Convergence Culture - Chapter 4
To be perfectly honest, I had know idea technology was having this great of an impact as it has in our world with Star Wars, Harry Potter, or politics. Reading the last three chapters made me feel like I had been living under a rock while all of this was going on. When I was reading about Star Wars, I just assumed I was not aware of these issues because I am one of the few people who grew up in the 70’s that did not connect with this movie at all. (Believe it or not, I think I have only seen the first movie).
Technology has definitely changed the division between folk culture and mass culture. People who normally composed songs and created media to share within their communities are now able to share and distribute these items over the internet. Corporations, who basically controlled all media now have amateurs to compete with when creating, so now the consumers are also producers, which takes away the authority from corporations. According to Jenkins (2008) this has created grassroots convergence.
Anime fans grew rapidly because Japanese companies basically let fan clubs and other offspring develop and interact underground.
Lucas Arts has tried to promote Star Wars franchises without losing IP by providing the fans with Star Wars controlled media. Giving the fans the ability to create and interact with Star Wars without claiming rights to anything being developed. A free Web space (www.starwars.com) and an online community (http://www.lucasfilm.com/divisions/online/) were created, but everything created on it belonged to the company. They also created a digital cinema site AtomFilms.com where amateur filmmakers again were given specific guidelines on how and what could be created from copyrighted materials. They also created a MMORPG entitled Star Wars Galaxies which gave fans a chance to bring a little more ownership with player interaction.
After watching, Boba Fett: Bounty Trail, I really do not see many “dangers” in letting fans make up their own Star Wars-based stories as long as they are not making any form of profit or claiming any form of ownership. To me the video seemed creative with enough copyrighted material used to let everyone know they were just having fun recreating scenes from a fans point of view.
Below is a link I found searching Creativecommons.org. To me it supports my comments above about fans and it contains animation!
http://www.archive.org/details/1stAnimationTestStarWarsAnimatic
“May the force be with you!”
Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. London: NYU Press.
So, are there any works of fiction that inspire you to create the next chapter of?
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