Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

RETHINKING CONVERGENCE/CULTURE

James Hay & Nick Couldry

To cite this article: James Hay & Nick Couldry (2011) RETHINKING CONVERGENCE/CULTURE,
Cultural Studies, 25:4-5, 473-486, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2011.600527

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.600527

Published online: 15 Sep 2011.

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James Hay and Nick Couldry

RETHINKING CONVERGENCE/CULTURE

An introduction

Intervening in the ‘over-crowded curriculum’ of

convergence/culture
Over the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a growing
perception that we live in an era of media ‘convergence’. There are at least four
ways that the expression ‘convergence’ has been deployed and its meaning
solidified
as a description of new synergy (a ‘horizontal’ realignment) among
media companies and industries, as the multiplication of ‘platforms’ for news
and information, as a technological hybridity that has folded the uses of separate
media into one another (e.g. watching a television broadcast on a cell phone),
and as a new media aesthetic involving the mixing of documentary and non-
documentary forms. This special issue, ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’,
acknowledges the usefulness of these accounts of convergence but is skeptical not
only about the overuse of the term but also about its limited conceptualization.
This issue is particularly interested in the prominent tendency to describe
‘media convergence’ as comprising, or at the centre of, a ‘culture’
what
Henry Jenkins has referred to as a ‘convergence culture’. Our issue asks what
difference it makes that the present is considered, or best understood, as a
moment of ‘media convergence’ but also what difference it makes that media
convergence (as a description of the present) is articulated as ‘cultural’ or as
symptomatic of a historical formation (or less modestly, a new ‘era’ or ‘epoch’)
best described as a ‘convergence culture’. How and why has ‘convergence
culture’ gained traction as a term for making sense of the present? What
assumptions in recent accounts of ‘convergence culture’ have been made about
media, convergence and culture
and their supposedly organic connection to
one another? To what extent has ‘convergence culture’ become a buzzword
whose meanings and currency have not as yet been fully mapped? We suggest
that understanding contemporary media/convergence as constitutive of a ‘new
media culture’ requires more careful reflection and elaboration.1
We raise these questions in this journal, Cultural Studies, because the
predilection for casting media as constitutive of a culture has a history in/as
Cultural Studies. Considering the linkage between Media Studies and Cultural
Cultural Studies Vol. 25, Nos. 4
5 July
September 2011, pp. 473
486
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2011.600527
474 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Studies is relevant to our project because the most prominent accounts of

media convergence and convergence culture have been silent about this
linkage, either assuming (after all these years) their organic connection to one
another, or implying a connection without acknowledging the complicated,
discontinuous, and sometimes fraught relation of Cultural Studies to media/
communications studies. So in one respect, we are interested in considering
whether, and if so how, a discourse about ‘convergence culture’
the yoking
of ‘convergence’ and ‘culture’
claims or gestures towards a new direction
for Cultural Studies, or towards a historical context wherein Cultural Studies
no longer matters in the same way as in the past
or no longer matters at all.
These questions matter particularly when Cultural Studies is understood as
projects and interventions organized from and about historical conjunctures,
often with an eye towards developing strategies for analyzing, theorizing and
intervening in the present. Proceeding this way does not assume an organic and
continuous unity between ‘new media’ and a ‘new culture’, or between new
directions for Media Studies and Cultural Studies. Instead, proceeding this way
underscores that these have been historically and geographically situated
linkages, and on-going problematics for both Media Studies and Cultural Studies.
In this sense, the ‘convergence’ of Media Studies and Cultural Studies, and that
convergence’s assumption of a natural affinity between communication and
culture, is a productive point of departure for assessing the current
explanations of ‘convergence culture’ and how ‘convergence culture’ matters
now.
Our point will be to bring out how the historical, and more or less
geographically situated, linkage between Cultural Studies and Media Studies
should pose certain questions to those who have been invested in the recent
discourse of media convergence-particularly media convergence as a culture, or
(in some accounts) a new culture. We say, ‘‘should pose’’, because too often
the history of this linkage has been ignored in the emphasis on the new-ness of
convergence as a problematic for Media Studies. The most well known efforts
that link media convergence to a (media) culture often have developed out of
the historical tie between Cultural Studies and Media Studies without
reflecting on their implication, and/or have merely implied the relation of
their project to this history without clarifying whether they see ‘convergence
studies’ as simply a new set of questions for Media Studies and/or a new
direction for ‘cultural studies’.

