Convergence Culture 1980s postmodernist analysts offered depic- tions of the developed world as a relatively DAVID TOEWS open society compared with the conformist University of Toronto, Canada polities of the 1950s and 1960s, stressing new ironies of self-consciousness and linguistic Convergenceisabuzzwordwithinmedia play. Jean-François Lyotard (1984) attacked industries that refers to the coming together the representational logic of deliberative of various forms of media at infrastructural democracy and imagined an ideal of free information made possible by computer as well as delivery levels largely by means of information storage. Jean Baudrillard (1983), digital media. Convergence culture refers to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983), and forms of social, political, and economic inter- others identified new regimes of surveillance actions that celebrate, engage with, modify, and control. Modernity theorists such as exploit and/or resist industry strategies of Anthony Giddens (1991) and Zygmunt Bau- convergence. Actors involved in convergence man (2013) observed how what Lash termed culture share a norm of creatively combin- Another Modernity (1999) – contrasting with ing various forms of communication and a earlier industrial modernity – was bringing worldview of living in a historical period of about disembedding effects and cultural convergence. The slogan “to mash up” –to conditions, such as reflexive modernization combine in new ways, for example, tech- and ambivalence. According to George Ritzer niques, ideas, artifacts, expressions, and so (2009), traditional pressures to keep forms of on – trades on an awareness of things in culture separate imploded under the leveling the world as symbolic representations that effect of the postmodern condition of mass can or have been digitized, post-workplace media and culture. productivism, and a sense of play tinged with The convergence culture zeitgeist of today impatience with the effects associated with has crystallized around a number of complex keeping these traditional forms of expression technological, economic, social, and political and communication apart in separate geo- factors. According to Henry Jenkins’s (2006) graphical and epistemological compartments. seminalworkonthetopic,farandawaythe Like the end of the nineteenth century, which most significant aspects of this phenomenon hinted at social disruption and a modernist are the panoply of tools of communication view of society, convergence culture is an and meaning framing afforded by digital ideology rooted in a liminal awareness of media. With digitization, most content is social promises associated with technological no longer specific to a medium but is rather change. madetoflowacrossmultiplemediachannels, In many ways the idea is not new. Fore- making their corresponding communica- runners of the idea that the globe is going tions systems interdependent, and creating through a cultural period of convergence demand for accessing media products in mul- include Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan and tiple ways. The exigencies of media industries Lapham 1994) who articulated his global and the interests of ordinary consumers village concept in the 1960s. In the 1970s and have thus also converged, he argues. The

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory.EditedbyBryanS.Turner. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0601 2 CONVERGENCE CULTURE sampling and remixing of media is a popular Closely associated with these localized phenomenon and a prominent example of combinations are new evolutions in the convergence culture. Jenkins interprets such notion of hacking. Hacking today refers expressions as a form of democratization not only to unwanted intervention in gated rooted both in the economic interests of systems but much more broadly to all kinds media conglomerates and in a widening of of interventions in forms of government, participatory culture associated with digital politics, economics, and life itself; it has media. oftentakenonthepositiveconnotationof In response to the ideology of participatory taking control of a situation with the aim cultureputforwardbyJenkins,criticalcom- of providing sociable solutions to perceived munication theorist Mark Andrejevic (2013) internal obstacles. Mash-ups typically pro- has critiqued the notion of affective economics vide the meaning context of this broadened which serves as one of his key unexamined sense of hacking. Radicalization, often on premises,inrelationtoananalysisofthe the political left but just as often swerving era of big data,whichJenkinslargelyomits. off the normal political map, is often the The economy of convergence culture revolves context for such practices. For example, around the accumulation of data by social the self-important quasi-political hacker media companies. Marketers’ practices of group Anonymous superimposes stylized sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and pre- Guy Fawkes masks over the top of faces in dictive analytics exploit this social big data to their pictures. The Occupy movement was in find “dominant feeling-tones” and emotional part rooted in the depictions of Adbusters, triggers that will enable them to encode their a semi-serious online group employing a products as consumers’ desires. Neuromar- Baudrillardian logic of theoretical violence keting pinpoints centers of the brain where in order to call attention with their satirical blood rushes as products are experienced. publications to the problem of inauthenticity Such market research analyses purport to and exploitation in consumer society. At completely bypass the social processes of the same time, unfortunately, the violence self-consciousness, rendering moot the con- is not always strictly theoretical as nefarious cept of conscious consumer participation in groups such as the so-called Islamic State of the formation of products and markets. This Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have employed repositions the ordinary person in late cap- similar cultural methodologies in the man- italism as a passive repository of marketing agement and presentation of their affairs. meanings, who supposedly cannot hide the Convergence culture encourages marginal- “true self” from powerful industry actors. It ized actors to attempt to resist hegemony by returns society to what Slavoj Žižek (2009) entertaining and drawing the attention of has called a resurgent fundamentalism that is others to their causes, and the line between wellunderwayintheformationofanattack justandunjustusesofsuchlogicsisvery on language, consciousness, and sociality. blurred. The meanings of converged cultural Andrejevic terms this phenomenon a shift forms, let alone political objectives, are rarely in the paradigm of social control from rep- stable, but very often they are not meant resentation to correlation, which emphasizes to be. the utility of emotionally charged “patterns largely divorced from any connection to SEE ALSO: Communication Theory; Digital underlying meaning or surrounding context” Democracy; Digital Media; Mass Media, (Andrejevic 2013: 132). Theories of CONVERGENCE CULTURE 3

REFERENCES Lash, Scott. 1999. Another Modernity: A Different Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. Infoglut: How Too Much Rationality. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Con- Know.NewYork:Routledge. dition: A Report on Knowledge,translatedby Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations,translatedby Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Min- Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton. New neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. York: Semiotext. McLuhan, Marshall and Lapham, Lewis H. 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2013. Postmodernity and Its Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Discontents. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. repr. edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1983. Anti- Ritzer, George. 2009. Enchanting a Disenchanted Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Min- World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. of Consumption, 3rd edn. Los Angeles: SAGE. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. The Consequences of Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. In Defense of Lost Causes.New Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University York: Vers o. Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, illustrated edn. New York: NYU Press.