Posts tagged media and communication studies

Dissertation: Going Live - Collaborative Video Production After Television

This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. We have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Author: Arvid Engström, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University

Access here: http://www.tii.se/mobility/?page_id=1695 or have a look at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-75931 where it might also show up.

ABSTRACT - This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. The work frames a design space that spans across both the social and technical domains. It associates emerging collaborative practices online with new means for producing and broadcasting media in real time, over mobile networks and using low-cost consumer technology just as these technologies are becoming widely available in the world. As a premise, we sketch a scenario where groups of non-professional users, enabled by new technology available in their mobile phones, produce live media collaboratively. We use detailed ethnographic inquiries into the practices of expert media producers to inform design and spur innovation of new technology. Over the course of the design research process, we have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Parts:

  1. Mobile broadcasting – The whats and hows of live video as a social medium
  2. Lean collaboration through video gestures: co-ordinating the production of live televised sport
  3. Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time
  4. Mobile collaborative live video mixing
  5. Amateur vision and recreational orientation: Creating live video together

Aca-article: Can Big Media do “Big Society”? On hyper-local journalism.

This paper examines a UK-based commercial local news network and evaluates the level of audience engagement by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting.

Thurman, N., Pascal, J. C. & Bradshaw, P. (2012). Can Big Media do “Big Society”?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics.

http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1125/6/Thurman_Pascal_Bradshaw.pdf

ABSTRACT - The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model.

CFP: Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality - “medium” beyond current disciplinary frames (Postmodern Culture, due June 1, 2012)

This issue of Postmodern Culture aims to gather ways of seeing the term “medium” beyond current disciplinary frames. Rather than take the routes of literary or film studies, art history or communication theory - and rather than see media as discrete, pre-constituted categories of aesthetics or mechanics - we seek to put the category of medium into question, and in doing so, to facilitate approaches to the various mutually dependent media whose boundaries and frames might now seem less conclusive.

Abstracts due June 1, 2012.

Read full call-for-papers: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v021/21.3.article.html

Free first issue of the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies

This is a peer-reviewed journal that aims to bridge the gap between media and communication research and actors with a say in media production, devoted to research with an applied angle. It has a particular focus on contemporary issues and practices of media firms as they are experienced by their actors journalists, executives, publishers and proprietors.

First issue available for free http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ajms/2012/00000001/00000001

New Book: Virilio and the Media - an introduction to Virilio’s media related ideas

Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio’s examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy. This new book, Virilio and the Media, presents an introduction to Virilio’s important media related ideas.

Author: John Armitage, Professor of Media at Northumbria University.

Published by Polity Press: http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745642284

MORE - Virilio and the Media presents an introduction to Virilio’s important media related ideas, from polar inertia and the accident to the landscape of events, cities of panic, and the instrumental image loop of television. John Armitage positions Virilio’s essential media texts in their theoretical contexts whilst outlining their substantial influence on recent cultural thinking. Consequently, Armitage renders Virilio’s media texts accessible, priming his readers to create individual critical evaluations of Virilio’s writings. The book closes with an annotated and user-friendly Guide to Further Reading and a non-technical Glossary of Virilio’s significant concepts.

Virilio’s texts on the media are vital for everyone concerned with contemporary media culture, and Virilio and the Media offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to the ever expanding range of his critical media and cultural works.

New Book: Media, Place and Mobility - a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living

With its powerful advocacy of a “non-media-centric” approach, this book offers a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living. Drawing primarily on phenomenological perspectives, Shaun Moores focuses on the ways in which people inhabit physical and media environments, and he explores the bodily and technologically mediated mobilities that are involved in this activity of dwelling. His discussion includes many specific examples of mobility, from the manipulation of remote-control devices to the movements of walking and driving in the city or of getting around in online social spaces.

Author: Shaun Moores, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sunderland.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=389674

New Book: Cloud Time - The Inception of the Future (on the culture and politics of cloud computing)

This book maps capitalism’s mobilization of cloud computing in its bid to archive and enclose the future. The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control.

Authors: Rob Coley, Doctoral candidate at the University of Lincoln, Dean Lockwood, Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Media at the University of Lincoln.

Published by Zero Books: http://o-books.com/books/cloud-time

MORE - The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable.  We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.

CFP: Journalism and Mobile Devices (Nov 15-16, Portugal)

How do mobile devices affect the traditional forms of delivering news? Can the app economy be an alternative to selling content? Is there a new journalistic language and new journalistic genres for these devices? These are the three themes of this conference.

Abstracts due June 30, 2012. International Congress on Journalism and Mobile Devices, Universidade da Beira Interior (Portugal), 15-16 November 2012.

See full call for papers: http://www.jdm.ubi.pt/index-en.php#CallForPapers

CFP: Platform Politics - Platforms replacing the open web as the default digital environment?

This issue of Culture Machine will explore how digital platforms can be understood, leveraged and contested in an age when the ‘platform’ is coming to supplant the open Web as the default digital environment.

Full articles due Nov 1, 2012. Special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 14.

ABOUT - Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. For this issue of Culture Machine we are seeking papers that explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’.
 
The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’  can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue will look to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it will think about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. As such, platform politics requires a distinct mode of engagement, which this special issue of Culture Machine will endeavour to encourage and provide.
 
We invite contributions on topics such as:

  • Protocols as machinery of the platform – its common language, including ideas of control and/or the possibilities and limitations of open, non-proprietorial platforms.
  • The specific relationship between networks and platforms (including the discussion of whether the former are being subsumed by the latter), and distribution vs centralization/aggregation — not least in terms of user created content and content management systems (code politics of algorithms, and the use of APIs).
  • The question as to whether a process of enclosure is taking place via the struggle over the creation and expropriation of ‘network value’, or whether it entails a more parasitical engagement with, and enhancement of, the existing network architectures.
  • Visibility/invisibility: platforms as political spaces to be seen/heard, or indeed tactically escaped and eluded.
  • Resistance: how the above described issues relate to the potential for cultural, political, social and economic praxis, which in turns opens up a space from which to address recent global events. (See, for example, RIMs (Blackberry Messaging’s) enclosure, which ironically creates spaces of resistance as well as disturbance and securitization.)
  • New software possibilities: for example, Drupal’s opening up and democratization of content management, which perhaps creates a kind of ‘platform commons’? The potential of ‘Diaspora’, the open source social network, to offer a viable alternative to proprietary social media.
  • The role of intrinsic network tendencies, as opposed to political and economic decision-making, taking in explorations of the relevance of graph theory, the role of power laws and the network-specific characteristics of ‘communication power’.

Please submit your contributions including contact details by email to Joss Hands: joss.hands(at)networkpolitics.org
 
Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
 
All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

CFP: New Media and the Public Sphere, (Nov 8-9, Copenhagen)

In the context of media transformation, this event brings together scholars and researchers in the fields of media, ICT, and political science, to reflect and discuss how we can conceptualize and develop empirically the public sphere of the new media-driven society.

Abstracts due July 1, 2012. Conference Nov 8-9, 2012, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Read full CFP here: http://cemes.ku.dk/newmedia/dokument/

Topics

  • Democracy and the online public sphere;
  • Cultural production in the digital age;
  • Identity in the virtual sphere;
  • Net neutrality and public participation.