Abstract: This article aims to explain how Web 2.0 platforms in general, and Facebook in particular, engineers online connections. Connectivity has become the material and metaphorical wiring of our culture, a culture in which technologies shape and are shaped not only by economic and legal frames, but also by users and content. The emergence of social media platforms is at the heart of a shifting dynamic, where various actors (technology, users, content, legal and economic actors) are building a connective space for communication and information. In order to comprehend this interwovenness, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory will be invoked to explore how social media platforms can be analysed as techno-socio-cultural artefacts; this theoretical framework will be complemented by Castells’ political-economy approach to arrive at a fuller understanding of how social media operate. The documentary Catfish (2010) serves as an illustration to explore social media platforms in their multiple dimensions.

Abstract: The article aims to provide a more historically grounded approach to the relationship between communication and participation, by distinguishing different waves of media democratization. The article first discusses the concept of participation and some of its complexities, and then sketches a series of intense moments of participation in and through the media in (mainly the second half) the 20th and the 21st century. At the same time, care is taken not to organize a linear-historical narrative, keeping in mind that the history of the democratization of Western societies and their media spheres is characterized by a series of continuities and discontinuities, dead ends and sedimented practices. Despite these ever-present fluctuations, the article argues that we can still see that structures, cultural resources and subjective dispositions have over time been geared more towards participation and equality, also within the media sphere.

Abstract: This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of new and social media to argue that the vital nonverbal functions of face-to-face communication are no...

Abstract: Media sociologists and cultural globalization theorists have tended to overlook the contribution of translators to the circulation of media content in the era of digital culture. After critiquing the reasons for the invisibility of translation in the literature on global cultural transactions, this article moves on to examine the emergence of new amateur subtitling collectivities in today’s informational society, exploring the role that non-professional translators – specifically, networks of activist subtitlers – play within the participatory media industries. Using examples from a case study of Ansarclub, a Spanish group of engaged amateur translators, this article gauges the extent to which their participation, remediation and bricolage practices – the main components of digital culture (Deuze [2006] Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society 22: 63–75) – fit in or divert from the cocreational dynamics underpinning other domains...

Abstract: The rise in use of social media platforms as tools of communication has presented journalists with an abundance of opportunities and challenges in equal measure. These platforms have enabled journalists to engage directly with their readers and develop new forms of interactivity, both pertinent and banal in nature. By analysing the content of multiple social media profiles at two daily regional newspapers in the United Kingdom, it has been possible to determine how interactivity between journalists and readers is being shaped. This article has identified a spectrum of interactivity, which indicates that individual journalists are engaging with their readers in an informal, personal and reciprocal manner via social media platforms. This is in contrast to the formal approach being taken by their associated media companies that are transferring traditional top–down forms of communication from the offline world to the online world. Research for this article was conducted via interviews and content analysis.

Abstract: Stereoscopic cinema and new media ask us to consider the screen; not just the screen in the movie theatre auditorium but also the hard-bodied screens of computer monitors, television sets and hand-...

Abstract: Scholars have observed the influence of online and offline media use on the promotion of political and civic engagement. Findings indicate a positive correlation between media use and participation. This study moves beyond such effect on participation. Using data from an original national US survey, this article explores the effects of News Platform Preference Scale – a construct that measures the contrast between online and traditional news use in a continuum – on participatory behaviours. Controlling for usual online and offline media use, results show that a preference for digital media has strong positive effects over political and civic participation, suggesting these media may indeed be different.

Abstract: Those observing the proliferation of three-dimensional (3D) films in US theaters wonder whether 3D will become ‘the new normal’ – the way that most films are produced and watched. Although skeptics abound, no one can answer this question with certainty now. But, if we consider this phrase from a different angle, it promises a more immediately revealing analysis of contemporary 3D cinema. Despite its appearance of born-again novelty, 3D has quickly established a highly codified stylistic repertoire. This repertoire is evidenced in the relationship that 3D US feature films have to classical Hollywood and contemporary film and image-making strategies. As it achieves its spatial effects, 3D obeys, wrestles with, and amplifies certain standard aspects of storytelling, visual style, and genre. Studying recent movies, including blockbusters, this article argues that 3D’s mixture of media heritages distills a highly conventionalized 3D aesthetic or a new stylistic normal.

Abstract: Sports video games rank among the most successful products of the game industry. Yet, very little is known about the players of sports video games resulting in a blind spot for media and video game research. Little is known about how sports video game players fit their games into a larger sports-related context, and about how their video game play informs their media usage and general sports fandom. The following empirical online investigation is an answer to this research gap, providing one of the first large-scale data sets detailing who the sports video game players are. Through an online survey of 1718 participants, general demographics of sports video game players, their habits and activities were investigated in the early 2011. While, until now our knowledge about players of sports video games has been based on anecdotal evidence or extrapolated from wider surveys of game players, this study demonstrates that there are interesting and important differences demanding further study.

