User-Produced Flash Cartoons and Television Animation

Introduction

A number of prominent media scholars including Peter Lunenfeld (2000, p. 71) and Lev Manovich (2002, p. 4) have shown that advances in the technical capabilities of personal computers, combined with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, have allowed the computer to become a single site for the production, dissemination, and reception of media texts.  Lunenfeld in particular contends that this convergence allows for the creation of new, alternative media forms and the ability for formerly passive mass media consumers to become active user/producers, blurring the formerly clear line between media audiences and producers. Amanda Lotz similarly claims that digital media give users the ability to dismantle mass media’s “bottleneck of distribution” (2007, pp. 148-149). Others assume an ideological revolution is taking place, making utopian claims that the capacity to produce and distribute media content outside of existing mass media structures allows for greater control and independence, which in turn has a profound influence upon the production of culture. For example, Lisa Parks (2004, p. 142) claims the “cross-pollenization” of television and new media might generate possibilities for social transformation, while Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000, pp. 73-75), Henry Jenkins (2006, pp. 3-7), and  Nicholas Negroponte (Andrejevic, 2004, p. 38) all presuppose that digital media allow users to challenge television’s hegemonic, “top-down” control over cultural production.

Many of these same scholars also predict a radical transformation in, if not the total collapse of, centralised mass media such as television. Anna Everett even claims that the “advent of the digital revolution in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century media culture apparently confirms both Jean-Luc Godard’s belief in the ‘end of cinema’ and other media critics’ claims that we have entered a post-television age” (Everett, 2003, p. 3).  She further asserts that this digital revolution represents “the rise of a new cultural dominant, one marked by the digital convergence of film, television, music, sound, and print media” (Ibid, p. 8). Everett’s argument in particular demonstrates that discussions of new media are not simply about technology, but rather involve a larger discussion about how these technologies can alter a society and its culture.

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