Long time ago I started reading Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture, but must admit I skipped a few chapters. But in this rainy summer I promised myself to start reading the last of a series (I turned out to be many) of book in which I have skipped, browsed and jumped inside the last year.

Last night I read the Tarantino’s Star Wars Chapter in Convergence Culture. It is really a brilliant book written by the founder (and Director) of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.

There are so many wonderful insights in this chapter so I’ll share a few. I love his differentiation between interactivity and participation, with interactivity being the master plan of the sender, based by their intentions, control and responsiveness of consumer feedback and participation being the respons by the reciever shaped by cultural and social protocols.

Another brillant diversity he adresses is how he categories the players in the media industry on behalf on their response to the changing media landscape as prohibitionists or collaborationists. This is perfect because you can take all players in the industry and locate them in eiter direction. Sadly their is a tendency to the classic media players (being music, recordings and film) joining the prohibitionists, and leaving the collaborative respons to gaming, mobile and internet driven companies.

A way where we see this in action is the ongoing debate on whether the movie industry embrace fan sites using content from their backyard? Disney fought for years to prohibit this, but were happy to make children market their movies anywhere else? This just doesn’t make sense. We fight to create Word of Mouth, but as soon as is spreads to Word-of-Mouse – we panic.

The sociologist Grant McCranken says: Corporations must decide whether they are, literally, in or out. Will they make themself an island or will they enter the mix?”

Especially the gaming industry has left the island and they are conquering the world by letting the gamers not just join the game, but co-creating the universes in where they play. It is estimated that 60 % of the gameplay in the Sims is created by users, and we see how MMPOG’s are defined today – not by the given gameplay, but by the social interaction happening between the users, as mentiond before with machinima Tales of the Past 3.

As you can see I love this chapter and it ends by this interesting quote, where the part about renegotiating relationships are very well spoken ” many of the smartest folks in the media industry know this; some are trembling, and others are scrambling to renegotiate their relationships with consumers. In the end, the media producers need fans just as much as fans need them.”

As Daria Rasmussen (my lovely co-worker) and me stressed several times under a conference on social media we hosted in march this year, social media is in its basic nature not so much different than 20 years ago. We now use last/Pandora or ilike to express our identity through public playlists, we make profiles on social networks as we  spend ours fillig out friendship-books and passing them  through our social networks 20 years ago (Personally I always had a problem filling out the “My future”- box, because my outer self wanted to be a hip journalist writing about politics and media, but deep inside I still had a little girl really wanting to be an indian princess – but I ever wrote that, in case some of the boys from the 6th grade would see the book)

The things going on in the media users heads and in their social interaction is not so much different. But the huge gap is in the speed in which these things go on. The adaptation rate is sky rocketting and I get dizzy just by thinking about the reach of our messages.

So there’s nothing new on social media – the news is in the broadband acces…

This is a good recent example copied with pride from Dan Calladine (love your newsletter, Dan!)

iLike popularity jumps due to Facebook widget?
“In true Internet fashion, iLike has gone through a year’s worth of
growth in a little over a week. As I wrote here last week, the company
went from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in a
little over a day — which taxed its resources to the point where it
doubled the number of servers it was running five times and still didn’t
have enough capacity. Eventually, the company had to plead with its
Silicon Valley friends and neighbours to provide extra servers for it to
use. And where is it now? It has quintupled in size again, and has more
than 2.2 million users.”

Read the whole article on Ingram 2.0 here

Spending some time with the nephew of my boyfriend last night (an hour in the room of a 12 year old boy and you learn more about media than spending weeks researching media trends) I saw the trailer for tales of the past 3 and it looked quite amazing.  As  I, as previously mentioned on this blog, am really fascinated by the whole category of MMOs and especially machinima movies. This trailer shows exactly what I like – they recruit so many people y a website and trailer seeded on the web. It is amazing.

Watch the trailer here.

For more info go to the tales of the past website.

This is really really funny… An ironic approach to my everyday work…. It’s funny – all the prejudice about the media industry collected in one video…..

I just booked tickets to Spiderman on thursday.. I’m looking so much forward to it. The trailer was fantastic! The reviews not that good, but have to judge for my self. As a big spiderman fan I think I can handle three villains.

Joining my brilliant co-worker Daria (see her post on this here) on scepticism on businesses panicing on the thought of being late for the future – being late for second life, I think that this is most of all a hype which has accellerated faster than the technology behind the software itself. Spending quite some time wandering the hills of nothing-ness I am mostly afraid of business meeting a wall of silence if they haven’t considered what they will do with their new found identity. A lot of companies have a hard time finding cohenrence in their many touchpoints with the consumers in reallife – many should think well about where their ressources are at their best use before stumbeling into the second life… or new things to come.

A little funny video to further thoughts…

I have a huge fascination of anything I don’t really understand. And the hard work laid in making this is really an example of a community and a culture I watch amazed and with my brain cells spinning confused around…

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I found it on a girl gamers blog – see the insomnia princess here

This is really just my totally lack of understanding about why people use twitter? I don’t get it? My mom would properbly love it (so would I if it  meant that  I should start every (And I do mean every) conversation with  “what have you been doing the last week? I have not been able to reach you at all? You work too hard, don’t you”).

Elsewhere I don’t really get it? Anybody out there???

A really great morning in Charlottehaven in Copenhagen with an interesting debate on the future for the TV medium. Henrik Dahl Explora started out with something like a hymn to TV as being center of social context, with the ads as a common denominator for the public agenda as well as the content is. A special point was his differentiation between attitude and behavior. Is it really true that we all hate commercials on TV. Attitude says yes – behavior no. But after that he drew out some points on how to lower the hatred towards TV ads. Interesting and most of all a solid base for further discussion.