Blog

Singapore.


We're now in the opening plenary session here at ICA 2010 - with a relatively low turnout, though; perhaps people haven't realised it's on today, after all the pre-conferences? Overall, some 1,700 delegates have registered for the conference, we're told... Anyway, the speaker tonight is Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, who begins by noting the challenge of communication - it is the central concept (the organon) of our historical period; it explains everything, and everything turns into communication. Therefore, seeing communication from the outside, studying it, is a particular challenge; all we can say about the world is already communication.

Singapore.


The next speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Debashis Aikat, whose interest is in how popular communication is transformed in the digital age, with a specific view towards India. India and a number of other countries, like China, continue to be areas of significant growth in Internet access, while there is saturation uptake in the US and a number of European countries already.

Aligned with this is the explosion in Web 2.0 sites and platforms, some of which last only a very short time, while others develop into major market leaders. In light of this, how are emerging technologies reshaping concepts and theories of communication and technology? How does this communication revolution play out? How does it affect us? Debashis runs through a number of ways to conceptualise this - categorising the range of Web 2.0 activities, and outlining the changing value chains from mass media to mass social media.

Singapore.


The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Singapore.


Our CCI roundtable on methodological challenges and cultural science was next in this pre-conference at ICA 2010, but we were presenting from my laptop so I couldn't blog it... Skipping to the first of the post-lunch sessions instead, we're starting Knut Arne Futsaeter, whose focus is on the growth of Facebook in Norway as a process of diffusion. Norway is a world leader in Internet access (at some 92% of the population), and Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites (with a market penetration of 50%).

Singapore.


The final speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Lynn Comella, whose focus is on adult entertainment - a global industry which is increasingly delineated by different interests and tastes, and one which is subject to high levels of criticism and antagonism. It has been underresearched so far, and policy decisions tend to be driven by moral outcries rather than evidence-based research. Communication research provides a robust framework here, but lags behind in its work on research into sexuality in general and adult entertainment in particular.

Singapore.


The next speaker at this ICA 2010 pre-conference is Nele Simons, whose focus is on the reception side of the emerging 'TV 2.0'. The two constituent trends here are digitisation (detaching TV content from the TV screen) and convergence (leading to cross- and transmedia forms) - so what does it mean today to engage with a TV series; how may we study it?

We need to reconsider our methodological approaches - one approach, which Nele explored, is a semi-structured, online TV diary that helps researchers understand audience members' viewing practices, with online follow-up and in-depth interviews. The semi-structured diary included categories such as watching episodes of a series (in whatever format), consuming media-related extras), consuming other extras, producing related content, and communicating about the TV series.

Singapore.


The next session in this ICA 2010 pre-conference starts with Andy Ruddock, who begins by focussing on George Galloway as a successful Labour candidate in Britain who appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. He describes this as an interesting new approach to political communication that shows the change in media and communication practices in the new media environment.

Galloway's appearance on Big Brother was a point of controversy; it was described as furthering his ego rather than doing proper political work. However, his counterargument was that this reached a different audience - so how do we read and research this from a communication studies perspective? We need new methods that provide new analyses of randomly occurring data and allow for the indeterminate outcomes of media practices across various domains.

Singapore.


The next presenters at this ICA 2010 pre-conference are Lothar Mikos and Ilona Ammann, who begin by highlighting the idea of convergence (a dangerous word, according to Roger Silverstone in the mid-90s). Convergence means the flow of content across multiple media platforms, connected to the cooperation between multiple media industries and the movement of users across platforms - so it exists on various levels: on the level of texts and the media (in transmedia storytelling, hybrid forms, and global and national brands) and on the level of audiences (in transcultural audiences, audience engagement, and audiences as producers.

Singapore.


The next speaker at this ICA 2010 preconference is Ranjana Das, who also notes the changing nature of audiencing and the move towards user-led content creation. Audiences and users, she says, can now be placed in a continuum of sorts, and to grasp this requires methodological advances. There are a number of shared interests in audience and in user studies, and both move beyond a mere individualistic focus on motivations and take a strongly interdisciplinary approach.

There is an increasing conceptual challenge here, however: the visual is becoming more important; it does not simply replace the verbal; hypertextual formats offer new modes of engagement; and so a new communicative order us upon us. In the process, reception, interpretation, text and genre are becoming more and more difficult to define. Divergence and diversity in interpreting texts is highly important, too.

Singapore.


From steamy Hong Kong I've now travelled to humid Singapore, where the 2010 conference of the International Communication Association is about to get underway. This Tuesday we're starting with a pre-conference on methodological questions in popular communication reearch. Pre-conference organiser Cornel Sandvoss begins by highlighting the significant intertextuality of media texts - and there is a quantitative increase in media content and use. Additionally, narratives are increasingly moving transmedia, and lines between the producers and users of content are blurring.