September 20th, Post Class Jenkins, Serendipity, LATE

“People who may not ever meet face to face and thus have few real-world connections with each other can tap into the shared framework of popular culture to facilitate communication” 556
This basically is related to how media has converged and how now our culture is almost completely participatory and “do it yourself”. For my theory praxis essay, I used Jenkins as a lens to look at the concept of Facebook. In it I realized how due to the advertisements, the groups, and the “friends” it is a completely relevant participatory cultural gadget. People can now make up their own opinions about something they never would have even known about, and also be bombarded by advertisements tapered to their interests through technology. We can relate this also to Baudrillard and how the media is part of the problem, the reason that things have lost value and are so blown up is because of the media, for example 9/11, if there was no media to show it everywhere, much less people would have known, and maybe the terrorists would never have chosen to do so. Also, the protest signs in a different language, they knew English speakers were watching their protests so they wrote the signs in English and tapped into our culture and our lives. Since we have so much power now about our image, about who we talk to, and about the opinions we have and have created through facebook, we are now the critics and therefore the experts. This relates to high culture vs low culture, the masses have much more say now than they ever did.