Let's Not Kid Ourselves

Apology: this posting will not be very text specific.

HBO Voyeur. Gotta say, I just don’t get it. Don’t know what the content is, don’t know how I’m supposed to access it, don’t know why I should care. Thoughts?

The thing about convergence culture that this week’s readings do not deal with is whether or not it works; to put it another way, does it succeed in its (from the corporate perspective) goal in selling more content, of whatever kind that content happens to be? Henry Jenkins and others write about terms like “franchise” and the phenomenon of corporations pushing products through a virtual mélange of media, but anecdotally, the idea of convergence to sell more product does not necessarily make sense. For example, I tend to visit the websites of films for which I like the trailers. And 99% of the time I am disappointed by the offerings of these website. There is usually no more content about the films except some kind of virtual world in which I can do very little in. Maybe I can buy the soundtrack or read a synopsis or bio of the filmmakers. So what is the point? I wouldn’t get to this site anyway without the trailer, and it doesn’t seem to lead me anywhere new except to the movie theater, which I was gong to go to anyway. I guess I could blog about my excitement, but really I’d rather talk to a friend.

While perhaps the websites for films are not the most creative example of convergence culture, the example seems to point to a seeming necessity for extraneous content across media to surround a product even when this extra content is usually redundant.

So why is convergence so privileged? My question is, must we use it just because it’s there?