Convergence Culture Intro

Convergence Culture Introduction

Main Point:
I believe that the main point of the introduction to Convergence Culture is basically to get across the meaning of the main points the author will be taking into more detail later in the book. It seems that there is a general description of the three main concepts which include media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Jenkins provides a simple definition of convergence and how it ties into the other two concepts.

Quotes:
-“In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”
-“The circulation of media content—across media systems, competing media economies, and national borders—depends heavily on consumers’ active participation.”

Real World Connection:
In my second quote it talks about consumer participation in the circulation of media content and how important it is. This is very true in American society because we seem to only see or hear popular content. A prime example is in the radio, we usually only here the songs that are very popular at the current time.

Weinberger Connection:
Weinberger and Jenkins talk about seem to talk about some similar points and one of the connections I made was about consumer participation. Weinberger talks about how the consumer is becoming more and more vital to today’s world of technology and it seems that Jenkins is introducing the same concept in his ideas surrounding convergence.

Weinberger So What?

After reading this book one of the main points that I gathered was the importance of the use of metadata and tagging. As the amount of information continues to grow, organization of that information will become more and more important. As for the so what, I am a frequent user of the internet and I believe the internet alone will benefit from tagging and the use of unique metadata for the fact that new information goes up on the internet every second and will continue to do so well into the future. Also I will most likely be in a technology oriented career soon and the use of tagging and metadata will most likely be an important part of my career as well.

Weinberger Chapter 8, 9

Chapter 8
Weinberger talks a lot about the use of metadata and more recently in the book the use of tagging and it’s importance in the world. In chapter 8 he talks about the uses of implicit and explicit data. Basically implicit data is there to help you understand the material better, whereas explicit data is a more generalization of the material.

So What? I believe as a DTC major I should care about this because the use of implicit and explicit data is becoming even more and more important in today’s world because the amount of data generated is expanding rapidly. In the future it will be very important to be able to distinguish different types of data and using implicit and explicit data is a very effective and basic way of doing so.

Chapter 9
In my understanding of chapter 9, Weinberger is talking about the organization of information mainly on the web. He talks about how different organization is on the web and how there really isn’t a set way of organizing a website. Different people have different tastes in organization and therefore different companies must tailor their organization of their material in a specific way in order to satisfy their target audience.

So What? Organization is becoming more and more important in the online world. I have seen many websites that are poorly organized and therefore very confusing. Companies today try to figure out their key demographic and tailor their organization skill to that and as a DTC major where web design is a huge part of our future careers, we need to know all of the different keys to organizing material.