Media studies/Cultural Studies

Although studies and critiques of cultural modernity through references to
communication media certainly pre-date the 1960s, the engagements between
Media Studies and Cultural Studies (indeed the ‘birth’ of British Cultural
 AN INTRODUCTION 475

Studies) developed during the 1960s in Britain through debates over the
meaning and history of culture,2 over the objectives of the study of culture in
schools, and over related initiatives about ‘media education’ (as integral to the
study of the ‘popular arts’). Although the curricular reforms associated with
integrating and studying media as forms of ‘popular culture’ may not have been
directly responsible for having transformed educational institutions in Britain,
the initiatives in media education and the study of the Popular Arts were
certainly a flashpoint of educational reform, and frequently are mentioned as
the historical context for some of the most well known rationales for early
Media Studies and Cultural Studies (Goodwin 1992). Contributing to these
reform debates were Richard Hoggart’s ‘Schools of English & Contemporary
Society’ (1963/2007) which argued for the inclusion and ‘critical’ study of the
‘little known mass and popular arts’, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The
Popular Arts (1964) whose Introduction noted the challenges that the study of
‘mass communication media’ posed to ‘traditional culture’ and ‘cultural
education’ and their policing of an already ‘overcrowded curriculum’, and
Raymond Williams’ Communications whose Acknowledgement cited the
National Teachers Union’s conference on ‘Popular Culture & Personal
Responsibility’ as an inspiration for his book and whose Preface to the second
edition pointed to work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
Birmingham as already having ‘superseded’ his book’s ideas about the study of
communication in cultural education. Although Williams (1962/1966, p.12)
explains how Communications provides ‘methods of television education’, he
also envisaged media education as integral to the idea of ‘permanent education’
and to ‘the educational force . . . of our whole social and cultural experience’
(pp. 14
15). All of these interventions affirmed Williams’ point in
Communications that ‘media education’ and ‘media studies’ in Britain in the
1960s was developing out of converging institutional practices, such as the
study of media in the classrooms at all levels of curriculum, the integration of
media technologies in the classroom, the reliance on media for distance-
education and the changing role of public broadcasting as an educational
practice.
Two other developments that were not exclusive to the UK contributed to
an emerging relation between media education/studies and Cultural Studies in
the UK
and to the pull, which Williams’ statement above represents,
between the study of a specific medium and of the place of media in ‘social and
cultural experience’. One of these developments was the currency and
influence of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), whose title
implicitly linked ‘media literacy’ and ‘media education’ and whose separation
of ‘media’, pithily summed up in the book’s famous expression ‘the medium is
the message’, provided an alternative to the prevailing practice (on the Left
and the Right) of describing communication, media, culture and society as
‘mass’
of associating these indistinguishable (and undistinguished) media and
practices of communication with a cultural and social uniformity.3 Although
476 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Hoggart’s (1957) inaugural lecture makes no reference to McLuhan, it shares

McLuhan’s emphasis on cultivating a literacy of individual media.4
The other development shaping the point of intersection between Media
Studies and Cultural Studies was the emerging influence of semiotics in
‘critical’ studies of media. To the extent that media education and McLuhan’s
increasingly influential writing emphasized the importance of a literacy of
individual media, semiotics provided a theoretical framework and analytic for
understanding each medium as a ‘language’
a relatively discrete set of formal
codes and conventions through which a medium ‘made meaning’. The
tendency to study and understand communication and culture in terms of
specific ‘media’ helped legitimate media education in the organizational and
reformist rationality of Western educational institutions that had, since the
nineteenth century, supported separate areas of study with their own protocols
of certification and expertise
evidenced in the modern Liberal Arts and
Sciences education which divided cultural from science education (as C.P.
Snow famously argued in 1959). And this tendency sanctioned the creation of
university departments with titles such as Radio-TV-Film, as a distinctive
academic pursuit, albeit one that represented the separation of media as objects
of study.
As Stuart Hall noted in his ‘Introduction to Media Studies at the Center’
(1980a), by the late 1970s Media Studies had become ‘one of the longest-
running Centre research groups’ (p.117). Hall cites four ways that Cultural
Studies developed before the 1980s as an alternative to the dominant (US-
centric) models of communication/media studies: as a rejection of the media-
effects paradigm, as a demonstration that (particularly visual) media were not
simply ‘transparent bearers of meaning’, as an acknowledgment of the agency
and productivity of media audiences, and as a study of the role of media in
circulating and securing ‘dominant ideological definitions and representations’
(Hall 1980a, pp. 117
118). In its embrace of Semiotic and Structuralist
analysis of ideology (one of the ‘two paradigms’ through which Hall (1981)
traced the early history of work at the Centre), British Cultural Studies shared
some of the aims of contemporaneous film criticism as ideological reading and
deconstruction. However, British Cultural Studies rejected the ahistoricism of
ideological criticism, casting the production and dominance of ideologies as
complexly determined and born through historical conflict, contradiction and
struggle. And as Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley (1978) and Morley
(1980a) emphasized in their study of the British TV series Nationwide, the
subject/audience of TV occupied a historically situated, and thus ‘unstable,
provisional and dynamic’ position in an over-determined, ‘inter-discursive
space’ reproduced through TV (Morley 1980b, p.166).
Certainly one of the most influential statements from the late 1970s on
British Cultural Studies as media studies was Hall’s essay on ‘encoding &
decoding’ media messages (Hall 1980b). That essay explicitly rationalized a
theory and analysis of media messages and media power as an alternative to
 AN INTRODUCTION 477

