I still love Bert from Sesame Street….

 

Could Bert from sesame street really be a clone to Osama Bin Laden?  Its a pretty scary the resemblance if you ask me.  Bert was one of my favorite childhood characters from sesame street.  The Children’s Television Network was not to happy about the negative depiction of Bert overseas.  “We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner.  The people responsible,e for this should be ashamed of themselves.  We’ve are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar in the future” (Jenkins, 2006).

It is truly amazing to me thing things technology allows you to do.  It is so easy to cut and paste, edit and merge pictures today to look like anything.  Is this genius or grounds for self destruction, I am not really sure.  When is it too much?  In Dino Ignacio’s case I think he went over board with his collage of Bert and Bin Laden.  “From his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy.  His images crisscrossed the world…”(Jenkins, 2006).  In a sense it distorted the childlike character, Bert that so many of us grew up with and loved.  In the article Jenkins argues that this is in a sense cultural convergence.  It ties together three key concepts, Media Convergence, Participatory Culture and Collective Intelligence (Jenkins, 2006).

Convergence is apart of our everyday lives.  The collage about Bert is a prime example of this.  “Think about the circuits that the Bert is Evil images traveled –from Sesame Street  through Photoshop to the World Wide Web, from Ignacio’s bedroom to a print shop in Bangladesh, from the posters held by anti-American protestors that are captured by CNN and into the living rooms of people around the world” (Jenkins, 2006).  The whole process is so scary and we wonder why terrorist exist in the world today and why identity theft exists.

Media convergence is just one of many ways that people interact and communicate with one another.  I think more times than not the media converges our lives with the negatives of today instead of trying to find more positives for people to interact and communicate about.

Interesting Article: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/7051/convergence-culture-by-henry-jenkins/