Henry Jenkins's "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars"

In “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars,” Henry Jenkins looks closely at how the Star Wars phenomenon has influenced thousands of fans to create their own music videos, movies, spoofs, and other forms of altering the original films. The well-known spoofs showed that these recreations were not restricted to the fans, but became ingrained into popular culture. Jenkins considers these fans not as people who have too much time on their hands, but as “participants within the current media revolution and their cultural products as an important aspect of the digital cinema movement.” Star Wars was key in bringing about these amateur works, which represented media convergence through a participatory culture.

Media convergence refers to the technological integration of various forms of media into an ownership of only one or a few conglomerates. This works for media democratization because it enables more accessible information, and allows studios to focus more on audience interests. By foregoing a director’s salary for a claim on merchandising profits, George Lucas became the prime example of media convergence, since taking money from the latter has allowed him to build his own empire. Participatory culture allows consumers to interact more with the media in question, and through technology like computers, not only alters the ways that media are produced and consumed, but also bring it into the market.

The most obvious example of participatory culture is fandom, which allows anyone to take an original story and use its characters, locations, themes, etc. to tell their own. Fans “explore and question the ideologies of mass culture,” and reject the idea that there can only be one version of a product. Whether it’s written fan fiction that continues the stories of the Star Wars characters or the video “Troops,” fans can participate in the Star Wars phenomenon that they hold so dear. It seems to go right back to aura – fans can change anything about Star Wars they want and give it new meaning, such as this Photoshop contest that puts notable public figures’ faces onto Star Wars characters: http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=17338&display=photoshop

Looking at these two terms and their examples, I do see increased democratization in popular culture. Fans can do almost anything they want, and no matter what Lucasfilm shuts down over copyright issues, fans will always be able to make those pictures and write those stories, or insert references into movies like Clerks. Fans even use things that originated from the movies themselves in their creation, such as costumes and music. In this case, Lucasfilm and the studios are the elite that Varnelis refers to in “Architecture After Couture.” They can have the final say in how Star Wars is used, but fans can mostly without trouble mold it into their own creation for the enjoyment of themselves and others.