‘mass-communication research’, though the essay was not primarily an

intervention into that paradigm of research, and the essay’s attention to
‘decoding’ was understood by many as a rejection (rather than a complication)
of the view that media power resided mostly in State and commercial media
institutions. The essay famously emphasized that media are productive of
hegemonic structures and, relying on Semiotics and Gramsci’s writing about
hegemonic formation, it underscored the complexity and contingency of the
network of subject positions and actors comprising the ‘production of media’.
Following Gramsci, Hall argued that media made meaning and operated
hegemonically ‘without guarantees’, thus reminding Communication and
Media Studies that their theory and politics could not run too far out in front
of careful analysis of the on-going process through which media re-constitute
the codes and rules for producing meaning.
Hall’s essay is characteristic of a historical contradiction of British Cultural
Studies as a form of media studies. In one respect, Hall’s essay (like other
media studies that developed from the CCCS) pursued a set of questions that
were not preoccupied (as were contemporaneous film studies) with the
distinctiveness or distinctions of a specific media’s institutions, ‘language’, or
culture. The historical conjuncture for understanding relations and formations
of power always were slightly more at stake in the analysis or demonstration.
‘That some of British Cultural Studies’ most widely read work focused on a
particular medium, such as television, was relevant to the authors’ points about
meaning-making and the contemporary conjuncture, but never such a primary
point as to warrant explanations about the institutional, formal and cultural
(trans)formation of television. A conjuncturalist study about the mattering of
television gestured towards the subject position as a point of converging media
literacies, but it also seemed relatively uninterested in explaining the historical
or geographic mattering of television or other specific media.
Over the 1980s, British Cultural Studies became associated somewhat less
for its commitment to ‘conjuncturalist’ analysis, theory and politics, than for its
having laid the groundwork for alternative models of communication and media
studies (e.g. Communication’s so-called ‘qualitative’ and ‘interpretive’ research
methods), and for a flurry of interest in Audience Studies and Television
Studies. As Lawrence Grossberg has noted, ‘in the United States, cultural
studies became visible only as something that operated within existing
disciplines, even as it claimed to disrupt and challenge the disciplinary structure
. . . [And] if, in fact, the specific nature of cultural studies as it developed in
England depended on the fact that . . . the question of culture . . . could only
have been raised in the field of English literature. . ., in post-war America, the
issue of culture . . . was often located in other fields, . . . and during the 1960s,
was largely displaced into the field of communication’ (Grossberg 1997,
pp. 276
279). Some of this uneasy and fraught ‘displacement’ of Cultural
Studies to Communication and Media Studies played out as much through the
importation of British Cultural Studies into Communication Studies as it did
478 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

