Who is Lying?
Henry Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with a brief account of the events that brought the imagination of a high school student to the public eye in different mediatic contexts. “Bert is Evil” offers the perfect example to illustrate the mechanics of Jenkins’ convergence culture. By taking Sesame Street’s Bert out of his context and placing him in a bizarre world, its creator accidentally provided visual support to anti-American protesters far away from Bert’s home at the same time that a set of reactions from the media and Bert’s owners unchained. Jenkins then welcomes the reader to “convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”
What follows is probably one of the most influential books in years to come, dissecting three essential concepts of modern media theory [media convergence, participatory culture, collective intelligence] and providing a framework to further advance the conversation surrounding contemporrary media channels [as he does almost daily in his blog as well as in the Convergence Culture Consortium weblog].
“Bert is Evil” is not only a great, radical example of convergence culture [which we will look at in detail at a later time]. It also provides an interesting platform to understand semiotics through the lens of Umberto Eco’s work, particularly through his Theory of the Lie, explained in the introduction of A Theory of Semiotics: “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.”
Keeping in mind that this is merely a grain of sand in the huge desert of Eco’s theory of semiotics, it nevertheless provides an interesting view of sings through which anyone can question and challenge the assumptions and preconceptions around them. In this specific case, we could always ask ourselves who is lying when it comes to Bert’s intentions. Is he really good or evil? The process of answering this and similar questions has the potential to unlock the semiotician that lives within us.
