The reading for this week was interesting and reminded me why I love this field of study so much: for so much of what we do, there is a popular audience that is interested in the same issues we debate in class and research for seminar papers, unlike many other fields in academia. I was particularly struck by one of the first lines in the first chapter: "Survivor is television for the Internet age--designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued"(25). As someone with a healthy aversion to reality TV, (okay, I do watch American Idol and Project Runway...but still...) I had never really considered the value (right word?) of this type of TV within this context. Before TV hit the Internet (and I don't mean pre-Hulu)--or, perhaps we should say before the Internet begin impacting TV--the act of watching television was a bit more of a passive experience. With network websites, YouTube, Hulu, spoiler sites, fan sites, and discussion boards dedicated to television, the act of watching TV has become less individualistic, and even less relaxing in some ways. Now, watching TV is an active ritual in which viewers become participants and authors who write and speculate about TV in a way once reserved for activities like politics. While this is not necessarily bad, it is very representative of Jenkins notion of convergence culture. In my opinion, any process by which consumers become participants or producers of information is subversive and ripe for an investigation of the agency of the subject. I kept thinking about this while reading today, and also kept thinking about the fact that, as one must do in a convergence culture, that we should still consider these new roles of TV viewers with caution, carefully avoiding falling into the trap of technological determinism. I think this is Jenkins point in many ways: as culture continues to shift and media continues to converge, we must become ever more aware of the way we as subjects are interpelated within such a matrix.
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