coolbeans, Jenkins

“Media consumers want to become media producers, while media producers want to maintain their traditional dominance over media content.” (554) This quote describes the new participatory culture that Jenkins describes, which has taken over media consumption. People want to become producers of their own media and the original media producers want to keep the dominance that they have over media content. This concept can be traced to many examples. One example is given in the reading. The example of the parody on Star Wars featuring Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Hilary and Chelsea Clinton is one such example. Programs such as Photoshop have made it easy for anyone to create their own form of media using already popular media content. Another example of this would be You Tube. On You Tube people can post short movies, or video clips that they have created on their own. Some of these video clips feature music written by other people or are spoofs of an already made television program/movie. Some people post music and create their own music videos by showing photo montages or act on their own. An example that we have discussed in CMC 200 is Mash-up music. Mash-up is creating music through mixing up a bunch of different music together in order to create a completely different song. While all of these forms of media are created by consumers of media, many times they can get in trouble by the media producers. Media producers often will sue people for using their content or will make them take the new media off of a website. This is because the producers want to keep their “traditional dominance” over the content. Technology has a lot to do with this new participatory culture because with all this new technology it is possible for us to create exactly what major media producers can create. Before, this technology was very expensive and generally only accessible by these major media producers but these days one can find just about anything one needs in order to create a media work at any electronics store as well as use the internet as a means of broadcasting it to the world.