Convergence Culture offers some very interesting perspectives and case studies for everyone, but especially for media professionals. There are even valuable lessons here to extrapolate for the book publishing industry, although Jenkins doesn't focus much on the book world. He does discuss Harry Potter, but mostly in the context of fan fiction.
Jenkins discussion of transmedia storytelling is fascinating, and fits together very well with Frank Rose's discussion in The Art of Immersion. The discussion of transmedia storytelling combines Jenkins' three concepts of media convergence, participating culture, and collective intelligence, because it requires consumers to move across multiple media and collaboration with a fan community to fully experience a story. As mentioned above, he uses the example of the Matrix movies to illustrate this point. Traditionally, all the information viewers needed to fully understand a movie were contained in the movie itself and presented in a mostly linear way that was easy to grasp, but movies like The Matrix provide open ended clues and loose strands that can't be fully understood without collaborating with other fans through online communities and by taking part in other extensions of the story in different mediums such as comics and video games. In some cases, these extensions may provide more background or a deeper understanding of the movie, or they might be completely new tangents unexplored in the movie. It will be interesting to see if this mode of story telling continues to gain traction.
Overall I enjoyed reading Convergence Culture, especially having also previously read The Art of Immersion. I do think Jenkins was trying to fit too much into the book, and at times the organization was a bit clunky. Each chapter focused on a particular TV show or movie as an example, so there was a chapter that discussed Survivor and the concepts of fan paticipation and "spoiling," the process by which fans share information that hasn't been aired yet about popular TV shows online. There was also a chapter on American Idol and advertising and fan participation. I think it may have been a better idea to organize the book around these ideas and provide more examples as opposed to organizing the book by show or movie. By far my favorite chapter was the one that focused on transmedia storytelling and The Matrix. By comparison, the last chapter on politics and popular culture and the afterword on the ramifications of YouTube on politics, while interesting and important, seemed out of place.
Perhaps my biggest gripe was how dated the book seemed. Despite being published in 2008 (the paperback was published in 2008, the hardcover in 2006), some of the examples given and, for instance, the lengthy explanation on what a blog is, made the book feel very dated, which goes to show how rapid the media landscape is changing. I would definitely recommend reading this book either before or after The Art of Immersion for a more well-rounded view.
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