Response to Convergence Culture (1-58) and Computer as Theater (Preface/Ch1)

The story of Dino Ignacio’s “evil Bert” which opens Convergence Culture strongly resonated with some of my own experiences and observations on the ways in which information spreads through various mediums. What, for him, originated as a fun website idea morphed through interactions across converging channels into something beyond what he had originally intended, leading him to take down his page with the fearful observation that “this has gotten too close to real life.” As a freshman in high school some friends and I made a blog which we utilized as a forum for sharing silly links and, occasionally, commentary on the school we attended that was seldom positive. When the school found out they had us shut it down; that, for me, was the point that I realized how close things on internet could get to real life. What had begun as something I never really intended anyone to see spread far more quickly than I could have anticipated through the school, ultimately affecting me with the dreaded “Saturday School.”

I actually seem to remember visiting the Survivor Sucks community at some point back when I, too, was engaged in various discussion communities on Ezboard. It appeared in a list of the most active communities in that BBS, and this was relevant to me because I was observing how the smaller communities I tended to engage in would frequently die out due to a lack of content being generated by its users, and in seeking out new forums to join I began to pay closer attention to the activity levels and size of their memberships. In that way I think I had a notion of the power of knowledge communities; the more people you get together, the greater problems they can solve. The way that the Survivor spoilers worked together, pooling their various resources toward a shared goal, and the ways in which this allowed them to “converse” with the producers of the series, is analogous to my experience of my favorite webcomic, MSPaintAdventures by Andrew Hussie (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/). Hussie started the comic based on the theme of an interactive adventure game where the users make choices for their characters; at first, he directly selected commands suggested by his readers and used those to shape the narrative of his comic “Jailbreak.” Later, as his reader-base increased, he exchanged the “suggestion box” for a fully featured forum where a burgeoning community took root. Yet the conversation didn’t stop there; since he is unable to respond to each and every suggestion, Hussie has taken to filling his most recent comic “Homestuck” with codes, recurring themes, self-insertion and meta-dialogue which involve the community. “Theorycrafting” is the popular term they use for taking what they are given by the author and combining that with outside sources of knowledge and research to develop sophisticated readings of the comic and the relationships between its characters. He is essentially engaging in the same practices used by Survivor producer Mark Burnett to engage his dedicated fans on a level beyond the TV broadcast, creating a convergence of mediums that enhances the viewer’s experience.


Hussie appearing in his own comic, bursting through "the fourth wall.

Another example worth mentioning related to the power of knowledge communities is Anonymous, the “organization” of internet users who pool their resources to accomplish many different tasks. The political agenda that has arisen to surround the group has brought attention to their ability to affect the “real world,” though the group’s origins in affecting such change lie in their attempts to publicly humiliate certain individuals in what were called “raids.” The target of a raid would be designated when the community became incensed enough with them ;one famous example is a grade school teacher who engaged in sexual commentary through LiveJournal. Once they found out the woman’s actual name they were quickly able to track down the school where she worked, hack the website and place a career-shatteringly embarrassing post about some of the teacher’s comments and pictures. In this way I can understand why Ignacio would have been quite afraid when people from the internet began contacting him in real life.

Brenda Laurel’s notion of interaction as analogous to theatrics calls to mind Kolko’s suggestion that interaction can be effectively understood through the creation of narrative scenarios; both emphasize the importance of conveying a human experience at an emotional and cognitive level. By examining the interface in terms of a stage one is able to understand how to marry different design elements toward the goal of creating a sense of immersion, involving the viewer to the extent that they lose any awareness of the technical aspects behind the scenes. This highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to interaction design for the purpose of producing this sort of “organic” experience.