Saturday, April 7, 2012

Lost: the great example of convergence culture?


Henry Jenkins explains in the chapter Searching for the Origami Unicorn, included in the book Convergence Culture, how and why Matrix could be considered as one of the most important cases of convergence culture. Nevertheless, the first film was released in 1999 in the United States, and lots of things have happened since then.
Undoubtedly, the scenario has change. Actually, the scenario has grown and now there are a large amount of new possibilities to create a successful and ‘multi integrated’ product. But, do all of them take advantage of the Web 2.0, for example? Has a new film had such a large impact in the society in the last years?
In the following, let´s try to guess if any there is something that have left Matrix in the second position. Let´s analyze what I consider was the biggest audiovisual phenomenon of the last 10 years: the TV series Lost. 

Firstly, some introductory information, although everybody should have heard about it before. Lost was a TV series developed by the channel ABC, whose first season took place in September 2004. An airplane crash in the middle of an island and the few survivors start a new life living there. The situation becomes weird (white bears living there?) and some mysterious events come about. I won´t spoil anything, I would have hated him if anyone had done it to me. The thing is that the series gets more complex, and more complex, and more complex…
But this is not really relevant. The thing is that Lost created something new, previously unknown, around it and became a big cult artifact. Jenkins quotes Umberto Eco in the text in order to explain the two main things that a cult artifact needs to become a cult artifact, and Lost had both. It of course had a completely furnished world, mainly composed by the island, the characters and all the episodes that were emitted every Thursday. The second factor was also fulfilled: being encyclopedic. The devoted fans were given a huge amount of information on each episode about the background of the characters, the relationship between them and even the territory of the island. In fact, the "official encyclopedia” of the series was published by the ABC channel.
Apart from the usual working of every TV series, the success of Lost brought the launching of thousands of products around the series, creating thus its own universe and of course, improving the ways of exploitation. It was very usual then to find toys of Jack, Hurley, Desmond, Kate or Sawyer. The figures, created by Todd McFarlane, represent real scenes of Lost, are exacts copies that represent the characters in real scenes of the series.
Figure of Sawyer by Todd McFarlane
But what really shows the success of an audiovisual product is its conversion to the sector of videogames. If we talk about convergence culture, a crucial step is to “invade” other fields, and videogames is one of the most profitable ones. Ubisoft launched in 2008 thevideogame of Lost, when the series was still in its fourth season.
Let´s look back in this point. A cult artifact, toys, an own videogame… What´s new comparing with Matrix or with any other big shocking film of the nineties? Wasn´t Lost a very new thing? In the upper lines it is not shown how or why the ABC series could be considered as an example of convergence culture of the 21st century. What made Lost a real breaking product?
According to some experts, Lost´s success is undoubtedly linked with the expansion and development of the Web 2.0.  The series had what any other could have: a big number of unconditional fans sat opposite their television every Thursday waiting to the next episode to start. But, what else? Lost created a parallel world that didn´t ended with the final of each episode. The series didn´t take place only on Thursdays but also on the rest of the week. On Thursday, the episode; on Friday, assimilating it, and on Saturday all the community started the ritual. Hundreds of forums were created and Lost fans shared their first impressions of each episode, started debates about the meaning of each of the mysterious things of the island, revealed what they thought was going to happen in the next episode.
Forums, chats and virtual communities in general such as the Spanish Lostzilla, acted as new spaces of debate. The devoted followers also created websites to share information about the series. They created maps of the island showing were the survivors lived and where the Dharma stations were, they exposed their theories about the future development of the series, they composed the background of each character, even these fans could be divided in two groups: the Jack supporters and the Sawyer supporters. All this information can be easily accessible now in the virtual encyclopedia Lostpedia: the Lost Encyclopedia.


The success of Lost was not only based on the quality of the series but also in its capacity to create a virtual world around itself. Lost escaped from the usual mechanism of the TV series to originate a virtual community 24 hours warned about the news of it. During the six years that lasted Lost, and still today, it existed a huge number of people interconnected that made the series to be alive all the days of the week, not only on Thursdays. The interconnectivity of course facilitated this fact. Is it the Lost the paradigm of convergence culture? I hope not, but for sure it represented a step further. 


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