Converging is second nature

On the surface, convergence culture seems like a complicated topic, especially when someone as intelligent as Henry Jenkins is talking about it.  However, the more I got through the reading and thought about what I would write, I came to the realization that in all honesty, convergence culture is second nature to myself and many others in our generation.  The amount that participatory culture has become embedded in my life is what made it so tough for me to quantify and wrap my head around it; almost everything I do exists on multiple platforms and is interactive.

When I am at home around my parents, the difference between my modern understanding of new media and their more old school views are often on display.  When we are sitting watching TV as a family, I always keep my computer by my side.  When any sort of question is raised, I am too curious not too google it and find the answer.  My parents constantly laugh at me for this and make fun of me being constantly “plugged in,” but what why is grabbing this knowledge a bad thing? Without the ability to reference across other resources, the question would have just hung in the air and died rhetorically.

Some people might say that such extra pieces of knowledge are only good for winning games like trivial pursuit or jeopardy, but if one has a good sense of filtering and importance, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with collecting as much information about the world around them as possible.

The idea of participatory culture is what I have grown up with.  While I was using a computer, listening to the radio and watching TV before this type of convergence developed fully, I spent my formative years converging and participating.  For years, my homepage has been azcentral.com, the web version of the newspaper we got delivered at home.  Just as important as reading the various sports articles, was reading the pages of comments and see which team’s fans were weighing in the strongest.  I was always obsessed with checking the insider message boards for my team and seeing what the latest news was, only adding my own input when I felt worthy.

That idea of being worthy of participating in the conversation about the things I loved the most was what eventually led my start writing this blog and record a podcast that never ended up being released.  When I was little, I thought breaking into the world of sports writing was impossible, but as I grew up into the society of convergence culture I realized that my voice had the chance to be just as important if I communicated in the proper ways.  Those different channels of communication always seem to be changing, and I certainly am not an expert at it despite growing up in its midst.

I believe that my lifestyle of convergence is what has led to my love for and constant use of twitter.  When used properly, twitter can answer my questions, keep me informed and keep me in touch with people across the country.  Twitter allows me to use the collective intelligence of the crowd, but only the crowd I chose to use at any specific time.

Even I was vehemently against twitter at first.  I didn’t see it’s power, but once I decided to give it a try I was swept up in what it could do.  Now as an avid user, this change shows another characteristic of those of us embedded with convergence culture: adaptability.  Despite not knowing anything about twitter, I fiddled around with it and since it was like facebook and other sites I had used, I quickly picked it up.  We are a hands-on generation, one that if given enough time to play with something will figure out how to use it and adapt our knowledge to it.

It is important that I keep reminding myself that with the idea of convergence culture; it is all around me, I just need to pry into my knowledge to really analyze it.  I have grown up so embedded with many of these concepts that I have to step back and pull myself away from them to truly see them from an academic point of view.

 

Just some stuff to think about…

–John