Abstract: This article analyses current trends in the use of anonymity services among younger Swedes (15-25) and focuses on individuals engaging in illegal file sharing in order to better understand the rationale behind both file sharing as well as online anonymity, especially in relation to enforcement of copyright. By comparing the findings of a survey conducted on three different occasions (early 2009, late 2009 and early 2012), we measure the fluctuations in the use of anonymity services among approximately 1,000 15-25-year olds in Sweden, compare them to file sharing frequencies and, to some extent, trends within legal enforcement. The article also suggests that the key to understanding any relationship between copyright enforcement and fluctuations in online anonymity can be found in the law’s relationship to social norms in terms of legitimacy by showing a correlation between file sharing frequency and the use of anonymity services. The findings indicate that larger proportions of frequent file sharers (downloaders) also use anonymity services more often than those who file share less. However, in comparison to the earlier surveys, the strongest increase in the use of anonymity services is found in the groups where file sharing is less frequent, suggesting that reasons for actively making oneself less traceable online other than avoiding copyright enforcement have emerged since the initial two surveys in 2009. Further, the overall increase (from 8.6% to 14.9%) in using anonymity services found for the whole group of respondents suggests both that high file sharing frequency is a driver for less traceability as well as a larger trend for online anonymity relating to other factors than mere file sharing of copyright infringing content – for example, increased governmental identification, data retention and surveillance in the online environment. The results are analysed in Merton’s terminology as file sharers and protocol architects adapting in terms of both innovation and rebellion in the sense that institutional means for achieving specific cultural goals are rejected. This means, to some extent, participating in or contributing to the construction of other means for reaching cultural goals. (Less)

Abstract: While the commonly received wisdom in scholarship of early stereoscopy asserts that it fell victim to photography’s success and eventually ‘died’ in the late 1930s, this article calls for a less determinist reading of stereoscopy’s place in media culture. Such a change requires the recognition that stereoscopy is a technique applicable across media, not a continually dying and reborn medium. Arguing that the stereograph laid some of the groundwork for the ‘cinema of attractions’ before it suffered from cinema’s capacity to supply precisely such spectacular modes of visual engagement on a grander sale, this article suggests that there is much to be taken from understanding early stereoscopy as a prototypical attraction. In the current context, in which not just three-dimensional (3D) cinema but also 3D television and 3D gaming all offer new forms of stereoscopic attraction, the content of early spectacular stereocards offers a wealth of source material with which to understand a newly resurgent form.

Abstract: Why and on what bases do people choose content and share it in an online environment? At the centre of Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture lie in the transforming links between active, participative audiences, media content and media corporations. However, the ‘textually motivated’ desire to participate in the circulation of and control over texts is just one among other key motives for the dissemination and recirculation of content. Ethnography-based research conducted at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic suggests that when exploring participation in textuality, performative self-exposure and self-presentation must be taken into account as well as the context of audiences’ everyday life. Thus, I propose to approach participation as based not only on a ‘will to text’ but also on a dialectical relationship between a ‘will to self-performance’ and a ‘will to conformity’. These three factors then impact on the social curation of content – a reflexive process in which members of the audience c...

Abstract: While the 20th-century media practice was marked by the focus of visual and audio screen cultures, the 21st-century media can be characterized by three key features: locative, mobile and social. With the transformation of mobile media from a communication tool into a multimodal device accompanied by global positioning systems (GPS), the significance of location-based services (LBS) has taken centre stage. Google maps, Facebook places and Foursquare are but a few of the locative media, a phenomenon creating new forms of co-presence that disrupt old binaries between online and off-line. In this transformation, a paradoxical relationship between identity, personalization and place occurs. On one hand, we see new ways for engaging with people, place and co-presence. On the other hand, we see the potential for corporations to create new levels of surveillance – a type of ‘uberveillence’ – that put into question individual’s sense of privacy and identity. If ‘social networking sites don’t publicize community, t...

Abstract: With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control, persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers, intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behaviour, considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.

Abstract: Although digital radio broadcasting has undergone significant development over the last quarter-century, no single protocol is poised to break out as a bona fide replacement for traditional analogu...

Abstract: From a perspective of critical heritage studies and conservation, this article exemplifies how the vocabulary of limitations (Westin, 2012) can be put to work on a translation-in-process; the shift from analogue to digital books. This vocabulary is a continuation of the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986), where limitations of a given format are identified as actants enrolled by stakeholders in the translation process, and, as such, anchor the format to society. Approaching the format as an actant which disciplines socio-cultural expressions through its limitations, this study tries to shed light on how cultural values are either acquired, reinforced or negotiated away in the translation process, when content is brought from one format into another.

Abstract: While the project of game preservation is still in its infancy, it is already clear that its practitioners find themselves facing a number of serious contradictions and predicaments. This article f...