around James Carey’s (1989) proposal for a ‘cultural approach to communica-

tion’
the latter of which cast Cultural Studies more directly than in Britain as
an alternative to the dominance of scientific positivism in US Communication
Studies (Carey 1989). A conjoined interest in Audience Studies and Television
Studies developed rapidly within this latter displacement.
The linkage between Audience Studies and Television Studies, and those
studies’ referencing of Cultural Studies, is worth recalling for several reasons.
First, their linkage enacted a historical contradiction. Television Studies was
born of an interest in recognizing and demonstrating the specificity of a
medium’s history and effectivity, particularly its specific modes of making
meaning and its operation as specific system of representation. Although this
reasoning implicitly supported some of the widely used manuals of Television
Studies (e.g. Horace Newcomb’s (1976) multiple editions of Television: The
Critical View, Robert Allen’s two editions of Channels of Discourse (1987,1992),
E. Ann Kaplan’s (1983) Regarding Television, and Patricia Mellencamp’s (1990)
Logics of Television), it was explicitly drawn out in John Fiske and John Hartley’s
(1980) Reading Television, which described TV as a specific media ‘paradigm’
and ‘unit’, and subsequently in Fiske’s (1987) Television Culture which explains
(and delimits) TV’s ‘culture’ in terms of its codes, texts, and ‘readers’. All of
these books sought to make visible and knowable a medium that was so taken
for granted, so embedded in daily life, as to require critical strategies for seeing
the medium as medium, paradigm and language. However, the growing
rejection of the old assumption that ‘mass communication’ was undiffer-
entiated and productive of a homogenous culture and society
if not a
totalitarian political state
required more than simply making visible an
otherwise unconsidered, unremarkable medium such as television in studies of
power, social relations and popular culture. It required that the critical
practice turn its analysis on the activity of the viewer/consumer as ‘reader’ and
user of the medium.
Although the impulse to rationalize TV Studies as aware of and interested in
‘active viewers’ or ‘fans’ complicated a central assumption in ‘mass
communication’ research and theory, it often made a virtue of the singularity
and specificity of a medium. Fiske’s and Ien Ang’s consideration of TV’s
‘secondary texts’, Morley’s attention to the ‘inter-discursive subject positions’
of TV viewing, and Tony Bennett’s and Janet Woollacott’s (1987) conception
of the ‘reading formations’ of popular media always potentially directed
attention away from the individuation of media towards a multi-media economy
of ‘media making’. But some of these lines of analysis (Fiske 1987, Ang 1985,
Morley 1980a, Brunsdon and Morley 1978) may have left an impression that TV
was the ‘primary text’ and the way into a study of subjects as points of
converging media. To the extent that convergence never figured prominently
into the study of a single medium, or that the authors assumed the centrality of
TV in the world, mitigated against an analysis that begins at the intersections of
media convergence and (more radical perhaps for Media Studies) with the
 AN INTRODUCTION 479

problem of media as hybrid technologies and assemblages, or with media

subjects as occupying positions within multiple media networks.
In some ways, the ‘politics of articulation’ and the ‘conjuncturalist analysis’
proposed by Hall provided a viable starting point as much for Cultural Studies as
for Media Studies, even though there clearly was too much working against
formulating an alternative analysis of a culture (or cultures) of media convergence
that understood ‘convergence’ in quite the way that Hall was proposing
that
examined the practices of a specific medium as implicated in a variety of media
practices and institutions, and/or beyond (‘outside’) media practice. Neither
then nor now, can one say that the media-scape was such that one necessarily had
to separate media for purposes of analysis. In fact, the ways that Cultural Studies
informed or was equated with Media Studies (an emphasis on the ‘active’ media
reader and on the importance of the ‘reading formations’ of popular media)
occurred precisely at a time when the broadcast media-scape was giving way to
forms of ‘narrow-casting’, marketing media products and commodifying media
audiences as ‘lifestyle clusters’, and becoming a motor in an economy of ‘mass
customization’, which by the first decade of the twenty-first century was
encouraging or requiring media consumers to operate ‘inter-actively’.
There also was an even more basic implication of the linkage between
Cultural Studies and Media Studies that sheds light on the present: the way that
Media Studies appropriated Cultural Studies’ emphasis on the little, everyday
and multi-form making and productivity surrounding media (i.e. a robust view
of ‘media/making’) even as it insisted on placing ‘media’ at the centre of the
world (and the structures in dominance) that it was analyzing and theorizing.
On one hand, the writing that helped ignite alternative paths for Media Studies
(such as Hall’s account of ‘encoding and decoding’ or Brunsdon and Morley’s
conception of TV audiences) assumed, and never felt obligated to demonstrate,
the mattering of media in relation to other practices. However, they were not
interested either in demonstrating, as were the accounts of specific media such
as TV, a media-centric account of a historical conjuncture and the modes of
(re)producing social relations and power relations. Especially since the 1960s,
media-centrism has been an objective of the institutions of media research, and
a way that those institutions have performed their value and virtue within the
economies and rationalities for producing knowledge about late- twentieth
century cultural production. Now it is important to reflect on why that has
been the case, whether the recently ascendant discourse on ‘convergence
culture’, ‘trans-media’ and creative industries breaks with that past, and, if so
or if not, why. ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’ is launched from this
journal because Cultural Studies historically has begun its research by trying to
figure out how media (and Media Studies) matter within conjunctures of
practices, economies, governmental and institutional arrangements, funding
streams, etc., and through a reflexivity about the changing contexts that
encourage or require that knowledge be produced along certain paths rather
than others.
480 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

