Arrested Pulse

In his “Afterword” to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins laments how, “[t]oo often, we have celebrated those alternative voices which are being brought into the marketplace of ideas without considering which voices remain trapped outside”(294).

I would like to give voice to a group of people who indeed are trapped outside of a convergence culture that Jenkins sees [sic] as promoting a more participatory and democratic society: nonsighted, or “blind,” people. Their marginalization has a long history in a culture that has privileged sight over other senses in determining what is significant in knowledge and experience.

Ocularcentrism in History and Philosophy

As represented by Jenkins, convergence culture seems to be the ultimate triumph of ocularcentrism (the privileging of sight over other modes of perception) in Western civilization. In primary oral cultures, nonsighted people could play significant social roles. The epic poet Homer, it is rumored, was the “blind bard,” as were some popular oracles. The mythological prophet Tiresias, a “seer” who was blind, suggests that visual disability may actually have been conceived by the ancients as a form of sight.

The shift from primary oral to literate cultures, however, saw [sic] the gradual disenfranchisement of nonsighted people. As Havelock Ellis and Walter Ong have shown, Greek thought was restructured by the technology of writing — a technology that could not function without sight. Even Plato, who distrusted writing because he felt it would destroy memory, inadvertently privileged a kind of epistemological sightedness; his term "idea" (eidos, form or model) is, like writing, visually based and derives from the same root as the Latin video, which means "to see" (Ong, 80).

For almost two thousand years, people believed that eyesight actually interacted with material reality, a notion called “extramission,” or “light from eyes” (220). Visual perception was conceived as an action performed by a sighted individual with the visual field serving as a dynamic site of contest and negotiation. In Athenian society, sightedness was virtually institutionalized in the assembly, the law-court, the theatron (‘place of viewing”; related to theoria, theory). These institutionalized spaces, Simon Goldhill argues, “established the citizen’s gaze as the field in which position was contested and made the collective, participatory spectator the role of the citizen” (19).

Hellenistic philosophy, thanks to aesthetes known as sophos, established epistemological links between sight[edness] and true knowledge, a taken-for-granted assumption that worked its way into Christian theology and Renaissance humanism. Johannes Kepler’s 1604 analogy between the eye and the camera obscura, followed by the optics research of Hermann von Helmholtz, gradually disintegrated the theory of extramission and transformed the eye from active agent to a passive receiver, one through which, according to Rosalind Krauss, light “passe[d] to the human brain as if it were transparent as a window pane”(qtd in Brennan 221). the 17th and 18th centuries, according to Peter de Bolla, widely-held assumptions regarding vision furnished “some of the grounding figures of conceptualization in general. In this sense,” he asserts, “one might say that vision figures Enlightenment thought” (65).

Though theorists and philosophers have interrogated the privileging of visuality in Western culture for some time now, the entrenchment of ocularcentrism in modernity has remained, ironically enough, invisible to most of us. Consequently, the marginalization of those who interact with and come to understand the world through other modes of perception—nonsighted people, for instance—have been marginalized while those who "see the light," and everything else, are normalized as the standard.

Convergence Culture: Triumph of Ocularcentrism
I think we might say that such ocularcentric assumptions also figure convergence culture, at least as it’s detailed by Henry Jenkins. In chapter after chapter, page after page, Jenkins unveils a world in which “knowledge communities” develop around a series of cultural spectacles, each engendering a “collective intelligence” grounded almost entirely in visual acuity.

Jenkins shows, for example, how spoilers of the CBS show Survivor set their gaze on all things visible. In order to figure out the exact location of the Survivor: Africa season, one spoiler scrutinized IKONOS satellite photographs taken 423 miles away in space to pinpoint the Shaba Reserve, while another spoiler of Survivor: Pearl Island used a camera with a long-range telephoto lens to photograph people showing up at a hotel to be interviewed as potential contestants (37).

Fans “scrutinizing” the opening credits of one Survivor episode “spotted an image of nine contestants at what looked like a tribal council session” (46), inspiring spoilers to “watch the episodes more closely, using their single frame advance to search for embedded clues” (47). Ironically, Survivor producer Mark Burnett at one point actually showed the winner of the first series, Richard Hatch, walking alone across a rope bridge with a big smile on his face as an announcer explained how “only one will remain to win the title of sole survivor and one million dollars. . . in cash,” but the spoilers “had seen and dismissed it, believing it couldn’t be that simple. . .” (47). Believing what couldn’t be that simple? The image rendered unto their sight.

Virtually all of the branding strategies Jenkins studies in his chapter “Buying into American Idol” exploit product visibility (this despite referencing the call by Kevin Roberts, the CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, urging marketers to develop multisensory experiences to impress on consumers, 70). Making brands visible is, after all, necessary for the demographic of “viewers” who are “invited to imagine that ‘it could be me or someone I know’” (71). Such an imagination is constructed by the must-see pomp and glitz which is a trademark of the show. Sighted people everywhere are sated with a wide variety of images and the “transmedia impulse” that Jenkins sees [sic] as being at the heart of convergence culture (133-4) stems almost entirely from people’s interaction with visual media.

Jenkins seems blind [sic] to the ocularcentrism that pervades convergence culture as he represents it. Still, I think it’s worth pointing out how his view [sic] of a cultural shift from a passive media spectatorship toward an interactive, participatory one not only mirrors shifts in models of communication (away from the linear transmission model toward the more complex and nuanced models of ritual) but also reflects historical shifts in models of visual perception.

As a “critical utopian” (258), Jenkins seeks to “identify possibilities within our culture that might lead toward a better, more just society” (258). But these possibilities, as his book makes clear, are not open to everyone. “I must acknowledge,” he writes, “that not all consumers have access to the skills and resources needed to be full participants in the cultural practices I am describing” (23). He then discusses the digital divide, a subject he addresses again in his conclusion: “Race, class, language differences amplify these inequalities in opportunities for participants” (269).

I agree, but Jenkins doesn’t go far enough. He doesn’t show how sightedness—the ability to “see” the Coca-Cola logos on American Idol, to “watch” the parody political videos on YouTube, to “look” for clues in Survivor clips and partake in the “whole new vision of synergy” made available by multiple media platforms like movies, websites, video games, comic books, anime, and real-time online games in telling the story of The Matrix—he just doesn’t seem to get how sightedness is central to, and enables participation in, convergence culture.
Some questions to consider: Isn’t “affective economics” (62) based upon how “expressions” are constructed in conjunction with what is seen in images projected on screens? Is Stephen Duncombe’s progressive notion of “ethical spectacles” (see Jenkins, 292) even possible without the ability to spectate — that is, to see and engage with visual media such as the much-hyped YouTube parody videos? Am I out of line by enacting a form of “additive comprehension” (127) when I alter slightly this phrase by Jenkins?

Most of the people depicted in this book are early adopters. In this country they are disproportionately white, male, middle-class, [sighted], and college educated. (23)
“The culture of visuality places a high premium on visibility,” de Bolla argues (74) in his study of the “obsessively spectatorial culture of the Enlightenment” (76). The same may be said, I submit, of 21st century convergence culture, at least as it is represented by Henry Jenkins. But perhaps I’m missing something; perhaps there is more to convergence culture than meets the eye. I’ll keep looking.