Ron Burgundy, 10/20

In class on Tuesday we went over the concepts Jenkins. We looked at the importance of media convergence and even did an exercise identifying the various ways in which we could advertise a single movie idea and move it into different forms of media. When we did this exercise in class, the number and multitude of ways that we came up with promoting this movie was intially somewhat alarming. I found it alarming at first because of the avaiability of different media companies to saturate all forms of media with a single product to reach all audiences and have an effect on them. At the same time though, it was great that the class was able to recognize all these different mediums and realize that this is all done for the single motive of profit and not to truly to provide entertainment. I believe the ablility of the class to easily identify all of these various promotional devices reveals that we are critically looking at the media and able to see past their strategies to saturate our lives with their consumer products. This type of realization needs to be obvious to all viewers of media in my opinion so that we do not fall into the traps of consumerism that our media industry sets up. In the Tuesday class we also looked at the concept of fan works and fandom, and even the concept of "fannon" which was apparently created by one of the first CMC disciplinary majors. This concept looks at not the cannon of a particular text, specifically movies in this respect, but the material created by fans of the film that tell the story in a whole new way. We looked at various forms of fannon, such as star wars rap videos, etc, which was extremely interesting to me. I am extremely impressed by the creator of the fannon concept and greatly intrigued by the idea of studying, not the text itself, but the outlying texts that make comments on the original and show the effects and influences the original text has made on society. This concept seems to tie in closely with Benjamin and the authenticity and originality of a work. Benjamin is concerned with the concept of authenticity in the age of mechanical reproduction as it is easier and easier to reproduce authentic works, challenging their originality. When people recreate original texts and create their own fannon though, I do not believe they are threatening the originality of the first text but are revealing more about the text that the author may have originally recognized or even meant. The fannon of a particular work could bring out underlying ideas that were unbeknown to the author, in a sense tying with Barthes concept of the writerly vs the readerly text. I believe studying the fannon of a work could be extremely interesting and extremely telling of the influences of a certain work on society.