The ‘now’ of convergence studies

Where does this leave today’s Media Studies, a product and field of intellectual
work that developed in a different historical conjuncture? Should we
understand a recent project such as Internet Studies as simply a residual
(even deeply rooted) disposition for staking out the analytic parameters and
limits of ‘new media’, as did ‘TV studies’ or ‘film studies’? Although there
have been new kinds of ‘critical’ questions posed about the Internet or a
‘society of the network’, this vein of work also has been dominated by long-
standing social scientific and behaviouralist research paradigms. There certainly
are new questions in the current context that would not have been posed in the
interaction between Media Studies and Cultural Studies during the 1970s and
1980s, when broadcast media and Mass Communication research were
dominant. But that said, how have studies of a convergence culture simply
pulled old questions from Media Studies and Cultural Studies into the current
context
something that likely occurs when one is not being reflexive about
where the questions come from? Should we understand ‘convergence studies’
or studies of ‘creative industries’, or even ‘trans-media’ studies, all of which
emphasize productivity across media, as still locked into a media-centric or
media-ubiquitous view of the world that prevents them from grappling with
how their projects do or do not reproduce the rationalities of the academic
disciplinarity and media institutions supporting media research? Just as
importantly, what are the disciplinary, political, heuristic and institutional
limits of these accounts of ‘convergence’, hybridity and the ‘industries’ or
‘media’ of creative labor? And how reflexive have these studies been about these
limits, and what authorizes them? If a discourse about ‘convergence culture’
and ‘creative industries’ acts on or against a history of ‘Cultural Studies’, how
does this recent discourse harness an old, familiar, and perhaps even
universalized conception of ‘culture’, or a conception of culture that was
central to Cultural Studies in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s? These
questions matter if the primary objective of today’s study of ‘media’ is to
represent the present context as organizing all manner of productivity and
political agency differently than in the past, and therefore as having called forth
particular positions for intellectuals who are ‘organically’ (in the Gramscian
sense) or ‘specifically’ (in the Foucaultian sense) implicated in a rationality and
new materiality of reorganization and advancement.
However, if the latter (i.e. if ‘media convergence’, ‘convergence culture’,
‘trans-media studies’, studies of creative industries, or the coming of
‘convergence culture’ studies all pose a genuinely new direction for Cultural
Studies), then it also is worth asking whether exactly these accounts represent
an alternative perspective about media’s mattering in relations of power,
political practice and agency, and governmental arrangements. Although
studies of convergence culture and trans-media have addressed a set of
questions regarding the political economy of contemporary media, their path
 AN INTRODUCTION 481

