Lecture Notes: Convergence, Digital Media, and Convergent Cultures
Quick housekeeping and class atmosphere
Instructor acknowledges sound levels and invites students to raise any hearing issues.
No formal housekeeping for the first time in this class.
Open invite for students to share hot goss or events; example given: Palestine Student General Meeting on Wednesday at 6 PM in the Student Union Building.
Offer to present slides or highlight events upon request via email; emphasis on engaging beyond studying.
Reminder: university is more than study; encouragement to make the most of the experience.
Week focus: convergence and the move to digital media
This week centers on the emergence of convergence; the title was intentionally framed as exciting.
Quick recap: three weeks of media history have concluded (initially described as sweeping and then clarified as still part of three weeks).
Shift in focus from historical thinking to present thinking; introduction of digital media with emphasis on convergence.
Reintroduction of Vilhelm (Kittler) as a useful reference point for understanding symbolic, technical, and digital structural layers.
Reading for the week: Jenkins and Dew’s article on convergence culture; plan to discuss in depth in the second half of the lecture.
Review: symbolic, technical, and digital media (Kittler’s framework)
Symbolic media
Created by humans using bodies to materialize information through symbols (e.g., rock art, papyrus scrolls).
Emphasizes physical presence in creating and using media.
Distinction from oral storytelling: media are external, tangible forms representing communicative acts.
Technical media
Created by humans to replicate or take over processes once confined to the human body via technologies that store one medium in another (e.g., light → film).
Supports mass cultural production (telegraph, television, radio).
Associated with the social emergence of the industrialisation of meaning making.
Agenda setting defined: not telling you what to think, but what to think about (example: Avril Lavigne mentioned to illustrate agenda setting).
Foundational references: Lippmann, Cohen; Littman & Cohen (for journalists).
The industrialisation of meaning making
Emergence of media/cultural industries; control over meanings and production processes.
Leads to the notion of passive audiences in some readings, though audience activity is always present.
Contrast with Stuart Hall’s idea that audiences are not passive; they actively interpret messages.
The audience and interpretation: Hall’s encoding/decoding model (brief recap for context)
Media artefacts are encoded by producers with a framework of knowledge, relations of production, and technical infrastructure.
Receivers decode using their own knowledge frameworks, production context, and technical infrastructures.
Three decoding positions:
Dominant/hegemonic: aligns with the producer’s intended meaning.
Oppositional: rejects the intended meaning due to different experiences/worldviews.
Negotiated: partial agreement with the intended meaning, tempered by personal experience.
This model sits alongside Laswell’s model, but acknowledges that receivers are not silent and differ in interpretation.
The culture industry critique (Adorno & Horkheimer, Frankfurt School)
The idea that media and cultural industries can oppress mass audiences by delivering homogenized messages.
Emphasis on the tension between emancipation and commodified culture.
Four historical moments mapped to media moments (illustrative examples)
Top: mass production model (Ford) — shared experiences around media (radio/television) with geographic proximity; content consumed collectively in shared spaces.
Bottom left: Walkman era — personal, portable media enabling individualized experiences and first hints of personalisation.
Bottom right: digital emergence — Macintosh/Apple LC era signaling access to information at fingertips and diverse environments; content consumption becomes plural rather than monolithic.
Question raised: If everyone can access different media, what environments arise? Plural environments emerge, with shared semiotic contexts but highly individualized experiences.
Kittler: digital as a historical stage (threefold history of media)
Threefold history
Symbolic: embodied experience of media.
Technical: external, mass-produced media that extend beyond the body.
Digital: the current stage to be covered; digital is defined by distinct operational principles.
What are digital media?
Examples cited: Instagram, YouTube, Google, TikTok, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, video games, animation, music, VR/AR, smart devices (watch, Fitbit), Bluetooth-enabled gadgets, etc.
The group discussion demonstrates that many everyday devices leverage digital capabilities beyond the Internet as a platform.
Core definition (Kittler, succinctly):
"Digital technology functions like an alphabet but on a numerical basis. It replaces the continuous functions into which the analogue media transform input data, which are generally also continuous, with discrete scanning at points in time at equidistant as possible, in the same way as the 24 film exposures per second, or at a much higher frequency since the Nipkow screen television did before. The measurement or this measurement, followed by evaluation in the binary number system is the precondition for a general media standard."
