Convergence Culture Chapter 4

Chapter 4 was called Quentin Tarantinos' Star Wars: Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Journey.

The chapter focused on how grassroots culture is a blossoming sector of culture as a whole. Television, film, music, etc. are now open and available for the amateur auteur to take a stab at. Grassroots culture used to be an invisible group, mainly because they had no way of sharing their creations. The internet has now made it so that anyone and everyone can create something and share it with hundreds of thousands of people.

Grassroots experimentation has acted as an innovator, creating new sounds, new artists, new techniques, and new consumer relations. It used to be that members of the commercial culture would try and put an end to these fan based creations. They felt it was infringing upon their profit and the intellectual property. However, culture is veering towards participatory culture, where cultural and societal protocols are open ended, with less control from the media. It's more like creation for creations sake, not for a profit or to infringe upon anyone's work.

There's the prohibitionist stance, which wants to regulate and criminalize fan participation, due to fear of it getting out of control. Napster is one of those institutions of fan participation that led to music downloads, which led to a firestorm that I think everyone's familiar with.

The collaborationists stance encourages fan participation, and this stance generally applies to newer forms of media, such as internet, games, and in a lesser way, cell phones. Many video games and their companies are turning to a support of this position. Fans are creating game types, skins, noises, add ons for combat bars, and so on. They are active participants in creating the world of a game, in furthering it's entertainment and appeal.

There is a split in forms of culture; there is mass culture, which is the producer, and then there is popular culture, which is the consumer. These grassroots artists are blending the two together, blurring lines so that the groups can act as a whole. However, many larger entertainment companies don't want to see this reality, because once the consumer becomes a producer, there is a chance of losing customers or fans to them. However, in actuality, everyone already exists in both, as producers consume a good amount of culture, while consumers now have tools available to them so that they may produce their art.

The mainstream media already draws from and absorbs certain grassroots practices and creations. Interesting ideas, creative world or characters, implementation of game elements, many of these started as grassroot ideas that are now becoming productions from larger media.

Lucas Arts was the larger example given. Lucas started out completely open to letting fans create new stories in the world that he had built. He allowed them to be sent it, he created competitions, and so on. However, it has gotten to a point where they are claiming that fans are doing damage to the spirit of a franchise like Star Wars. What I feel is actually happening is the fact that fans are becoming more and more talented, and technology is becoming so advanced, that larger companies are fearing loss of profits and fan bases to these indie creations.