to these questions remains confined typically to conclusions about the agency

of media consumers, rather than about how media institutions and
consumption or ‘media citizenship’ matter within a robust, complex and
contradictory sense of the current historical conjuncture. To the extent that
the most well-known of these media studies venture into discussions about
political activism or citizenship (e.g. Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (2006),
Hartley’s Television Truths (2008), Burgess and Green’s YouTube (2009)), they
tend to emphasize the virtue of ‘interactivity’ and to cast the non-
professionalism of DIY media, and the ‘grassroots’ of media mobilization, in
terms of a generalized, universalist understanding of democracy rather than in
terms of the messy contradictions and contingencies of democratic citizenship
in the historical and geographical production of convergence/cultures and, we
might add, in wider politics. And if ‘convergence culture studies’ are about
one’s implication (as consumer, citizen and/or professional analyst) in these
contradictions, then it is incumbent on those who are engaged in a discourse
about convergence culture to address directly how and why the political
virtues and commercial value of an ‘interactive’ consumer-citizen have gained
traction within contemporaneous (‘neoliberal’?) political rationalities and
governmental arrangements.
In a world supposedly prior to ‘convergence culture’, ‘trans-media’, and
‘creative industries’, John Fiske (Allen 1987/1992) suggested that as British
Cultural Studies informed TV Studies (partly through mediators such as
himself), the connection between Cultural Studies and TV/Media Studies in the
US had developed through ‘liberal pluralist’ and ‘anthropological’ theories about
‘social harmony and stability’, rather than through a ‘Marxist analysis of social
conflict’, the latter of which he attributed to the emergence of British Cultural
Studies. Fiske’s explanation of these key terms, and his distinction between
Cultural Studies in the US and the UK, lacked nuance. And despite his criticism
of US Media Studies’ appropriation of British Cultural Studies, his translation of
Cultural Studies in the 1980s (from the US) became a prominent lens in the US
through which to examine ‘TV culture’ as replete with ideological resistance
which played out not only in TV programs but through a richly intertextual chain
of practices performed by TV viewers/consumers. His rationale consequently
became the point of debates over whether Cultural Studies was simply about
seeing resistance everywhere
not just in TV. In important respects, Fiske’s
rationale about the virtues of not assuming that media consumers are ideological
dupes (because they are themselves active producers of media cultures as
systems of representations) laid some of the intellectual groundwork for the
recently energized studies of convergence culture. Some of the contributors to
‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’ remark on how Jenkins, for instance,
explains the economy and politics of convergence culture through both Fiske’s
and his (Jenkins’) reasoning about ‘fan cultures’. However, Fiske’s explanation
affirmed the importance of recognizing the multi-form uses of media without
accounting for how (even in the late 1980s) the increasingly individualized
482 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

engagements with media were becoming instrumental to the ‘mass customized’

economies and lifestyle programming of TV and media culture. Arguably, we
should be more, not less, alive to that instrumentality two or three decades later,
asking whether the economies of individualism (and their relation to new models
of liberal citizenship, in the US and elsewhere) make ‘culture’ relevant, or
relevant politically in the same way as in the 1970 or 1980s. Unless we do, it is
difficult to see how today’s invocation of convergence culture can claim anything
significant in common with the legacy of Cultural Studies, and specifically with
its insistence on endlessly rethinking the changing positions and structures of
dominance. There are no good reasons (from within Cultural Studies) to assume
that liberal and democratic governmental arrangements and citizenship are
geographically or historically uniform or uncomplicated. If anything, it is the
complex situatedness and embeddedness of the mediation of liberalism and
democracy from which ‘convergence studies’ of media, culture and power
should begin.
From that starting-point, we may be better placed to reflect on the
undoubtedly important intersection between many waves, not just one wave,
of ‘new’ media (transnational satellite TV, mobile phones, the world-wide-
web, social media) and the successful and failed political mobilizations that have
attracted global attention in recent years. Even a crude, if roughly
chronological, list
Myanmar, Kenya, Iran, Venezuela, Thailand, Spain,
Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Belgium, Italy, Libya
brings immediately to mind
the range of complex institutional and cultural contexts within which
convergence’s implications for everyday politics and political change must be
thought.

Themes and threads for rethinking convergence/culture

In the articles that follow, an international range of scholars reflect from many
(not always convergent!) directions on what is at stake in claims of the sort that
many writers recently (not just Henry Jenkins but also in various ways Yochai
Benkler (2007), Manuel Castells (2009), Charles Leadbeater (2008), Clay
Shirky (2010)) have made about the direction and type of change that
something like ‘convergence’ brings to media, culture, society, the economy,
politics, and to the more or less organised articulations or disarticulations
between all or any of these. Just as the focus of such future-oriented claims
varies, so too does the angle of argument in these article.
Some of the articles are general critiques, arguing for a new focus on the
specific practices gathered under the term ‘convergence culture’ (Nick
Couldry, writing from media sociology) or for a much longer historical
time frame within which to assess convergence culture’s continuities with, and
differences from, the pasts of media, technology and broader ecology (Toby
 AN INTRODUCTION 483

