Meghan Rannells Convergence Culture

Ettdrömspel to Earthbound and all the Convergence in Between

It would be easy to talk about the benefits of convergence culture (the merging of old and new media), making faster connections between individuals and, according to Henry Jenkins, becoming an evolution comparable to the Renaissance (Jenkins 93) But what is largely more interesting, is the examination of convergence media’s role in something so culturally relevant as theatre. In an article titled “Earthbound Strindberg’s Dream Play Reimagined for the Era of Digital Media Convergence”, a theatre director named Robert Allen does just as the title suggests, and adapts August Strindberg’s Dream Play (otherwise known as Ettdrömspel) with the incorporation of various medium. Throughout the article, Allen discusses the potential to incorporate new media into the dream centred play, and concludes by confirming his plans to merge Strindberg’s original ideas into a new piece titled Earthbound, “a child of the current era of media convergence” (Allen 419). This essay will examine Allen’s article in hopes of exploring the connection between what Jenkins would classify as converging culture, and the nature of Allen’s adaptive piece.

Early on in the article Allen elaborates on the benefits of the convergence period by stating that “the cost of undertaking the image research and video processing for Earthbound would have been prohibitive in terms of the time and skill sets needed in any prior era” (420). Among faster connections and the immersion of interactive media, convergence culture has brought with it a more accessible educative field of technology, something Allen requires for his newly imagined Earthbound. With the learning and accessibility provided, the director finally states near the article’s conclusion that his project will be “a sequence of stand-alone videos…each…an individual scene from Strindberg’s [original play]” all to be viewable on the internet (422). Perhaps before convergence culture, a theatre director would not learn nor utilize various types of softwares, however in this era a hybrid is instead created of both old and new. Suddenly the blending of a play originally performed in 1889, and a project Allen began working on in 2012, incorporates various media such as images, video, and the internet, fitting in perfectly with Jenkins’ classifications of convergence culture.

This example of convergence media incorporating the old into the new, is perfectly exemplified in Jenkins’ statement that “media convergence fosters a new participatory folk culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate content" (93). In the article, Allen clarified that he was by no means a Strindberg specialist, but was instead intrigued by dreams and the way media and technologies could be intertwined with it. With that being said, Allen in this scenario is “recirculat[ing] content” as an “average” person according to Jenkins’ theories (93). For Allen, the era of convergence culture gave him the new ‘tools of the trade’, allowing him the opportunity to create and re-imagine Strindberg’s play on a new set with varying elements, and yet still “in keeping with what [he] perceive[s] to be…Strindberg’s original intention” (419). Throughout this essay, the role of convergence media and its impact has been explored by way of examining the appropriation of converging medium and its tools onto the set of a nineteenth-century play with a twenty-first century project; the perfect combination of medium combining the old culture, and the new.

Meghan Rannells

Works Cited

Allen, Robert. “Earthbound: Strindberg's "Dream Play" Reimagined for the Era of Digital Media 	Convergence”. Scandinavian Studies 84.3 (2012): 413–424. Web.

Jenkins, Henry. "Convergence? I Diverge." Technology Review 104.5 (2001): 93.