Futures of Entertainment 3: November 21–22, 2008, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

The third Futures of Entertainment (FoE) conference was held at MIT in late November 2008. As with the previous events, the two-day conference was sponsored by the Creative Culture Consortium (C3), a northeast US–based group of media scholars, practitioners, managers, and consultants anchored by Henry Jenkins of MIT. C3 aims to provide a working model of academia-industry collaboration, bringing together people who share a broad interest in developing media, and in "convergence culture": the evolving and expanding transmedia spaces of contemporary media where old categories and practices break down in favor of malleability, mobility, and increased user control and participation. Each FoE conference has functioned as a public forum on convergence culture, as scholars and industry professionals have discussed key aspects of contemporary media.

With convergence introduced as a theme at the first two conferences, on the heels of Jenkins's influential 2006 book, Convergence Culture, this year's event was more focused on the labor of convergence, i.e., how it is made to happen by people and groups across media and culture. Jenkins's opening keynote set the tone in this regard, critiquing the blanket usage of the term "viral media" in journalism, industry, and the academy, which he believes inaccurately describes a diverse array of media practices. Instead, Jenkins argued, we should think of these media forms (e.g., YouTube videos, Photoshopped images, audio mash-ups, etc.) as "spreadable media," emphasizing the actions of media creators and sharers, rather than their passivity as suggested by the metaphor of a virus. The term "viral" suggests the old model of broadcasting, where media use is regarded as the result of centralized coordination, and users are mere receptacles for targeted content. "Spreadable," by contrast, frames media users as creative and collaborative agents, building media texts and communities outside corporate strategies of market control. Jenkins raised the example of the new Organization for Transformative Works (http://www.transformativeworks.org/) as an important champion of such spreadability. Similarly, he likened spreadable media practices to Lewis Hyde's theories of gift economies, arguing that convergent media's very malleability and mobility have granted new registers of value to active media users. This linkage of spreadability and "gifting" was reinforced in Jenkins's discussion with networking theorist Yochai Benkler, who argued that our understanding of human behavior has been too limited to assuming "selfish rationality" to be the dominant motivation, and that instead we need to better understand and value the social relationships that are enhanced by digital production and distribution technologies.

If spreadability was the theme of FoE3, then networking was its instrumental logic. Though rarely referred to directly by that term, networking repeatedly emerged as a key concern of participants and attendees, and was understood fluidly in terms of the capabilities of digital technologies, the viability of content across multiple nodes and mediums, and the collaboration of people embedded in key but increasingly indistinguishable areas of production and distribution. All of these practices were discussed in the hallmark sessions of the weekend, which focused on ongoing real-world transmedia projects. The examples ranged in scope and strategy, and included: the robust expansion of CBS's supernatural drama The Ghost Whisperer (2006–present) across multiple media platforms; the aggressive, guerrilla-theater tactics of the independent horror film/multimedia experience Head Trauma (2006); and the sumptuous world-building involved in the 2009 cinematic adaptation of the acclaimed Watchmen graphic novel.

Participants throughout the weekend generally agreed that definitions of "audience" and "success," long measured by the media industries in terms of sales or ad revenue, are uncertain in a transmedia age. What does it mean when significant components of a media experience are made freely available outside the "core" text (i.e., an individual film, TV show, novel, or album)? In a session entitled "Making Audiences Matter," Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer, detailed her series' "infinity loop": an extensive array of online and offline campaigns, images, and narratives coordinated by her team (much, interestingly, without the prior approval of CBS). Many of the elements in the loop involved...