Elmo, 10/21

The class where we discussed Jenkins and the media convergence was very fascinating to me. I had never really thought about how we have seen a shift from passive to active citizens. It is amazing to me how many people publish their own media nowadays because a while ago this wasn’t very popular. It is also crazy how horizontally integrated something can become in our society today. The term media convergence was a new term to me and seems to describes what has happened with our society perfectly. When we discussed the potential movie “Tar Man” we thought of so many ways in which to integrate “Tar Man” into our everyday lives. We thought of toys, posters/cups/popcorn at the movies, commercials on TV and before other movies in theaters, t-shirts, pop ups on the computer, games, toys in cereal and kids meals, promotions on websites such as goggle, facebook, or twitter, school supplies, theme parks, cards, blankets, towels, candy wrappers, and many more. It is crazy how one small idea of one movie can become so mass-produced into a whole slew of items to be purchased. It seems that nothing can be just a movie anymore, there has to be so much more that comes along with it otherwise it will not be as popular or successful. For example, the new movie “Where the Wild Things Are” has become quite popular, but it didn’t begin as a movie, it was a children’s book, which was all of ten sentences long; yet these ten sentences have made it to the big screen and into stores around the country. The movie, which I saw last night, is vastly different from the book, yet it is still gaining popularity as we can see from its $32.5 million dollars it made in its first weekend alone. I guess the concept of how things become so popular so fast still baffles me, but I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles these days.