My Beautiful Dark Twisted Reality

Over the course of Jenkins' Convergence Culture, we've seen the transmedia experience take several different forms. Most common has been that of a transportation to a different reality, engaging in a fabric of other lives and experiences, resulting in a franchise that serves as something of a "cultural activator" (Jenkins 97). In order to create this engaging experience, Jenkins says that the
"transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole" and avoiding redundancy (Jenkins 97-98). The examples Jenkins gives of this horizontal integration of media range from the heavily discussed The Matrix franchise, to other hugely popular media goliaths, such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh, to, as mentioned earlier in the book, reality shows like Survivor and American Idol, which engage consumers on multiple fronts and encourage their participation beyond superficial viewing. The unifying thread that runs throughout each of the examples that Jenkins has put forth is the notion that "storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium" (Jenkins 116). These transmedia experiences are products of alternate realities. The Wachowski brothers built their empire on a universe that lies just outside the boundaries of our own; other experiences, such as Star Wars and Harry Potter and the like lie even further away from reality. Even Survivor and American Idol reappropriate reality into a media-manufactured commercial environment – perhaps the most foreign experience of all. From Convergence Culture, one might assume that the blueprint to a transmedia experience must be framed by the transportation to an alternative world.

Ignored by this blueprint is the transforming transmedia music culture we see today. Music used to be rather monolithic; anything outside of the audible realm was supplemental to the songs and albums artists would release. Tours represented places people could go to hear a band's songs in person. Music videos represented visual supplements to songs. Merchandise represented materials a band or label sold to promote the music. However, with the recording industry in freefall, the blueprint for the way an artist promotes and releases music is changing – even the realms within which an artist works is evolving and expanding. No artist has embraced – or embodied – this change more in recent times than rapper Kanye West.

Kanye West began blogging in late 2007. Unlike many other artists' and record labels' blogs, however, his posts were far more than just updates on music matters. He would post art, fashion, old music videos, new music from his peers, and things he simply thought were cool. It was a window into his mind, and an outlet for his tireless activity. But it was difficult to imagine that this sort of intimacy could reach any higher plateaus beyond this.

Moving forward to 2010, following his reclusion after the Taylor Swift incident, Kanye West would direct all of his energy towards a transmedia experience unlike anything else witnessed in music history. Kanye visited Facebook and Twitter headquarters in the early summer of 2010 and was videotaped performing a few songs acapella in front of employees at the respective institutions; shortly after the news of these meetings came out, Kanye West's reinvigorated Internet presence was born. Kanye's Twitter account offered an even more intimate look at the inner workings of his mind with tweets that painted a portrait of a workaholic insomniac obsessed with opulence and without a filter. While Kanye continued to flood our timelines and newsfeeds, he suddenly began flooding our iTunes libraries. He spent 2009 appearing as a featured guest on song after song, but with the creation of "GOOD Friday's," we saw Kanye surround himself with guests of his own on song after song released every Friday night. As soon as we could wrap our heads around one new song from Kanye, another was on its way with a new band of extremely high profile guests joining the cast and submitting to his methods. The influence of his weekly giveaways cannot be understated; they sparked endless conversation and even imitators along the way, but laid the groundwork for an album that was in the works. But before the album was released, Kanye West showed of his directorial skills and put together a 35 minute short film built off a script he primarily wrote, that starred himself, and featured several songs off of his upcoming album. The film, Runaway, represented unmarked territory for music artists of any genre, but offered yet another entry point to the experience that is Kanye West. All of this – from the tweets to the weekly songs to the movie to even artwork that painter George Condo did for Kanye's album and singles – snowballed into the November 22nd release of Kanye's album titled My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a critical smash and commercial success, ending up on top of countless year-end critic lists, as well as near the top of the list in album sales, behind only Eminem and Taylor Swift.

Kanye West's album was not one that could simply be digested on its own. Not only was it unfair to consume on its own: it was impossible. Kanye created a truly integrated media experience, not unlike anything Lucas, Rowling, or the Wachowski brothers created with their franchises. Also important to the media experiences that Jenkins has described is the role of collective intelligence in their examination; Kanye West's transmedia run could not be excluded from this company on this account either though, especially if one took the time to look at the online rap communities invigorated by his output. However, what Kanye created, even with its centerpiece ironically titled a Fantasy, presents more of a reality than any of Jenkins' examples could claim. We experience Kanye West's media assault in so many ways, but none of them lie anywhere outside of our realm of familiarity.

Jenkins' Gated Communities (Chapter 1)

The heart of the first chapter of Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture is the idea of "spoiling." A practice founded simply in the "mismatch between temporalities and geographies of old and new media" (Jenkins 30), spoiling developed from an East coast-to-West coast share of information to a game in which fans began to investigate shows in order to find out what they can before episodes even aired. The online communities that delved into the task of spoiling provided a prime example of what Jenkins and Pierre Lévy refer to as "collective intelligence," or the "ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members" (Jenkins 27). Jenkins goes on to introduce what Lévy presents as knowledge communities, a term used to identify these groups where members' knowledge is aggregated and used to produce or discover. Throughout the introduction of the idea of collective intelligence and knowledge communities – and Survivor spoiling as a prime example of these concepts – the notion of a participatory democracy in knowledge creation is stressed above all. Lévy even states that "it is now impossible for a single human being, or even a group of people, to master all knowledge," (Jenkins 28) which suggests that above all else, the open flow of information and the freedom with which members of the community can submit their thoughts is of paramount importance.

In spite of the power of the idea of such open knowledge communities, the sobering reality is that Lévy's utopian scenario of "the whole world operating as a single knowledge culture" (Jenkins 38) seems to be almost impossible to approach in practice. The largest obstacle to forming such open communities has proven to be "brain trusts," which ultimately create what Jenkins refers to as "gated [knowledge] communities" (Jenkins 38). The hierarchy Lévy distrusts so heavily is reinstated within these collective knowledge communities when privatization occurs: sources are kept secret, coveted information is kept under wraps, membership is invitation only after extensive vetting, and any person or group that even approached the brain trust's resources is seen as a threat. The focus of Jenkins' Survivor example was the spoiling work done by ChillOne, a legendary spoiler that gained privileged information and slowly revealed it to a rabid online spoiling community; the brain trust of this community spent the majority of its efforts working to disprove ChillOne's revelations, rather than work to explore with the rest of the community the possibilities of their truth.

While proponents "argue that these brain trusts serve a useful purpose" (Jenkins 39) in guaranteeing the validity and quality of information, it seems as though their first aim is self-preservation, rather than helping the knowledge community. Lévy's ideal hierarchy-destroying, globally-scaled knowledge communities may remain simply a thing of fiction, so long as the privileged brain trusts sit on their information in the name of self-preservation; one knowledge community member – outside of the brain trust – feels as though "[everything] we have is also theirs because we're open, everything they have most definitely is not ours because members of the gated communities may or may not feel like dropping in and sharing it" (Jenkins 39). With this much secrecy and distrust between the general knowledge community and the gated elite, the power of collective intelligence may never reach its potential.

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