Consumption has become a collective process—and that’s what this book means by collective intelligence, a term coined by French cybertheorist Pierre Lévy. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using this collective power through our recreational life, but soon we will be deploying those skills for more “serious” purposes.
- Jenkins, Henry (2008-09-01). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Kindle Locations 198-203). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
The notion of “collective intelligence” has interested me for some time and Jenkins, through Lévy provides a definition that fits with the way a large number of people use the Internet in their day to day lives. According to Jenkins, experiencing the various forms of media that we have available to us is no longer an activity that takes place in the comfort of our homes or in the cinema; people now consume their media as a group. The primary viewing of a television show may be done alone or with a small group of friends or family, but once that has been completed, fans across the globe flock to message boards and websites to analyze, discuss and dissect that episode. The fans no longer have to rely on their friends and family members who happen to enjoy the same program to discuss what a particular line of dialog meant or what contestant will get voted off the island on Survivor.
Jenkins’s first case study is that of the Survivor Spoilers forum, a place where fans of popular CBS reality series Survivor gather online to do whatever they can to figure out what is going to happen on the current (or next) season of Survivor before anything is announced publicly. Participants in this “knowledge community” have done everything from harmless cross referencing satellite image data with locations that could be likely locations for the next season to hacking into the email accounts of CBS employees who are working on the show. Jenkins sees the power in such communities saying that their shared knowledge “allows them to exert a greater aggregate power in their negotiations with media producers,” but also wonders “when does participation become interference?”
The second case study focuses on the American Idol franchise, particularly on the meticulously crafted advertising efforts behind it. A main point of this chapter is that advertisers no longer want the viewers to simply see their commercials or product placements but to engage with the brand and “to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions.” By accomplishing these two objectives, advertisers are able to tap in to the communities that develop around their products, creating “brand advocates” that will evangelize others, defend the product and even “act as moral guardians,” when the company strays from their stated values. All for free.
The case study regarding the transmedia empire of The Matrix is interesting in the amount of work that Warner Bros. and The Wachowskis put into creating an experience that could be experienced across a multitude of medias: movies, video games, websites, comics and animated shorts. According to Jenkins, “The Wachowski brothers built a playground where other artists could experiment and fans could explore.” The brilliance of this strategy was that they knew that a subset of the fans of the first Matrix film would seek out other forms of entertainment based in this universe and provided those experiences to them in the mediums that are often associated with young, male science-fiction fans. By producing these other forms of entertainment, they were able to cash in on the communities developing around their creation. Fans did not have to play the games or read the comics to understand what was going on with the movies, but it helped. The games set in the universe of The Matrix even allowed players to take part in the events that occurred between the films, such as escorting a character to the point where she is later featured in one of the films. Using these techniques the Wachowski brothers created a cohesive experience that had fans playing what seemed to be an integral part in the overall story.
Across these three case studies Jenkins shows that, when done properly, fans can have an impact on their favorite media franchises and the companies producing the entertainment can engage with consumers on a deeper level. Each fan has their own insights as to what might be going on and they each can share those thoughts with the rest of the community and attempt to predict what might happen next. But this method of sharing information is capable of so much more. As Jenkins states in the above quote, right now people are using the collective intelligence primarily for recreation: talking about television shows, organizing fan meet-ups, writing fan fiction, et cetera but “Imagine the kinds of information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil the government rather than the networks.”
Jenkins asserts that the knowledge communities of the Internet could accomplish great things if they simply put their mind to doing something that benefits more than their entertainment interests. People are spoiling governments and companies that have committed some wrong. Jenkins hints at this potential at several points, but he never really digs too deeply into what could happen if knowledge communities were “serious.” Over the past few years, various groups have sprung up to take on various entities, but the most interesting of these are Anonymous and LulzSec. Anonymous sprang out of the discussion board 4chan (be careful) and have committed very high profile attacks on groups like the Church of Scientology (their message to the church is embedded below), the FBI, the MPAA and many others. LulzSec was a group loosely affiliated with Anonymous that committed similar hacks, but rather than for any serious purpose, LulzSec did it for the entertainment value (“the lulz”).
These two groups show what a knowledge collective is capable of. Should someone invoke the wrath of Anonymous, the members (who insist that they have no leader) gather on various message boards and chat rooms to organize attacks, produce messages to distribute and discuss what courses of action should be taken to accomplish their goal. The reasons for Anonymous attacks have been to show support for groups that share similar ideals (ThePirateBay and WikiLeaks), to express distaste over politics (response to the US Government's takedown of MegaUpload), or even because they just plain disagree with the ideals of a group (the Church of Scientology). LulzSec on the other hand picked its victims over what would cause the most chaos and entertainment for them, such as taking down Sony's Playstation Network service.
Anonymous and LulzSec are essentially the best and worst case scenarios, respectively, for Jenkins's argument of what is possible when the power of a knowledge community is harnessed for a goal beyond exploring the media that we all consume. When the gears of Anonymous begin to crank, there is seemingly nothing that will stand in their way, taking on the US Government was as much of an attempt to show that they are not afraid of any governing body as much as it was a sign of protest. While the high profile targets of Anonymous are often powerful corporations, organizations and governments, they have also been known to target single people who have committed some wrong, often hacking their email and social network accounts, sending lewd messages to everyone on their contact lists. LulzSec, while seemingly subscribed to some of the same beliefs, do not bother themselves with motives or attempts to expose any injustices, they simply wanted to insight chaos by taking down services that millions of people used.
To Jenkins, groups such as these must be fascinating now that people are using knowledge communities to fight for against what they see as the evils in the world. But if Jenkins sees some of the activities of groups like the Survivor Spoilers as "interference," what must he think when a relatively small number of people take down Paypal because they stopped processing payments for WikiLeaks? Should the world's population be subject to the whims of a headless organization that anyone can claim to represent? More importantly, are these forms of protests even accomplishing their original goals?
Attacking Paypal, Mastercard and other corporations that refused to process donations for WikiLeaks was certainly a bold move that sent a message to the companies, but ultimately, it changed nothing. Julian Assange is still considered a criminal in many countries and WikiLeaks is still considered of questionable legal status. A more successful campaign by Anonymous was Operation DarkNet where Anonymous took down 40 child pornography sites and published information about the members of these sites and asked the FBI and Interpol to look into the people on the list. Any activist group will have successful and failed protests but what Anonymous might lack in their success rate, they more than make up for it in their wide reaching influence on the Internet. And for Jenkins, success rates do not seem to be too important, the real importance of these knowledge groups is that people are coming together for a cause and the more groups like Anonymous that spring up, the more potential there is for everyday citizens to have an impact on the world.
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