimes working within rather than outside
capitalist institutions. Other writers here will disagree with that priority,
stressing the need to fight for fundamental and systemic change. These are
debates worth having, even if I would argue that the two are not necessarily
incompatible goals. The urgency of this current moment suggests that we need
to be working together to broaden who gets to participate, to push back
against corporate and governmental policies that constrain our capacity to use
new media in the public interest, to identify ways groups are engaging in active
participation in spite of such constraints, and to advocate ways that corporate,
governmental and other organizations might better respond to their
constituencies. The struggle to reform media is going to be a multi-front
struggle. We should be figuring out how to work together, where we can,
rather than refighting the same old culture (studies) wars we have been
restaging for the past 20 years.
Notes
1 While it is true that the term ‘convergence culture’ has been taken up by a
range of other scholars since the book’s publication, I doubt most of the
other authors being discussed would accept the premise that their work
should be understood as part of a ‘convergence culture’ model. The
differences in our disciplinary backgrounds, institutional settings, discursive
goals and theoretical and ideological commitments are important in
understanding our work. The editors do make a substantive effort to
situate their discussion in relation to historic frictions at the intersection
between media studies and cultural studies, an important context for such a
discussion, but most of those they identify here probably would not see
either field as their primary discipline. I can only speak for myself and my
own work. That said, I am not sure you can meaningfully engage with
Convergence Culture in isolation from the body of my work: while a
commitment to fostering a more participatory culture is a central theme of
my work, my theoretical models have evolved dynamically over time due to
changing circumstances, shifting realities, engagement with work of other
thinkers and so forth. And for me, the academic publications are strongly
connected with the work of my blog, a space I use to foster larger
conversations, and with my various projects that attempt to translate these
ideas into practice. For that reason, I am approaching this paper less with a
goal of defending Convergence Culture and more with an emphasis of showing
how some of the questions raised are addressed in the context of my larger
body of work, especially in works published since the book’s release in
2006.
2 For example, there is an important methodological discussion about how we

might move from localized case studies to larger theoretical models and
there is a key pedagogical debate about what constitutes appropriate
curriculum for cultural studies in the twenty-first century, both of which
would require deeper discussion than I can provide here.
3 For example, I have already written a very productive dialogic essay with
Nico Carpentier (2013), which explores points of contact between our
respective models for understanding the politics of participation.
4 See, for example, the balance of critical and more celebratory perspectives
within Ito et al. (2013).
5 There is a need for continued historical reflection which might place current
developments in larger contexts and which might encourage us to take a
longer view on the process of media change. This debate would benefit
enormously from more historicized accounts, but I also see value in trying to
capture and analyse emerging technologies and practices, so that timely
theoretical interventions can help shape future developments before the
paint dries.
6 We can see this difference when we compare Andrejevic’s critique of the
corporate use of sentiment analysis tools with the forms of ‘conversation
maps’ MIT Media Lab alum Warren Sack (2005) describes. Sack argues that
mapping the flow of conversations would allow large-scale communities to
better understand their own discursive interactions, often with the goal of
ensuring diversity of perspectives as well as identifying tactics for working
towards shared interests. Sack was designing tools that could move fluidly
from large-scale conversation maps towards more qualitative engagement
with specific posts and conversations. As Andrejevic (2011, p. 613)
suggests, corporate use of sentiment analysis seeks ‘to capture enough
data to discern an overall tendency, or an aggregate sentiment’, an
approximation which falls short of the tools for democratic citizenship Sack
imagines. This is a powerful example of the limits of technological
determinist readings: though the initial steps down this path were framed
as creating tools for democratic participation, current use of similar tools
can be highly exploitative, especially when employed cynically by
corporations simply seeking to more effectively market to specific
demographics. Yet, we need to remain open to the possibility that those
same tools might be deployed differently if the tools or the data they
generate were made more widely available to these networked publics as has
been advocated by those who are seeking to make easy-to-use visualization
tools accessible to a broader range of users (Danzinger 2008).
7 There are plenty of signs throughout the book of scepticism about
commercial interests: to cite a few examples, my discussion of the shifting
relationships between Lucasfilm and Star Wars fans (pp. 153 164); the
conflicts that had emerged between the producers of American Idol and
certain segments of their audience over the voting mechanisms (pp. 89 93);
my expressed concerns about the consequences of moving civic conversa-

tions into commercial spaces, such as shopping malls or massively
multiplayer games (pp. 242, 243).
8 This generation of feminist fan scholars announced their collective
emergence through Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s Fan Fiction and
Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006).
9 For a useful discussion of the structure of conservative organizations, see
Amy Binder and Kate Wood (2012).
10 For a brutally honest overview of how one of my teams’ efforts to partner
with NBC News to promote news literacy went awry, read Klopfer and
Haas (2012).
Notes on Contributor
Henry Jenkins is a Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism,
Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He is
the co-author, with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, of the 2013 book Spreadable
Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture and the author or editor
of another 15 books, including Convergence Culture (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and
Gamers (2006), and Textual Poachers (1992).
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Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’

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Responding to the September 2011 special issue on ‘Rethinking Convergence

Keywords participation; convergence; fandom; activism; feminism;

In September 2011, Cultural Studies devoted a special issue to ‘Rethinking

airing of differences continues to be constructive and mutually respectful.

Towards a more participatory culture

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate

(Shaull 1972, p. 13)

And we might see at least an implicit theory of participation in Raymond

(1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate,

(2) a range of subcultures promote Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media production,

(3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglom-

(Jenkins 2006b, pp. 135, 136)

Given my focus on cultural and economic factors, I saw Convergence Culture as

Right now, convergence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding

(Jenkins 2006a, p. 259)

Those of us who care about the future of participatory culture as a

(Jenkins 2008, pp. 293, 294)

This passage reflected my growing awareness of what Nick Couldry (2011)

‘Participating’ in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free

What is often missing [in the first wave of scholarship on participatory

This is precisely what I meant when I suggested at various points across

So, is this an immutable law that negates any possibility of alternative

The march of time

It is beyond my abilities to describe or fully document the changes that are

I intended Convergence Culture to provoke a new round of discussion about the

where the culture may be heading.5 For example, Convergence Culture’s

critique of ‘user-generated content’ incorporated in the paperback edition of

Writing with ambivalence

Here’s the paradox: to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes

(Jenkins 2006a, p. 63)

This seems to me what Mark Andrejevic (2011, p. 612) is getting at when he

consumers on the production process and the facilitation of monitoring-based

The logic of aggregation is distinct from that of collectivity the former

engagement is accompanied by revamped strategies for managing and

Corporations imagine participation as something they can start and stop,

Convergence Culture may place its emphasis on the growing influence of

How do fans fit into the picture?

(Jenkins 2006a, p. 23)

this endless circulation and proliferation of objects and images through

Gender and fandom

Collective agency and participatory politics

certainly, individuals do gain some greater degree of communication capacity

The social production of meaning is more than individual interpretation

Increasingly, my focus is turning towards various activist networks and

concerns we have about the state of American democracy, we can point

Critique in the public interest?

Ours is a reformist rather than a revolutionary agenda, offering pragmatic

2 For example, there is an important methodological discussion about how we

my expressed concerns about the consequences of moving civic conversa-

Enzensberger, H. M. (1970), republished 2000. ‘Constituents of a theory of the

Jenkins, H. (2007a). ‘Afterword: the future of fandom,’ in Fandom: Identities and