Henry Jenkins: My new book, "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," due out this summer, takes up this very question. Essentially, I argue that what might have seen marginal when I wrote Textual Poachers has become increasingly mainstream.

What I am calling convergence -- the flow of stories, sounds, images, ideas, brands, and communities across media channels -- is being fueled on a top down level by the consolidation of ownership in the media industries and bottom-up by the ability to consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. Everyone in the new media industry takes as a basic assumption the idea that consumers will be active participants in the new media landscape.

Where we disagree is on the terms of participation. There are strong economic incentives to open up brands and franchises to greater consumer participation; there is much talk around the branded entertainment space about the need to create "love marks" that command consumer loyalty beyond comprehension; there's much talk around the entertainment industry about the economics of the "long tail" which depends on consumers to function as grassroots intermediaries who generate interest in the product. Yet, there is also an enormous amount of anxiety about losing control over intellectual property and over the message of the brand if they give too much room to consumer expression.

The result is an era of mixed signals, which I think accounts for the confusion consumers are experiencing about what are appropriate or inappropriate ways of expressing affiliations with brands.

My book tries to explore some of these conflicting assumptions about consumption in the age of media convergence, hoping that it may help consumers and media makers understand each other better during a period when the rules of the game are being radically rewritten.

Berens: I was puzzling over my second question when I saw it in a recent Slate.com article where Andy Bowers advocates that "West Wing" fans band together and try to keep the recently cancelled show going by paying for it directly on iTunes and other forms of pay-per-view. This is probably the first time that fan-action to save a beloved series has intersected with the new video download/VOD technology. What's your perspective on this?

Jenkins: This is a model I have been proposing for some time. I recently wrote about the phenomenon of "Global Frequency--" a program that developed an intense fan following on the basis of an unaired pilot that was leaked to bit torrent.

The rights to the show had been purchased by The WB, but the network decided not to exercise its option and instead killed the series. Fans were rallying offering to pay in advance to get access to more content.

At the time, there were various models-- subscribing like you might subscribe to a magazine and getting either downloads or DVDs shipped by mail. People in the industry were suggesting it might make sense to circulate pilots via the web and let consumers decide which ones warranted production.

Some note that this makes more economic sense for media producers, since they often do not make any money until they have enough episodes for a syndication package (or for DVD sales) while a pay-as-you-go, direct-to-consumers scheme might recoup costs and net profit from the very start. Not every show is suited for such a model.

You need a show that has a strong cult following (or at least the potential to reach one) and a relatively low production cost. (I doubt it would work anytime soon for a veteran ensemble drama like "The West Wing.") This idea is circulating so broadly at this point that it is only a matter of time before someone tests the water, and as we saw with the video iPod and reruns on demand, once one company announces, everyone else will want to get in on the act.

A show can sustain production costs with a solid base of consumers without ever reaching the huge scale numbers needed to be a success on network television. Ties to the networks will be useful to heighten public awareness of a show. But I am convinced that once a producer has a track record with consumers, they might go direct to download distribution right away. I am certain that if Joss Whedon, say, announced such plans, he'd have enough people subscribing to make a hefty profit.

Berens: A few weeks ago, a study by the Points North Group came out that is relevant to this conversation: Points North says that consumers prefer commercials to paying for TV shows on demand by a three-to-one margin, and they argue that $1.99 video downloads will therefore have a limited appeal.

I think it's only a matter of time before marketers realize that they can sponsor the first 10,000 downloads of a show or reduce the cost of a show for all VOD consumers and get a positive brand affinity. Any guesses how this will play out in the short or long term? 

Moreover, do you think Apple will continue to blaze a trail with the iTunes platform, particularly given Steve Jobs new relationship with Disney? Or might another media company take the plunge first.

And what is your advice for marketers with this sort of thing? My gut tells me that -- so long as there's a fee-based alternative-- marketers shouldn't hesitate to sponsor an ad-supported free VOD download of a show. Without the fee alternative, though, I think consumers would be annoyed.

Jenkins: Your gut speaks wisely. Consumers are going to be much much more accepting of sponsorship arrangements if they feel there is an alternative and if they can opt to pay themselves rather than consume advertising.

I am reminded of a statement made several years ago by Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that, "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots."

At the time, I argued that Kellner's comments were a prime example of old media arrogance, trying to bully consumers into sticking to old arrangements through scorched earth rhetoric. I argued that the time had come for us to "renegotiate" our contracts. Consumers clearly did not like the terms they were being offered. They had other options and they were taking them. Online fan and brand communities had the potential to do for media consumption what labor unions did for work-- they represent collective bargaining units that challenged management to rethink entrenched models and come up with more equitable arrangements.

The situation you are describing here represents a prime example of the renegotiations that need to take place. The bottom line is that someone has to pay for the content; you can't undermine the economic base of current broadcasting and expect the content to continue to flow in the same old ways, but there may not need to be one size fits all arrangements anymore.

Some consumers will prefer to pay for the content themselves rather than have advertising imposed upon them. Other consumers may be willing to accept a sponsor subsidy in return for non-intrusive spots at the beginning and end of the content. Others may be willing to watch commercials throughout if it means getting the content for free. Most will be supportive of sponsors who are willing to help keep their favorite series in production. And sponsors can certainly tout their relationship to the series through other branding efforts.

