As part of our journalism course we also have to take a media module. Our final assignment in this was a case study on the media text of our choosing with a focus on convergence. I chose Doctor Who and here is the outcome.
In the course of our Media in the 21st Century module, we have looked at convergence quite often. The term is a fairly common one in media, most often referring to the coming together of old and new media. For this assignment I will be looking at the television show Doctor Who, but as this is convergence I’ll be looking at how the text converges across other media like the internet, books, video games and the like. Convergence is a controversial thing to some media types; in our lectures we saw how some believed that new media should have swept away the old media, making it obsolete. Instead, whilst online media players like 4oD, iPlayer and even YouTube are examples of pioneering new media, its old media counterpart the TV still rumbles on, as Curran and Seaton said in 2001, people are “watching it for the same reasons they watched it in the past.” In Kackman’s book Flow TV he states that television has survived by adapting to become a converged technology. Convergence however means more than just multi-platform delivery, it means “new textual practices, branding and marketing strategies, industrial arrangements, technological synergies, and audience behaviours enabled and propelled by the emergence of digital media.”[1]
The television show Doctor Who is a long lived brand and as such its recent reboot has meant a much loved programme, despite its flaws, was suddenly right at the zeitgeist, one of the most popular shows on the box. It did this through a whole host of ways but I believe that one particular way was its use of new media, not available to the original wobbly set show of the 60s, through to the 80s. The show in its current form has a website which has multiple functions, first of all it connects to iPlayer so you can catch up with past episodes but also watch prequels to episodes that are not available on old media. There is also a gaming functionality, asking the audience to participate in the text in a new way. Audience participation is not welcomed by all, in fact in December 2000, columnist Charlie Brooker wrote about convergence saying: “Having made your choice, the programme begins – except it isn’t a normal programme at all. No: thanks to ‘convergence’ it’s a magical cross between TV, the Internet and the most sophisticated arcade game you’ve ever seen. If you’re watching Ground Force 2006, for example, you’ll be able to push a button to digitally graft Alan Titchmarsh’s head onto the body of a dancing cat, and take potshots at it with a light gun, earning Amazon tokens for each paw you blow off.”[2]
It’s fair to say that convergence in general is a difficult subject, but in the context of Doctor Who, I believe it enhances the audience experience of the show. During the years when David Tennant was playing The Doctor, there was an online interactive game which encouraged you to ‘Become the Doctor’s Companion and save the world’. The game is still available on the website and is played from a point of view which allows the player to feel they are actually involved in the story. This kind of audience participation can be viewed under the uses and gratifications model. Whilst the show itself is simply that, something to be watched, the online content adds a new interactive dimension which comes to enhance the text as a whole. Doctor Who’s creators have been quite clever in this respect; they have created a range of products that encourage audiences to continue their involvement in the show, long beyond the actual programme. The show produces a magazine, novels, graphic novels (i.e. comic books), toys, animated series, video games and spin-off television shows like Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures which extend the story’s canon outside of the main show creating flexi narratives. [3]
Looking at the show from a media histories point of view, it is interesting to note that Doctor Who was rebooted not just through popular opinion but because new technology had come along in the years since its cancellation. The special effects in the show give what used to be a slightly laughable show which became a cult classic a new edge, making it more relevant to a media savvy audience. This is an example of technological determinism, with the new technology driving media forward as opposed to the technology having to find its place in the old media. The famous technological determinist, Marshall McLuhan said of new technology, in particular looking at the Gutenberg press, “If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody.”[4] You could also look at Doctor Who from a Free Market version of history, the show has strived to become something that the consumers want to secure the largest profit, innovating along the way. The free market media history and technological determinist history can run side by side as the technology could be introduced in an attempt to make the text more consumer friendly and in turn more cost effective.
Convergence is not a new thing; it was happening even 100 years ago in Lord Reith’s BBC with old media like plays converging with the radio, just emerging as a media type. What is driving the new technology though? The Internet emerged because of wars, the army needed a way of communicating and eventually it spread to the general public; the economic boom of the 80s also drove technology forward which in turn would lead to convergence. Old media can only survive by adapting to new media. The arrival of radio terrified the newspaper industry but papers adapted with radio becoming an important source of news copy. The same can be said of cinema and television; television threatened to kill off cinema but cinema adapted and now TV has learnt to feed off of cinema instead i.e. BBC Film Night 2011.
Doctor Who has gone from a cult TV show to something of a television phenomenon. The show is one of the most successful on British screens picking up a huge number of awards on the way. It is quite something for a science fiction text to become such a hit amongst a mainstream audience, and I believe it is the way in which it has adopted a combination of old and new media which has brought it such success. The show produces a number of novels and graphic novels, which run in a non linear way to the actual series, providing a set of paratexts with an implication for narrative theory as it means you can have stories with the characters from the series outside of the main story arc. Another way Doctor Who has embraced convergence is its acceptance of the convention culture of its most ardent fans. The convention circuit gives the fans of the show another chance to be a part of it and engage with it on a different level; for example people can talk to the actors, producers, directors and writers and gain a new level of understanding for the show, enhancing their experience of it.
In short, convergence is everywhere in today’s media. It is inherent in TV as much as radio and in cinema as much as the Internet. Whilst convergence is often old media incorporating new media into old media, such as BBC’s iPlayer which is the incorporation of the Internet with TV, it can also be new media taking on aspects of the old like Twitter and news agencies. Doctor Who is a media text which uses a wide range of new media, which I hope I have shown in this essay whilst keeping the heart of its old media roots. With using so many converged technologies, podcasts, video blogs meta-textual websites and red button adventures is it all working together as s richer entertainment experience or is it merely an economic exercise. Can these media really work together to create a satisfying whole?[5] My belief is they can, as Doctor Who continues to be such a media institution, the convergence that it so heartily embraces will on serve to make it bigger and better.
Word Count: 1390
References:
[1] Kackman, A et al (2010). Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. : Routledge. p1.
[2] Brooker, C (2005). Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn. London: Faber and Faber Limited. p36.
[3] Wikipedia. ( ). Doctor Who. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who. Last accessed 29th May 2011.
[4] Wikipedia. ( ). Marshall McLuhan. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan. Last accessed 30th May 2011.
[5] Perryman, N. (2008). Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media A Case Study in `Transmedia Storytelling'. Available: http://con.sagepub.com/content/14/1/21.refs. Last accessed 31st May 2011
Until next time. Stay classy Internet.
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