#dtc356 ~ Blog #5 [Introduction of Jenkins]

#dtc356 [Blog #5 (Introduction of Jenkins)]

This book has a full focus on how the convergence culture affect the roles of media that are spreading and growing on us, society. There are 3 key basic concepts of convergence culture: media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Media convergence is what things are changing the old ways to the new ways, through the modification or upgrade of media. This influences people everywhere to follow because somehow it has become the new trend. We gotta leave trivial old ways behind and start embracing the new world that contain various ideas with a wide range of thoughtfulness from people. Participatory culture is the idea that both producers and consumers share ideas and collaboratively develop and create something that can satisfy both parties, inherently exemplified by the societal consumption and the profits earned by manufacturers for listening to the customers and making their dream products come true. Collective intelligence simply collectively accumulates intelligence from everyone who participated in the development of an idea, turns them into sources to improvement, and foundationalize them as the basis of the making of a product or media, with of course, fulfilling the necessities and what the consumers want. For instance, in the new product from Apple called iPad, has the features that are always owned by old cellphones, included with music and videos compilation library also Mac laptop features, etc. One device has the abilities to provide satisfaction to the user through the availability of other devices in it.

My favorite quotes:

* None of us know everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. (4)

* Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era when media will be everywhere. (16)

* Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. (18)

* You are now entering convergence culture. It is not a surprise that we are not yet ready to cope with its complexities and contradictions. We need to find ways to negotiate the changes taking place. No one group can set the terms. No one group can control access and participation. (23)

This is very important to me as in life, things keep changing over years and generations. What my parents understand often times are very unusual and unreasonable to me, although I am sure it was reasonable to everyone during their youth years. My parents do not like to use the new types of technology, not necessarily recent like iPhone, but phones or computers. Even the stoves are using oil instead of electricity. It is not that they don't have money to purchase them or are not capable of using them, but they decided not to follow the convergence of technology as they think those stuffs are meant for younger generations. But as times passed by, they realized how important it is to have a mobile phone and access to internet at least in everyday's life. Another thing is as a DTC student, understanding and discerning media well is the key to successful way to better culture. Since the way people think keep changing, media keep converging as well. The only way to through years would be to follow the trend and being up to date to the new things. also I need to be in the front line of understanding those so that I can keep track of how people' thoughts in the world change and affect the evolution of media.

The relation of this main idea of the book to the Weinberger's would be that convergence acts the same way as the leaves of the information/knowledge tree become smarter. All kinds of media are being converted into something new in different pace of progress. This is based on the demand of consumers who think life should be more enjoyable if things/tools/ideas they use are becoming practical, instant, multi-functional, and interesting. However, to develop such goal, they ought to realize that collective intelligence which is crucial to the growth of participatory culture is much needed in order to generate smarter leaves, which eventually lead to a more intellectual life and better way of living. Unfortunately, those people who cannot keep up to the convergence process will slowly turn into incompetent individuals and may become the victims of societal values for not being up to date.