ONLY a few decades into our digital evolution, human knowledge, once the domain of great libraries and universities, is just a Google search away. Interpersonal connections can be made instantaneously, conversations downloaded and fleeting thoughts logged for all to see.
Technology has emboldened us. It allows us to access information so quickly that there is no need to understand it deeply. It also lets us interact across various media and find community in places that previous generations could never have imagined. Ours is a moment in time, Henry Jenkins writes in his new book, "Convergence Culture," when "lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires ... flow across media channels."
On one level, convergence refers to the breaking down of walls between methods of communication (telephone and telegraph) and mass communication media (newspapers, radio, television and the Internet). Jenkins sees a simultaneous reshaping of the relationships among individuals, media audiences, content and its producers -- and therefore of popular culture itself.
Online communities have emerged solely to ponder what will happen on the television show "Survivor." Harry Potter fans around the globe collectively produce a Web newspaper called the Daily Prophet that its young creator labels a "friendly utopian society."
Whether these links are profound and the relationships forged through them can exist offline hardly matters. In many ways, we've become what historian Daniel J. Boorstin warned about in 1961: "the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them."
Jenkins, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's comparative media studies program, sees convergence culture as the latest in a series of intellectual movements. It is the point "where old and new media collide, where grass-roots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways." \o7 \f7
Examples abound: Rupert Murdoch buys MySpace.com, then makes a deal with Google to put ads on the popular social networking site. More problematic is what happened when Chevrolet invited consumers to create their own online commercials for its Tahoe sport utility vehicle; instead of paeans to the SUV, environmental activists made 30-second clips lambasting it.
