Convergence Culture Wins 2007 Kovacs Book Award

Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide has been awarded the 2007 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

The award selection committee members, Greg Smith (chair), Pam Wojcik, and Daniel Bernardi, reviewed 87 books for this year’s competition. They drafted the following citation for Convergence Culture:

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide reclaims the new media buzzword ‘convergence’ as a productive but not quite predictable interaction among synergistic corporations, migratory audiences, and multiple technological platforms.

He discusses how this unruly process is redefining public culture through popular culture, and Jenkins's approachable prose reaches out to both media scholars and non-specialized audiences alike. The terms he uses (‘participatory culture,’ ‘collective intelligence,’ ‘affective economics,’ ‘transmedia storytelling’) are already reconfiguring the way we think about the contemporary media environment.

The award will be announced on Thursday evening, March 8 at the SCMS conference in Chicago.