Convergence culture, as Henry
Jenkins sees it, enables a bottom-up, grassroots approach to media production
that has been unparalleled in the digital age. He emphasizes how convergence “is reaffirming the right of everyday
people to actively contribute to their culture,” in a shift from predictions of
folk culture being contained by the development of mass media (Convergence
Culture, p. 133). Jenkins’ crucial question: “What would it mean to tap media
power for our own purposes?”(Convergence Culture, p. 249) permeates not only
his own work but the field of cultural studies as a whole in terms of the
larger aim of addressing inclusive and participatory impulses. When
audiences/consumers are actively involved in the creation of their own media,
it brings up a whole other range of questions and concerns. We must be careful
not to get caught up in a rhetoric of liberation and democratic creation when
several collaborative, consumer-produced media are still privy to power
dynamics and a number of hierarchical executive decisions that ultimately
decide what is or isn’t promoted, and what can or can’t gain popularity. At the
end of the day, dissemination is everything, and any consumer-produced content
needs to be available to others in order to create its own mark in our media
environment.
One
intriguing example of fan cultures and creativity being appropriated for a more
mainstream media usage is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s ‘Hit Record’ project. Hit
Record is a collaborative media project that has been running for about four
years now, with its first televisual episode premiering earlier this year.
Gordon Levitt directs the collaboration and acts as the unflinchingly handsome
PR face of the project, ensuring interest and backing from various investors.
Episodes are generated around certain themes, and writings, music pieces,
animations, and voiceover are culled from the thousands of submissions their
interactive website (http://www.hitrecord.org/)
receives. The top selections are
displayed and voted on by the web users, which is naturally far from being
detached from politics and doesn’t guarantee democratic creation. Additionally,
the politics of visibility are fascinating; for instance, in the first episode,
‘One’, a fan-created short story was selected and paired with a fan-created
voiceover recording. However, Gordon Levitt invited Elle Fanning to enact the
filmed role onscreen and then superimposed the fan voiceover in lip-synch.
There is certainly a degree of celebrity that pushes the project forward, and
which creates all sorts of interesting boundaries whereby the fan is allowed to
participate and dictate the content only to a certain extent, or only within
pre-defined confines and categories.
The website is organized in a very straightforward and interactive
mode that encourages participation and submissions from the online browsers, as
well as multiple options for sharing content on other social media (facebook,
twitter, etc). Merchandising and various products are on sale online, extending
the brand’s notoriety even as more profits are generated. The project is billed
as ‘a new kind of variety show’, which interestingly draws on a historical form
of early entertainment to account for its diverse perspectives and bricolage-like
structure (though in reality its unifying themes are a lot more cohesive than
variety shows of old truly aspired to be). Gordon Levitt sees the project as an
extension of his own production company, aspiring for inclusivity and setting
it apart from ‘your typical Hollywood production’ in terms of allowing anyone
who has the internet to participate. This alone, however, is restrictive – much
as technologically utopian views might insist, the internet is far from
representative of a wide-ranging section of the global population considering
the numbers of those who actually have regular access to it. Hit Record is a
particularly interesting example because the degree to which it is furthering
the image of its creator is inextricable from the degree to which it seeks to
truly establish a wide-reaching creative collaboration of media content
involving hundreds of contributors. It’s a bold and beautiful step in the world
of media convergence, but its actual outreach and purpose still remain to be
seen…
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