Here are my initial thoughts from our course material and your discussion notes from this week:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word \u201csocial\u201d<\/em> has a Latin root – \u201csocialis<\/em>,\u201d – which stands for \u201ccompanionship or living together. The term media <\/em>stands for \u201cmiddle, in between\u201d and that is why to media-te <\/em>(mediate) refers to being in the middle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us now consider these two terms together: social media<\/em> \u2013 the in-between that has become our companion; that lives with us; that has become us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The transformative aspect of social media is emerges from a complex flow of contents across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who are ready to go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The coming together of these aspects is what has been defined as \u201cconvergence.\u201d It describes technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes that ubiquitously surround us. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right now, convergence culture is being defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers (or pro-users<\/em>: producers who are also consumers) to have the media they want, where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This circulation of media content – across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders – depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From this week\u2019s discussion, it occurred to me that the idea of convergence\u00a0cannot merely\u00a0be understood primarily as a technological process – the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, in my view, convergence represents a shift in cultural logic, where users are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, we are no longer consuming media; instead, there has emerged a\u00a0participatory culture<\/strong>\u00a0that contrasts with older notions of media spectatorship. In this emerging media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This participatory culture does not merely occur through media or technological devices – however sophisticated they may become. It occurs within the mind of individual consumers. Yet, each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a culture that is “burdened” with information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media contents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Consumption has become a collective process. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. This forms a unique form of collective intelligence, which can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions within convergence culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How does this collective meaning-making changing the way religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here are my initial thoughts from our course material and your discussion notes from this week: The word \u201csocial\u201d has a Latin root – \u201csocialis,\u201d – which stands for \u201ccompanionship or living together. The term media stands for \u201cmiddle, in between\u201d and that is why to media-te (mediate) refers to being in the middle. Let us now consider these two terms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1010,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1010"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/wachanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}