J.p. Lawrence

A Tale of Two Conferences

By J.p. Lawrence  (Next Section / Convergence Menu)

1

The mood at conference is one of polite doom, the way most journalism conferences are. The world, once again, is ending. No ark to be found. Coffee and donuts at the rear of the hall.Small-talk comes all at once, in between long stretches of listening. And peering.

In front of me is a man with a spreadsheet and a podium. He speaks in a measured tone, wears a tie, and talks about his clients as if they were gods. Perhaps they are. The numbers he places on the screen are massive. They are the growth numbers for various media industries over the coming 15 years. A billion here, a billion there: $7.6billion in local mobile ads, $37 billion in online ads. And then a series of percentages that dull the room: 0% projected growth for newspaper publishing,and 0.3% growth for consumer magazines. This is compared to 13% projected growth for internet advertising. "Mobile is the future," the spreadsheet man said. "If there's anything you can learn from these trends, it's that the future is mobile, mobile, mobile."

Mobile is the new god.

2

Henry Jenkins, a technologist andvery smart person, has an idea called the "black box fallacy." It'san argument against the idea that all media content is destined to flow througha single, sellable contraption - that your television and your newspaper andyour music player would all come in one package. (It should be noted thatJenkins writes this from the year 2006. In other words, one year before thedebut of the iPhone).

Jenkins thinks the black boxfallacy reduces media change to technological change (14). He thinks thecultural ideas surrounding media change are much more interesting. He wants totalk about are the rules we put in place when we interact with media, not thetechnological ways that the media itself is changing.

Jenkins, too, was at a conference:the New Orleans Media Experience in 2003. He watched the panels on new videogame consoles. He watched the panels on new music platforms. He met Hollywoodagents and music flacks and ad men and programmers and gamers and nerds. And herealized that all that these people wanted was for one of them to find orcreate the one black box that would win the market. After that the black box isfound, uncertainty will be banished, and everyone can get back to work.

Everyone wanted to find the newgod. No one knew what kind of god they were about to witness. They only knewtheir old idols had lost their luster. Jenkins asks: "Was it a NewTestament God who promised them salvation? An Old Testament God threatening destructionunless they followed his rules? A multifaceted deity that spoke like an oracleand demanded blood sacrifices?" (6). No one knew.

All they knew was that they desiredto worship at the alter of convergence.

3

Convergence. A word with a vicious,vengeful, violent "V" right in the middle. A word like a totem thatindustry leaders use to make sense of a moment of disorienting change. A wordthat Jenkins defines as the flow of information: across multiple mediaplatforms, between multiple media industries, and especially among mediaaudiences in search of the entertainment they want (2).

Media is the toast around yourinformation jelly. A medium is the delivery technology that enablescommunication, yes, but it is also the set of rules and cultural practices thathave grown up around that technology (13).

The rules have changed. Theaudience, the spectators, have now crashed the stage. Convergence is a specificcultural shift in protocol. Relations between producers and consumers arebreaking down as consumers now interact with media producers and otherconsumers (20), according to a set of rules that no one fully understands(3).  The old rules, the rules ofthe large daily newspapers and of Walter Cronkite - they were mere simpleconveniences, Ithiel de Sola Pool writes. Each industry had its own rules andfunctions, but Pool argues these were largely the product of political choices,preserved through habit, rather than any inherent characteristic of newsprintor television (11). Now, habits are being broken, and formed.

New rules are being made up as wespeak. As Pool predicted, the media world is in a period of prolongedtransition, during which various media systems competed and collaborated,searching for stability that will always elude them (11). New delivery technologiesbring with them new rules of use - rules often instituted ad hoc, taught by oneconsumer to another. This scares producers. This scares the type of person who attendsconferences.

For the industry insiders, thesearch for stability comes within the rhetoric for the next best technology. Oncethe black box is found, the rules will follow, and uncertainty will dissipate,the thinking goes. But this project will follow Jenkins. It will delve into thecultural changes, surrounding the technological ones. What happens to therelations between producers and consumers in a period of great mediatransition? When the rules by which producers live are no longer in place? Whenthe line between consumer and producer narrows?

4

I’ll try to make this more concrete.I’ll tell a story. At the conference spoke Alan Murray, president of the PewResearch and veteran of the Wall Street Journal. He quoted others in sayingthat today may be the golden age of journalism. More people are consuming morenews on their phones, tvs, and tablets. The audience crosses the global. Thetechnical barriers that once existed are gone. Editors are able to tracknumbers and see what people actually want from their news. A journalist can goout with an iPhone and shoot a story that goes on the air that night.

The people who suffer the yoke ofthis golden age are the producers. Media protocol is domain of both consumerand producer. The rules that the media industries once took for granted are fading:professionalism and disinterest, even the idea that one can make a living doingjournalism. Pay walls may be the answer, Murray said, and he advocated abolstering of media ethics as a bulwark against changing protocols. Murray saidthe rules of the medium dictate that you must pay money for disinterestedjournalism – our protocol will save us.

Question time begins, and I askMurray a hypothetical: in 15 years, what will separate the reporter with an iPhone12 filming a riot from a random bystander with an iPhone 12 filming a riot,besides the fact that the reporter is paid to follow a protocol? Murray pausesand says he hopes people will still believe in brands 15 years from now. Hehopes, in so many words, that consumers will maintain the cultural practice oftrusting large institutions like the Wall Street Journal to maintain a higher levelof quality control than the average consumer. He didn’t seem convinced in whathe was saying.

His belief system relies on theidea that a producer is by virtue separate from a consumer.  This is a belief system that has beenand will be tested in the future. Convergence has shown that consumers aretaking more and more of an investment in the creation of media and in theinterpretation of the world around them. It seems the development of protocolon behalf of both the consumer and producer will be the driving force of whatcomes next. 

Works cited: 

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print.