Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins
the history of their affiliation. Yet, as a fan community disbands, its members may move in many different directions, seeking out new spaces to apply their skills and new openings for their speculations, and in the process those skills spread to new communities and get applied to new tasks. ChillOne’s intervention no doubt shortened the life of the Survivor spoiling community, yet he merely sped up what was going to be an inevitable decline in interest. Once the game had been played through a few times, the members were going to seek out new avenues for their practice.
We can see such knowledge communities as central to the process of grassroots convergence. To be sure, as we will see in the next chapter, the producers wanted to direct traffic from the television show to the Web and other points of entry into the franchise. Those various points of contact became opportunities to promote both the series and its sponsors. Yet, fans also exploited convergence to create their own points of contact. They were looking for ways to prolong their pleasurable engagement with a favorite program, and they were drawn toward the collaborative production and evaluation of knowledge. This bottom-up process potentially generated greater interest in the series, amplifying these fans’ investment in the aired material. But, insofar as it interfered with or reshaped the informational economy around a series, it also threatened the producer’s ability to control public response.
What we need to keep in mind here and throughout the book is that the interests of producers and consumers are not the same. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they conflict. The communities that on one level are the producer’s best allies on another level may be their worst enemies. In the next chapter, we will reverse perspectives—looking at the audiences of reality television from the vantage point of program producers and advertisers. In this way, we will come to understand how entertainment companies are reappraising the economic value of fan participation.
1 For a fuller discussion of Twin Peaks’ online fan community, see Henry Jenkins, “‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery,” in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
1 Personal interview with author, May 2003.
2 Chris Wright, “Poaching Reality: The Reality Fictions of Online Survivor Fans,” unpublished seminar paper, Georgetown University, February 7, 2004.
1 Pamela Wilson, “Jamming Big Brother: Webcasting, Audience Intervention, and Narrative Activism,” in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (eds.), Realty TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 323. See also Joan Giglione, “When Broadcast and Internet Audiences Collide: Internet Users as TV Advocacy Groups,” paper presented at Media in Transition 3 Conference: Television, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., May 3, 2003.
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