In the conclusion Jenkins talks about how TV is a medium that has made us dumber, while the internet has made us smarter (250). This is true for a few reasons, first off the TV gets all of its stories from the Associated Press. This means that they all have the same information, it's just up to them how they want to frame or spin the information that they are given. It's hard to provide diverse coverage on a story when everyone is given the same facts, so we end up with only one real view of the story. The internet on the other hand has a vast wealth of information and, as long as your willing to spend the time searching for it, you can find anything. The internet provides a more spread out coverage of every event so that you can look at the story from more than one angle and draw your own inferences. instead of spoon feeding you the information, the internet lets you discover it.
At the bottom of 252, Jenkins is discussing a method of essentially selling season of TV shows on a subscription or pay as you go method, which is interesting because now, 5 years later, we're finally heading more towards that direction. Hulu has come out with a new subscription based version called Hulu Plus, in which you get full seasons of shows in HD. What interesting though is how we arrived at the Hulu Plus business model. Before Hulu launched Hulu Plus there were already many sites that would offer you seasons of whatever show you wanted for free, granted you get a dead link every once and a while, but that's a small price to pay. In addition to costing money, Hulu Plus has advertisements, where as free sites, such as www.sidereel.com, do not have advertisements. So while Jenkins idea sounded good in 2006, it seems to have come out of order in the evolution of internet TV. By this i mean that since the current business model for TV is buy cable and you can watch shows with advertisements on a set schedule. Jenkins model/Hulu Plus allow you to pick what to watch when, but you still pay money and have advertisements, although not so many and it costs less than cable. The Sidereel model is free shows whenever without advertisements. While Jenkins was looking towards the future I think it's interesting that he saw this opportunity only from a business standpoint, instead of the adhocracy-like view of sidereel.
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ReplyDeleteI also found Jenkins' comment on pg 250 to be very interesting. It made me realize that perhaps the association between TV making us dumber and the internet making us dumber helps us define the "achievable utopia." What if the "achievable utopia" is a point in the digital age where it's not about the information presented, but about the skills that consumers have developed in the process. In other words, the "achievable utopia" would be when consumers are actively looking for their own info because they enjoy it, rather than just waiting to have someone tell it to them. Perhaps the necessity of having us depend on TV media is what is keeping us away from reaching the "achievable utopia."
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