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lazy and impossibly stupid. Yet, despite its notorious status, the program endured for decades through different media. The radio program’s popularity was so widespread that it culminated in a 1930 feature-length film,
Check and Double Check
, which featured the white performers appearing in black-face. The program ran well into the 1950s, during which time it also spun off into a short-lived television show. While activist protests forced this new televisual version off the air after only a few seasons, episodes continued to run in syndication well into the 1960s.
Amos ’n’ Andy
was the rule, not the exception, for representations of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Its resilience throughout the years and across several different media platforms testified to the racist ideologies within the audiences who supported it. But just as important, this survival spoke to the reassuring durability of old stereotypes during the upheaval of new technologies and new historical eras.
    PARTICIPATORY CULTURE
    Nostalgic audiences play a crucial role in the survival of racist images across multiple media, a fact often marginalized within more utopian articulations of reception practices. One such conception is Jenkins’s notion of “participatory culture,” a cultural shift whereby “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” as a result of these transmedia worlds.
Convergence Culture
presents one of the most recognized models for examining the relationship between media producers and audience behavior in an age of corporate horizontal integration and transmedia intellectual property. Working from Pierre Lévy’s theories on “collective intelligence,” Jenkins argues that the Internet, with its seemingly endless networks of blogs, forums, and forms of social media, provides an ideal platform for people with shared interests to go online and pool their accumulative knowledge of a given subject. Online communities, Jenkins believes, are “held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge.” Everyone can contribute pieces of information to the larger group and, in turn, share in the benefits of such accumulative comprehension. Collective intelligence, he writes, “refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively.” 37 Moreover, according to Jenkins, these online communities force media producers to stay honest in how they negotiate audience participation, for fear of organized rejection or reprisal.
    Although digital participatory culture has simplified some forms of communication within various audience communities and with mediagatekeepers, it would be inaccurate to presume an equal, or even relatively democratic, power relationship between potential participants. Economic and cultural status invariably dictates which audiences can interact more easily. Meanwhile, media companies have become increasingly savvy about shaping, limiting, and controlling the relatively modest ways in which consumers can contribute. And especially with a major entertainment giant such as Disney, access and participation are often defined through purchasing power. It is difficult to accept unquestionably the idea that “the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception.” Given how many platforms—literal and symbolic—each individual consumer has at her or his disposal these days, physical and intellectual isolation would seem a very real possibility. While Jenkins expresses a complicated view of these issues, he places critical approaches to convergence in a binary: critical pessimism and critical utopianism. One can choose to be either cynical or optimistic about the intentions of media conglomerates, and about the democratic potential of collective