Henry Jenkins has two main focuses in his book Collective Culture– collective intelligence and its relationship with and pathway to an achievable utopia and the relationship between capitalism and commodification and trans-media marketing. For the first, he relies on an example with the TV show Survivor, which was the first major series that people tried to spoil. The fact that not everyone could know everything invoked the need for the collective intelligence that was found in spoiler blogs and chat rooms. “A collective intelligence… assumes that each person has something to contribute” and “people work together, put their heads together” to discover something that no single person could know by himself (53). Author Pierre Lévy believes that this continued conversing and sharing of information will result in an “’achievable utopia’… when the sharing of knowledge and the exercise of grassroots power become normative” (246). The evidence for Jenkins’ other main focus comes from such brands as Harry Potter, The Matrix, and American Idol, as well as in political campaigns. Jenkins says the success of Harry Potter came from its use of various media – literature, film, toys, and merchandise; but the brand is also making it possible for people to fully participate in convergence culture by pooling knowledge with others, sharing and comparing value systems, and circulating what is created via the internet (185). Political campaigns also take advantage of trans-media marketing. Before the “Dean Scream” went viral, Howard Dean used new media (namely the internet) in ways never used before the 2004 Presidential campaign season, which was important, Jenkins says, because he got young voters excited. Both The Matrix and American Idol linked trans-media marketing to capitalism and commodification. According to Jenkins, the Wachowskis “integrat[ed] multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium” (97). Fans had to play the video games, talk with their friends, and read blogs or they would miss much of the point. Jenkins also gives various examples of how the “layers upon layers of references… may require you to move through the film frame by frame on your DVD player” (100-101). American Idol did the same thing with brand recognition. Many times, viewers would have to text votes in on their AT&T phones; otherwise their vote would not go through.
The most prominent aspect that Jenkins discusses is his concept of collective intelligence. Each chapter has its own interpretation of what the collective intelligence means for convergence culture and how it plays in to each medium. For instance, in the chapter “Spoiling Survivor,” Jenkins quotes Lévy: “’No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity’” (26-27). However, Lévy believes that eventually this collective knowledge will result in an autonomous culture. Neither Jenkins nor I truly believe that. There are people that will argue merely to argue. And there are people so entrenched in their beliefs that no amount of collective intelligence will yield a consensus. Another example comes from Keanu Reeves telling TV Guide: “’What audiences make of Revolutions will depend on the amount of energy they put into it’” (97). And Jenkins interprets that “viewers get even more out of the experience if they compare notes and share resources than if they try to go it alone” (97). Jenkins further stresses the importance of collective intelligence in regards to such stories as The Matrix, stating that “’Joe Popcorn’ can pool his knowledge with other fans and build a collective concordance on the internet” because although the film is difficult to just get, “the emergence of knowledge cultures made it possible for the community as a whole to dig deeper into this bottomless text. Harry Potter also provides a good example of collective intelligence. When discussing the fanfic sites, Jenkins introduces the beta-reading, which not only improves children’s writing skills, it also takes unnecessary focus away from “what can be counted on a standardized test,” which, I feel is not the best way to gauge a child’s intelligence nor scholastic success. An example from class is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. People fear that, because people can post whatever they like, it will be unreliable. However, because so many people post to the site, it is a sort of self-correcting machine. The collective intelligence of the millions of users weeds out the fallacies and leaves almost as much accuracy as Encyclopedia-Britannica. Now that is collective intelligence at work.
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