Here's a "response" for you: GIVE US SHORTER ARTICLES! Good lord, I could feel my youth slipping away reading that.
As far as the actual content of the essay? Snore. Alright, I guess that's a little mean, but this is all stuff that I've already experienced, thought about, or read before. I wrote fan fiction as a kid and posted on Star Wars RPG forums. In high school, my friends built their own Mystery Science Theater 3000 robots and we taped a homebrew episode of the show with our own skits and commentary on a episode of the 60s Batman TV show. Freshman year of college, for a film project, I re-shot the opening scene of Pulp Fiction with all the dialog presented as an AIM conversation. Basically... this essay was about me.
Unfortunately, while all of the stuff in the article is accurate and still rather poignant, it feels dated, being decidedly pre-YouTubevolution. Yes, I definitely just made that term up. Regardless, Jenkins seems to limit his definition of "Participatory Culture" to non-canonical uses of popular universes and pop-culture cross references. These days, it's not so much about parodying or homaging stuff you like, it's about making your own. It's not about Thumb Wars anymore (which was lame anyway, Bat Thumb and Frankenthumb were way funnier), it's about LonelyGirl15, which in turn, makes this a really long winded essay about things that used to be interesting. Alright, that's mean too, but I find myself at a lack of anything to really say about this except, "Yep. That's right. Let's move on."
It's not that the things in this essay are no longer relevant, it's just that they seems to be somewhat old hat because basically nothing new has happened on that front since the article's writing. People will continue to create fan films/fics/games/whatevers for things they like, the media corporations that own the IP will continue to send cease and desists if any one of those gets too popular, and people will continue to find new methods and technologies to take their own little media-related amusements and bring them to the big time. The breakthroughs of Photoshop and Premier are long since past now, and it seems like everyone and their grandmother is "rolling their own". And for whatever own you might be rolling, there's a dot-com 2.0 ready and waiting to present it to the rest of the interwebs.
This is a good essay. Actually, it's a great essay. It just stresses things that are now of historical importance rather than current events.
2 comments:
hm. nice to see you come around from a plea for shorter essays to thinking its a great essay.
also very interesting to learn that you, in fact, are the subject of much of Jenkins' ponderings.
I agree that once you get an idea of the thesis... "fan culture goes mainstream = participatory culture" its kinda like, yea... got that... what else?
i guess i am interested in finding out what else. will there be some sort of paradigm shift, brought on by the anarchy and participatory aspects of the web, that actually is capable of bringing about positive social change... or will the whole thing just be harnessed and driven by the same handful of humungo corporations that control everything else we see/hear/do, etc.
thanks for the thoughtful post!
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I don't think that being long and good are mutually exclusive for an essay. I thought it was a good essay from the beginning, I just didn't want to spend 2 hours reading it.
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