Fibreculture Journal (Jan 2008)
New Maps for Old?: The Cultural Stakes of '2.0'
Abstract
Convergence theorists explore/predict the fusion of a series of previously discrete forms, a process that might be viewed as un-problematically centripetal. This is the longstanding view of the information industry. It produces a particular outcome - there may be local difficulties, but the perceived ontology of information is towards total convergence. Focussing on the socio-cultural diffusion of information cultural theorists have offered a different account of technical convergence where the stress has been on the centrifugal as much as the centripetal, so that not only what is pushed together through information but also what is forced apart, becomes significant. Jameson’s 1980s account of schizophrenia as the cultural logic of information capitalism is an example of this – and is written about the same time Negroponte set about founding/defining future media at MIT. Forcing these different accounts into relation with each other is productive, revealing lacunae not only in technical accounts of convergence but in critical accounts of informational culture, and exposing a naturalized set of alignments which might be questioned; to read the centrifugal moment of convergence as the technological moment and as the enlargement of a form of social control, and the centripetal moment as the cultural moment and as a form of evasion of control, can be problematic. In this context this article (i) explores the contemporary relationship between ‘2.0’ (read as essentially industrial account of convergence) and Henry Jenkins’ account of convergence culture as post-resistance culture and (ii) explores the potential for understanding contemporary convergence processes and the forms of participation they entail across a series of axes which together might provide a different and more multi-dimensional form of mapping.