Unpacked in lecture: digital media run on binary codes ext{zeros and ones}; discrete sampling vs continuous signals; higher-frequency sampling enables rich digital representations.
What digital means in practice
Binary code enables interoperability: content can be consumed on multiple devices (TV, phone, tablet) with the same experience.
Transmission uses electricity, light, and radio waves; content can be structured in multiple ways and structures of transmission vary.
Historical context: computing as a military and distributed problem
Paul Barron (1962) — distributed communications networks as a response to the vulnerability of centralized mass-media hubs (one hub, many nodes).
Centralized model (single hub) is risky if the hub fails; distributed models increase resilience.
Conceptual trajectory: from centralized to decentralized to distributed networks; digital technologies enable decentralization and distribution at scale.
Diagrammatic evolution (historical note): central hub → distributed interconnections → fully distributed networks; parallels to blockchain concepts (distributed ledgers) and brain-inspired parallelism.
The physical infrastructure of the Internet—the submarine cable map
“Series of tubes” quote (US senator) used to introduce understanding of submarine fibre optic cables.
Undersea cables provide global connectivity; Australia has ~15 cables; cables connect countries through gateway hubs (e.g., Red Sea region near Egypt).
Cables are critical; if a cable breaks (e.g., Tonga outage after a volcanic eruption), regions can lose connectivity for days.
Cable cuts (e.g., reports of Russia cutting Finland’s cables, China cutting Taiwan’s cables) illustrate geopolitical power in digital infrastructure.
Even with satellite services (Starlink, etc.), most long-distance communications rely on undersea fibre.
Summary takeaway from Kittler's digital phase
Data throughput and access time have been transformed by physical parameters (transistors → integrated circuits) and parallel computing architectures.
Von Neumann architecture (linear, one operation at a time) becomes a bottleneck for multi-dimensional data like video and animation; this motivates parallel and distributed computing, as well as brain-inspired circuit designs.
The day is not far off when signal processing reaches physical limits of feasibility, prompting scalable, distributed, and parallel infrastructures and potentially AI-driven computation.
Social and ecological note
The internet is not merely in the cloud; its physical infrastructure (cables, data centers, etc.) has ecological and geopolitical implications and is a key determinant of social coherence and access to information.
Final note on Kittler
Acknowledgement that Kittler’s writing is challenging; the takeaway is the emphasis on the shift from symbolic to technical to digital and the implications for scalability, interoperability, and distributed networks.
From Kittler to Henry Jenkins: convergence and the social effects
Introduction to convergence (Henry Jenkins, with Mark Deuze)
Jenkins is the main proponent of convergence culture; Deuze contributed to the discussion.
Convergence means that media are coming together; content and platforms co-evolve and interact.
Transmedia storytelling and content convergence
Example: Marvel franchise as a case of media convergence
Marvel film (film as a medium)
Action figures, websites, comic books, novels, spin-offs, etc. (additional media forms that tell the same stories)
Transformation through remix and cross-media storytelling (e.g., fan communities, online discussions, fan fiction on Archive of Our Own).
Digital media enable remixing and convergence of content and stories across platforms.
Corporate consolidation alongside democratization: Disney owns Marvel; Alphabet/Google owns various content platforms; ownership concentration coexists with participatory culture and user-generated content.
Participatory cultures and the politics of participation
Jenkins argues that participatory culture diversifies culture by enabling grassroots contributions and remixing of mainstream content.
Quote (paraphrased): The power of grassroots media diversifies the power of broadcast media; expanding participation is the greatest opportunity for cultural diversity; writing over, remixing, and recirculating content can enrich the mainstream.
The lever of participation is not simply to destroy commercial culture but to rewrite and repurpose it.
Contemporary tensions and practical considerations
The 2002/2006 perspective by Jenkins is optimistic about participation and democracy in media; the modern context with TikTok and memes invites critical evaluation: is remix culture liberating or coercive?
The cat’s-eye/K-pop dance meme discussion illustrates how user-generated remix can democratize or exhaustively repurpose content; questions arise about the depth of participation and the meaningfulness of “creative” acts in the face of highly commercialized, pre-packaged content.
