Disney's Most Notorious Film by Jason Sperb Read Free Book Online

audiences. Much of
Convergence Culture
’s optimism is rooted in the belief that more media platforms will spell greater opportunities and interaction for producers and users to both expand and contest existing media content. The transmedia dispersion of content inspires a certain “epistemophilia,” 38 a love for seeking out knowledge and reconnecting information that motivates fans, bloggers, and other users.
    In the age of media convergence, knowledge not only expands—more often it
dissipates
, becoming less and less coherent. The vastness of new media just as easily reinforces ignorance when audiences seek out like-minded folks online and settle down in ideological echo chambers. It is true, as Jenkins notes, that “knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence,” 39 but willful
ignorance
can be just as potent. The recent online behavior of
Song of the South
fans, as I document in the final chapter, is testament to such a particularly ugly subdivision of participatory culture today. Various media content—their stories, images, and cultural histories—can just as often scatter across these transmediated landscapes as a result of the collective diligence of fans and media conglomerates, especially in the case of problematic works such as
Song of the South
. Meanwhile, particular, isolated ideas can momentarily intensify during their occasional reappearances. This is not to suggest that there are narrow truths to be maintained in the history of transmediated texts. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the inner workings and ambiguities of convergence culture hide as much as they reveal—a complicated, contradictory process in which both media producers and audiences play a key role.
Song of the South
’s transmediated ubiquity—as both a property for Disney to carefully exploit and repurpose, and a beloved text for fans to defend—has for the moment dissipated the immense cultural and racial legacies contained within it.
    Does epistemophilia, the collective drive to learn ever more and share that knowledge with others, best describe audience behavior in the age of convergence? Or does the repetition and fragmentation of transmedia worlds allow fans and media producers to simplify interests in a particular text down to only that which matters the most to them? Many
Song of the South
fans go online not to expand their understanding of the film, but rather to have their own interpretation
reaffirmed
. In the process, they align themselves with other sympathizers to shut out anyone who expands comprehension of the film’s cultural histories and racial ideologies in
unsightly
directions. Such fans may be motivated at times by a desire to know more about the film—its production history, distribution practices, and so forth. Yet they are not always open-minded toward the wealth of knowledge that the Internet provides about their beloved cult object. Which approach (collective intelligence or transmedia dissipation) is more relevant to audiences and media corporations in the age of convergence culture? They seem equally valid, but also inadequate in isolation. A renewed emphasis on
ambivalence
for the convergence scholar—that newer media present both utopian and dystopian possibilities, that audience behavior is reactionary and indifferent as often as it is progressive—is required. In either case, such an evaporation of certain narrative and thematic content across platforms has considerable cultural and political implications, the historical and cultural gaps that new media theories have thus far been reluctant to approach. What I propose is transmedia storytelling’s more frequent, ambivalent side effect—transmedia dissipation.
    DISNEY’S HISTORIES OF CONVERGENCE
    As a company with a trailblazing history of convergence, Disney deserves renewed attention. They maximized the processes of media convergence several decades ago, building the “Disney universe” long before it became commonplace to talk