The Anatomy of Jenkins' Knowledge Community

If the anatomy of the knowledge community is similar to that of a human body, the consumers, or the audience, are most definitely the heart. Jenkins says that there needs to exist an emotional connection to the consumers for information to make it’s way around the knowledge community. Media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence then make up the circulatory system. Divergence is something else that comes into question by Ithiel de Sola Pool, I would say this could be something considered pathogenic to the knowledge community.

Delivery technologies could then be considered the neural connections linked to everywhere in the body of the knowledge community. This allows convergence to take place. “Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences” (15).

Media, in my opinion, can be considered the brain. Media is the entity in which all material enters discourse in the knowledge community. It can also have some effect on how we interpret it. An example of this is could be the Christian controversy versus many children’s take on the Harry Potter series, which if it hadn’t become a great cultural phenomenon I don't think it would have had so much controversy. Another example, as in the reading, the reality show Survivor (2000). This is a television series ‘made for the internet age.’ It is designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted and critiqued.

Within the Brain, I could consider two more things. Big media could be considered the left hemisphere of the brain while small media could be considered the right hemisphere. Not the either hemisphere of the human brain is bigger than the other to my knowledge, but I make this distinction to make a point about the relationship between big and small media, or rather corporate and grassroots media.

Looking back at the glory days of old media, corporate conglomerates had the upper hand. Now we see a paradigm shift in ‘consciousness’ where the grassroots media might be making a comeback. The consumers are now taking control of a postmoderinized and digitized media. This is a process of convergence rather than divergence, as Jenkins would explain, and in respect to my anatomical model, you cannot have one without the other. This could be due to the fact that it is the big media people that hold all of the capital, but one day this might change.

Pedagogy and pop culture could be considered the extremities, modes of transport, because they are responsible for what direction media goes in. One day it could be vampires and warewolves, the next it could be ancient civilizations; where any myth really comes from. The body of the knowledge community could change direction at any time. Possibly more often if it were only pop culture, but one argument I will make is that pedagogy still does have some control over what direction the community goes.

And there you have it! One Frankenstein’ish way to explain the anatomy of the knowledge community. Give or take several vital organs.