Updating Laswell’s model with platforms and participatory dynamics
Receivers meet on digital platforms; content is produced, remixed, and redistributed across platforms; user-generated content feeds back into media and cultural industries.
The platform economy shapes who gets to participate, what gets amplified, and how cultural power is distributed or concentrated.
Takeaway on convergence culture
Convergence is not simply one direction (from broadcast to user-generated content); it includes simultaneous processes of democratisation and concentration.
The social question is about how participation, remix, and platform-mediated interaction reshape cultural diversity, power structures, and the persistence of commercial logics.
Synthesis: environments, platforms, and the current media landscape
If everyone can access different media, environments become plural and diverse, with multiple coexisting media ecologies.
Media platforms function as spaces where users create, remix, and share content; these platforms feed back into the broader media/cultural industries.
The dialectic between democratization and monopoly remains salient: a few large players (Disney, Alphabet, Netflix, etc.) own many IPs and platforms, while countless users contribute content that can alter, reframe, and propagate messages.
Practical implications and examples discussed in class
The social media ecosystem enables rapid dissemination, remixing, and community formation around memes, songs, films, and other cultural products (e.g., cat’s-eye dance and related memes across TikTok and YouTube).
The shift toward distributed and decentralized networks (in Barron’s sense) supports resilience, redundancy, and new modes of production; the trade-off is evolving governance, moderation, and control of content.
Educational and ethical considerations
Encouragement to engage critically with media: understand the production contexts, the politics of platform economies, and the power of audience interpretation.
Recognize the ecological and geopolitical dimensions of the digital infrastructure (undersea cables, hubs, and geopolitical cable-cutting concerns).
Reflect on how digital media shapes participation, cultural diversity, and human agency in the age of convergence.
Practical reminders for students
Required reading for tutorials and exam preparation
Ensure you have completed the week’s readings and can answer exam questions posted in the prior week.
Engaging with the material beyond the classroom
Consider how convergence theory applies to current platforms (TikTok, YouTube, memes) and the ongoing dynamics of media ownership and participatory culture.
Next steps
Be prepared for discussion in tutorials; bring questions about convergence, digital media architectures, and the social implications discussed in this lecture.
Quick references and focal terms
Symbolic media: media created through embodied human activity and symbol-making (e.g., rock art, papyrus).
Technical media: media that store/translate information across media forms (e.g., telegraph, radio, television).
Digital media: media built on binary code and discrete sampling; interoperability across devices; distribution via digital networks.
Binary code: ext{zeros and ones}; foundational to digital computation and transmission.
Interoperability: the ability to watch/consume content across multiple devices/platforms with consistent experiences.
Von Neumann architecture: linear, sequential computation; bottleneck for multi-dimensional data; motivates distributed parallel computing.
Distributed vs decentralized networks: distributed networks interconnect many nodes without a single hub; decentralization reduces reliance on a central authority while preserving connectivity.
Submarine fibre optic cables: critical physical infrastructure enabling long-distance digital communication; outages/cuts have wide social and geopolitical consequences.
Convergence culture (Henry Jenkins): media are converging; participatory cultures expand the diversity of content and the range of voices, but coexist with ongoing corporate concentration.
Transmedia storytelling: storytelling that spans multiple media platforms, with content across films, games, books, websites, and more.
Participatory culture: bottom-up creation and sharing of media content by users; potential for empowerment and diversity, but also concerns about commodification and performative participation.
Exam-oriented takeaway points
Understand the progression from symbolic to technical to digital media and how each stage reshaped production, distribution, and audience reception.
Be able to explain the concept of agenda setting and how it differs from direct persuasion.
Describe Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the three decoding positions (dominant, oppositional, negotiated).
Discuss the implications of the Frankfurt School critique for contemporary media, especially in light of convergence and platform capitalism.
Explain Kittler’s definition of digital media in terms of binary/discrete sampling and the implications for interoperability and scalability.
Compare centralized, distributed, and decentralized network models and relate them to real-world infrastructures (e.g., undersea cables, military communications).
Define convergence culture and describe transmedia storytelling with examples from popular media ecosystems.
Evaluate Henry Jenkins’ optimistic view of participatory culture against contemporary realities (e.g., memes, platform dynamics, and ownership consolidation).
Consider ethical and practical implications of digital media’s social effects, including participation, diversity, and access to information across geopolitical contexts.