Convergence culture

Platforms like Google have managed to expand their services to allow a single sign-on that connects a user's workplace to their entertainment system to create a converging technological environment.

[7] However, as the notion became popular in various media discourses, some scholars see an over-use of the idea of convergence culture, reassessing its broad nature or lack of specificity.

[2] This term "collective intelligence", introduced by Pierre Levy, refers to the ability of virtual communities to collaborate bits of their knowledge or expertise to make it a whole, essentially working together towards a shared goal.Collective intelligence is also distinguished from simply "shared knowledge" across a community, since not one single mind or group can possibly know everything, instead it becomes a sum of many minds half full.

Here, fans on Reddit, described as a "knowledge community", work like a hive mind and come together online to put multiple pieces of relatively small bits of information together, thus being able to puzzle together spoilers.

[1] For example, in the second season The Australian Outback, fans were able to figure out that a contestant was eliminated due to a medical evacuation, as well as who that person was.

According to Jenkins, this spoiler culture behind Survivor revealed a new power-relationship between production and consumption with more interactive online behaviors because of the show's open recognition of the so-called "collective intelligence" .

[1] Watching the show became a shared experience of collaboration which extended their engagement with the media hence, some argue that not taking this into account can be a flaw in the producers, not fully accepting a new commodity.

Taking one of its multiple video games, such as Enter the Matrix, exemplifies these extensions as not just adaptations, but instead add to the story by almost "upstaging" a main character in the films (Morpheus) with a minor character who you play as in the game (Niobe) thus creating a new narrative perspective for fans who participated within the "world" more.

Barriers to production are low, as technologies facilitate the ability to easily produce, share and consume content.

[20] Jenkins integrates this active audience participation as a notable element of convergence culture, whereby fans as consumers can directly interact with content and appropriate or remix it into their own consumption process.

Creators Minh Lee and Jeff Cliff, developed and released this "mod" for free but the game required a Half-Life copy to work.

[13] Critics like Ginette Verstraete, have also mentioned a need to acknowledge and discuss the converged culture discourse within the context of other social spaces such as politics and economics.

[25] With the rapid development of convergence culture, media professionals, like reporters, are frightened or confused whether their current skills are needed in the future.