When you enter the space of video downloads, you are for the moment dealing with the most loyal consumers. Loyals are more likely to return to the content week after week, more likely to extend their experience into other media and thus encounter other touchpoints with the brand, more likely to talk about the content, including the brands, with other consumers, more likely to recall brands, and more likely to make conscious efforts to support sponsors than other classes of consumers.

Loyals or fans follow reports from the trades that impact the future of their series; they regularly check out information about the ratings; they are aware of the relationship with sponsors and the ways this may or may not impact the content. In the information age, Loyals are hyperconscious of the economic context within which the show gets produced and distributed, and they are ready to make economic tradeoffs that will insure its survival.

I also hope that such sponsorship plans do not undercut what is really radical about the idea of viewer-supported television content-- the ability of consumers, not advertisers or networks, to decide what shows they want to watch. In such an atmosphere, the shows which create the most open and collaborative relationship with their fans will command the greatest loyalty. As we start to see the Long Tail effect applied to television, we are apt to see greater diversity in content and a range of different business models and approaches to consumer relations. It's hard to predict which company jumps into this space first but I think we will see a broad range of different experiments once the process starts.

Berens: In this same vein, have you seen "Star Trek: The New Voyages" -- the fan-created full episodes with a new cast based on the 1960s series? I find it fascinating and surreal, and don't know if it is unique or the shape of things to come.

Jenkins: I have not yet seen the episodes but I am very aware of the phenomenon. In many ways, "Star Trek: The New Voyages" represents the application of the "open source" model to television content.

The games industry has long embraced user-generated content. Many games publishers make their engines and design tools available to fans as part of the commercial package. Fans generate new material that sustains the lives of those franchises. In some cases, the best fan work is drawn back into commercial distribution -- part of the expansion packs surrounding the game. The fan creative community functions as a recruiting ground for new talent and a testing ground for new ideas.

Such creative fans constitute what Sloan Professor Eric Von Hipple calls "Lead Users." Lead Users are both early adopters, in that they are among the first to buy a new product, and early adapters, in that they often have to retrofit the product to suit their particular needs.

Companies in the manufacturing space have learned that such Lead Users can help them identify further fixes that need to be made with new designs as well as potentially new and unanticipated uses that may be made of their products.

Television has been slow to adopt such a model, tending instead to take a prohibitionist perspective on fan creativity. Fan expression is read in terms of copyright infringement rather than creative enhancement.

What's striking about the Star Trek experiment is not that fans are making new material to keep alive their interest in an old and seemingly dying franchise. That's what fan culture has always done. What's striking is that the television producers are not shutting it down and are indeed giving the whole process their wink of approval. Viacom has almost killed off the goose that lays the golden eggs through a mixture of over-harvesting and over-regulating its fan community. Now that the franchise is almost dead, they are rediscovering the need to hold onto their most loyal fans, and they are suddenly more open to work that make keep interest in the series alive during what many expect will be a prolonged hibernation. What happens next depends more on the willingness of media makers to collaborate with their consumers than on any technical limit on fan creative expression.

Berens: We've been talking a whole lot about television, but fan fiction started with the mimeograph machine. What other sorts of participatory culture are big right now, and how can marketers get involved?

Jenkins: Actually, fan fiction starts with toy printing presses in the 19th century or perhaps even earlier. We now know that readers have long created new stories about their favorite literary and media characters and have long sought to retell and extend narratives that they found to be deeply meaningful. In the past, some of this work occurred on a folk level as amateurs asserted their rights to participate in their own culture; other rewritings were commercial or semi-commercial representing a point of entry into the professional world of publishing; and all of them sustained interest in the story beyond what was generated by the original writer.

Much of this grassroots creativity was pushed underground by the explosion of modern mass media in the 20th century, and it is now bubbling up to the surface in the early 21st century as generation after generation of new tools allow consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media content.

Fan creativity didn't originate on the internet; the web simply provides an infrastructure for distribution that makes it much more visible than it has ever been before.

A recent study from the Pew Center for Internet and American life, found that more than half of all teens had created and circulated new content online and that 19 percent remixed content borrowed from other sources.

They blog; they mod; they mash up music; they make movies; they design websites; they write and circulate fan fiction. And everything they touch potentially turns to gold if companies can learn to monitor the vast array of cultural Petri dishes out there, figure out which ones represent real sites of innovation, and make this content more widely available.

It's a new cultural ecology where grassroots creativity innovates on the basis of inspiration drawn from mass culture and the mass media amplifies their innovation, creating revenue streams from content that originates within the folk culture.

For this to work, however, the media industry has to respect and value the invisible labor performed on their behalf by their fans; they have to be willing to open up legitimate spaces of participation and collaboration; they have to reform the "moral economy" that allows fans to create and demands respect for what others have created; they have to let go of some of their existing constraints on intellectual property in favor of a model based on "emotional capital." Right now, companies still act most of the time as if fan creativity depreciated the value of their properties.

Instead, they need to recognize that fans appreciate media content in the double sense-- emotional (I appreciate it) and economic (I increase its value through my investment of blood, sweat, and tears).

Everywhere you look there are new experiments in forming partnerships between companies and consumers that are generating new value for everyone involved. Through the Comparative Media Studies Program, we have organized the Convergence Culture Consortium to help our member companies identify such opportunities and form sustainable partnerships with their fans.

Berens: Last question: when does the book come out? And, by the way, I should mention that we have an iMedia Book Club, so when you've got early copies please let us know and we'll review it.

Jenkins: There are two relevant forthcoming books -- "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide" and "Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture." Both are due out from New York University Press this August.

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