Miller and Richard Maxwell, writing from Cultural Studies/political

economy). But the insistence on specificity is taken further also by a number
of other writers. Some such as Liz Bird (and also Couldry) explicitly, and many
other authors implicitly, raise questions about the typical agents of
convergence culture and why certain claims about change prioritise particular
types of agent, or particular types of evidence of agency, rather than others:
who, if any, would be regarded as likely to be typical of something called
‘convergence culture’? Extending this question leads to other questions about
the agents that are considered significant for understanding the general trends
of ‘convergence’, and an important line of argument in this special issue
concerns gender. A great deal needs to be learned, as the articles of Laurie
Ouellette and Julie Wilson and Melissa Gregg and Catherine Driscoll each
argue, from the specific ways in which convergent media use is embedded
within, and distributed across, contemporary gender relations in the work and
quasi-work spheres which remain, emphatically, unequal. Nico Carpentier
pursues specificity by looking more closely at the notion of participation:
taking the apparently new participatory cultures that have emerged in the
decade, he considers the social processes in which they are embedded, and the
roots of those processes in much longer histories of power struggles around
media resources which may not have been reconfigured as much as first
appears.
Diverging from, or sometimes overlapping with, these directly critical
views of the notion of ‘convergence culture’ are other essays which insist on
the need to reframe our assessment of the discourse on convergence culture.
This is pursued in various directions, some engaging with the details of Henry
Jenkins’ specific argument more closely than others. Mark Andrejevic and Jack
Bratich examine the entanglement of convergence discourse with new
discourse about social space generally, including new forms of measuring
and managing social and economic action and new modalities of war. Inevitably
convergence discourse intersects from many directions with the changing
dynamics of capitalism and another major strand in this special issue are articles
that seek to adjust our understanding of convergence so as to make it more
open to other
possibly sharper and more flexible
continuations of the
critique of capitalism (Ginette Verstraete and also Driscoll and Gregg,
Ouellette and Wilson). Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell offer a more
fundamental critique of convergence discourse by problematizing from the
outset the notion that we can easily identify what is ‘new’ and why it matters,
without clarifying ‘who’ the mattering is for, and within what longer trajectory
of power reproduction it is formulated. This returns us to issues of agency, but
this time conceived not within the ambit of everyday practice, but within the
space of wider power-structures. Sarah Banet-Weiser by contrast focuses not
so much on the specific logic of convergence discourse, but on the (in effect,
political) work that a celebratory close-to-commercial discourse of conver-
gence culture does in deflecting us from the many other types of ‘converging’
484 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

already under way in contemporary media and creative cultures. James Hay
discusses the need to rethink ‘the popular’ as ascribed to media and culture,
and he considers how old accounts of ‘popular culture’ and recent accounts of
‘convergence culture’ may not help us think about the historical contradictions
and crises through which the new political ‘populism’ in the US (on the Left
and the Right) is emerging.
Finally, Graeme Turner addresses how theories and studies of ‘media
convergence’ and ‘convergence culture’ have been integral to both a
reformism and crisis in global higher education, in ways that are materially
supportive of new paradigms of ‘media education’ alongside decreasing
financial support of curricula that have accommodated critical and Cultural
Studies. As Turner argues, the arrival of a ‘convergence culture’ and the recent
ways of studying it are having a profound impact on Media Studies as Cultural
Studies. Turner’s essay ‘brings home’ one of the fundamental questions driving
this issue: How are our interventions into the current context of ‘convergence’
and ‘new media’ authorized and materially supported through the institutions
that we inhabit as workers, citizens and consumers? Perhaps this is the
underlying question from which future reviews of convergence ‘culture’ will
need to start.

Notes
1 The term ‘media culture’ itself requires more interrogation, on which see
Couldry and Hepp (forthcoming).
2 Here we have in mind the polemics that famously developed through and
around writing and interventions by Raymond Williams (1958, 1961), E.P.
Thompson (1964), Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall during the 1950s and
1960s. As much as that body of writing rethought the relation of ‘culture’ and
‘society’, the historical meanings of ‘culture’, the dominant histories of
Modernity, and a Marxist historiography, theory and politics, it also
reinforced a conception of culture that persisted well beyond that
context
even as it never ceased being a subject of debate. In part, the
objectives of Cultural Studies often have pivoted on the debates about
perspectives and meanings of culture that were introduced during that
context. The current studies of convergence as culture or cultural typically
build on the history of these debates without acknowledging the history.
3 McLuhan occasionally accentuated this point in one of his well-known puns

‘the medium is the mass age’.
4 Hall and Whannel’s The Popular Arts was published the same year as
McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but their book makes frequent reference to
McLuhan’s earlier The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man.
 AN INTRODUCTION 485

Notes on contributors
James Hay is a Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the
Department of Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois
Urbana-
Champaign. His most recent book, with Laurie Ouellette, is Better Living
through Reality TV.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths,

University of London. He is the author or editor of nine books including most
recently Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage, 2010).

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