In Jenkins essay he explores Star Wars, as a catalyst for somewhat of a DIY age. He says that the multiple spinoff of fanfilms that have emerged since the beginning of Stars Wars represent a cultural movement that "enable the grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content" (Jenkins 454). This brought to light the idea of video's going "viral," as in infiltrating and infecting multiple areas of the web, and reaching mass amounts of viewers in small amounts of time. Such recent viral videos include "What Does The Fox Say," "Wrecking Ball," and "Harlem Shake." Along with these video's going viral, many now wildly successful artists have been discovered purely due to their own video's gaining the attention of millions. One such example is Justin Bieber who was
discovered from youtube, and the rest is history.
Another theme that Jenkins conveys through the DIY notion is that through this participatory culture, fans as well as other outlets (with the proper licensing) can generate excitement on a companies behalf (Star Wars) without them doing the work themselves. One such example of this is one of my favorite commercials of all time, released during the 2011 super bowl, in which Volkswagen utilized the Star Wars theme and in turn created a viral video, today having over 58 million hits. This video generation much buzz for Volkswagen, but more importantly the Star Wars empire in general. Jenkins says, "In many ways, the Web has become the digital refrigerator for the "Do-It-Yourself" ("DIY") movement" (Jenkins 457).
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