Future of Convergence.

The future of convergence has been here all the time! It isn't something new, that media franchises want to create more and do so across platforms. "The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws." (Debord, Chapter 2, Sec 44)  We are addicted to being satisfied by getting new updates and getting surgeries to look a certain way or even buying something because it's the best of its kind. So if these companies say we need to learn more however only do so by getting this game or having to buy a book to see what is going on next in a world why not, we "need" it.

What companies should do in the future is more Transmedia storytelling I think that is where it is evolving to. We need interaction to a false world that we can feel apart of. The story unfolds "across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole." Jenkins talks about how Umberto Eco argues that a work must be a, "completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian world." He also states that the work must be, "encyclopedic, containing a rich array of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered by devoted consumers." 

These films can provide resources that consumers can construct their own fantasies. If there is a movie such as Harry Potter or Star Wars and it creates this world where people can create fan fiction, and dive into a world, also it starts making comics and video games that expands that world even more beyond the main story line and I believe that is the future.

Speaking of video games, we learn from video games also, not learning how to kill and be drug dealers like in Grand Theft Auto but the undertone of critical thinking and business. In Everything Bad is Good for You,

Johnson states that, "For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass cul­ture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb,Simple pleas­ures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less." Since people will learn easier that way why not give it them exactly like that yet teaching them at the same time.

The future will only come from us also. Society now "replaces a previous professional function." Shirky states that the greatest change in intellectual landscape was invention of printing press which made made reading and writing valuable to a society as a whole. However this stopped this trait as being useful as a profession. In Clay Shirky's Everyone is a media outlet, he states “the scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss... His function was indispensable, and his skills were irreplaceable” (Shirky, 67) Until everyone learned how to do it, so the job to do it isn't there anymore, thanks to mass amateurization and printing press started this idea which dates back to the 1400s. We will change the future by being the media producers and we can do it which such ease because of technology that it is scary. We are all not professionals but we can update a blog and with our ideologies and take photos and post them on instagram, even post videos on youtube to market ourselves that is as easy as clicking a button. 

With us creating the content easily whereever we want from our laptops to our cellphones, technology is only evolving. Then we are the one making advertisements and letting society know what they need and what they should buy, and not only are we telling them they should get updated items and need this we will put it across all platforms and they need to buy it all. Convergence is scary, but it has been here all the time since we started dipping are feet into other categories of media. With video games or just being interactive with something it is a greater learning experience all together.