Core response (the Industry week)

Almost writing during the same period of time (2003 & 2004) within the American media environment, all the three authors in their articles shed light upon the then intensifying phenomenon of convergence tv/media from different perspectives. Jennifer Holt adopts a political economy approach to review a history of deregulation that transformed the broadcast landscape into a vertically integrated and synergetic one. Aside from a very clear and solid historical overview for reference, I find most insightful the section concerning those underexplored syndromes which seem to contradict consolidating strategies deployed by entertainment conglomerates, such as lawsuits about self-dealing. Likewise, Henry Jenkins speaks of a seemingly internal dysfunction in terms of collaboration among different divisions within giant media companies (37) in order to remind us not to take media convergence as monolithic. To borrow his words, convergence is a kind of “kludge” out of a complex of economic and legal shifts at play rather than “a fully integrated system” (34). And he goes on to point out a kind of unevenness in media convergence across national borders and suggest an uneven distribution of power and wealth among nations (35). These are only minor observations compared to his major speculation on potential sites for producer-and-consumer relations to change, but they stand out to me while reading the article this time. I was thinking of the case of Bytedance, a rising Chinese tech conglomerate, and its short-form video app TikTok that has been heavily venturing into US. Bytedance produces short videos, computer games, websites, and apps, heading on the way of convergence.

John Caldwell differs from Holt’s approach by paying attention to what he calls “cultures of production” (45), and unlike Jenkins, Caldwell brings to light the rhetorically marketed sides of the buzzword, convergence, in five different forms. I was first and foremost impressed by his astute explication of the rhetorical shift from “program” to “content”, which suggests the centrality of repurposing in industrial practice (49). The second trend concerns a heightened interactivity in tv-web synergies through different strategies to expand a tv text and keep viewer-users engaged. By doing this, we see how the concept of interactivity is constructed and hyped. Pitching, subsumed under what he categorizes as “ritualized forms” (57), is another practice that he finds have informed tv convergence. This can be rarely found in scholarly discussion but makes a lot of sense if we follow the author’s careful analysis of the “pitch aesthetic”. It is construed as not simply a temporal devolution of the narrative form but a kind of rhetorical discourse with a hidden pattern that (58). In this way, the author places tv’s creators as an industrial player in an ensemble and pitches, a discourse constitutive of “cultures of production”.