Abstract: This paper traces the development of children’s multiplatform commissioning at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in the context of the digitalisation of Australian television. Whilst recent scholarship has focussed on ‘post-broadcast’ or ‘second-shift’ industrial practices, designed to engage view(s)ers with proprietary media brands, less attention has been focussed on children’s and young adults’ television in a public service context. Further, although multiplatform projects in the United States and Britain have been the subject of considerable analysis, less work has attempted to contextualise cultural production in smaller media markets. The paper explores two recent multiplatform projects through textual analysis, empirical research (consisting of interviews with key industry personnel) and an investigation of recent policy documents. The authors argue that the ABC’s mixed diet of children’s programming, featuring an educative or social developmental agenda, is complemented by its appeals...

Abstract: Antipiracy campaigns have traditionally centred on the illegality of film piracy and copyright infringement, framing piracy within a discourse of crime and criminality. However, as film piracy has retreated from hard copy piracy to online downloading and file sharing, these traditional discourses and framing of piracy have become increasingly redundant. This article examines the work of The Industry Trust responsible for antipiracy campaigns in the United Kingdom, since 2003, and how they have changed the discourse of piracy, reframing the pirate as antisocial miscreant rather than criminal. The article also examines the Trust’s antipiracy campaigns that attempt to make legitimate film texts increasingly more real and add value to counter the effects of the increasingly ephemeral online film download.

Abstract: A ‘shreds’ video combines existing live music concert footage, predominantly including a famous male rock guitarist or guitar based rock group, with a self-produced overdubbed soundtrack The result is a musical parody that exists in an intersection between production and consumption and works as a within-genre evolution The shred is controversial and its most popular instalments have been pulled from YouTube on claims of copyright infringement This paper examines shred sas a form of multimodal intertextual critique by engaging with the videos themselves, as well as audience responses to them As such, the applied method is genre analysis and multimodal semiotics geared towards the analysis of intertextual elements The paper shows how prodused parodyexists as a co-dependence between: (1) production and consumption; (2) homage and subversion;(3) comprehension and miscomprehension; and (4) media synchronicity and socioeconomic dis/harmony The paper also discusses how shreds can be interpreted as tampered-with gender performances In conclusion, it becomes clear that the produsage of shred videos is part of ‘piracy culture’ because it so carefully balances between the mainstream and counter-culture, between the legal and the illegal, and between the commoditized artefact and networked production

Abstract: Album leaks have become a taken-for-granted experience amongst artists, labels, and fans over the past decade. The cultural impact of leaks is obscured through a simple definition of piracy, howeve...

Abstract: Using a case study of the British pay television (TV) service Sky 3D, this article considers the current barriers to mainstream adoption of stereoscopic three-dimensional TV (3D TV). Exploring the history of 3D TV technology and the public discourse around 3D on TV, the article argues that the digital 3D TV aesthetic remains rooted in two-dimensional production models and restrictive genres/formats that stifle 3D storytelling and experimentation. Given these current limitations in broadcast content and the continuing influence of home electronics manufacturers, the article argues that 3D TV will struggle to have more than a fluctuating appeal in the consumer marketplace.

Abstract: The forays into digital three dimensionality (3D) by both mainstream directors (Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg) and established auteurs (Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders) – triggered by the groundbreaking success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) – have not simply fueled heated debate about the possibilities of 3D and its impact on industry players and critics, but have also precipitated inquiry from historical, aesthetic and cultural perspectives. We have thus been witnessing the rapid growth of scholarly interest in 3D across different disciplines to the extent that stereoscopy – which was invented before the advent of the standardized two-dimensional (2D) cinematic apparatus but has been critically neglected – was recently reevaluated as ‘stereoscopic media’. Still, this upsurge of academic interest in 3D seems long overdue if we consider it not as a special effect in the fields of cinema or photography, but as a particular mode of viewing and imagery that has been pervasive throughout the history of modern media technologies and across different forms and platforms. In the historiography of media art, the rise of 3D in Hollywood and the development of Cinerama and Sensorama in the 1950s are part of the larger traditions of immersive imaging from the 19th-century panoramas to contemporary digital artworks grounded in virtual reality (Grau, 2003). The many ways of achieving stereoscopic illusion suggest that 3D is not reducible to an integral essence or a limited set of material and technical components (such as particular glasses, head-mounted displays, etc.). Rather, following D. N. Rodowick’s revisionist ideas about the definition of a medium, it is more productive to consider 3D as ‘a set of potentialities’, or a range of perceptual effects and cultural ideas, that those material and technical components ‘are capable of expressing’ (Rodowick, 2007: 85). Set in this context, the six articles in this special Debates section are not intended to offer an essentialist definition of 3D and its applications in cinema and television (TV). Rather, all the articles regard 3D as something through which a host of concepts, ideas, aesthetics and industrial strategies related to cinema and TV are rethought and reconfigured. This conceptualization of 3D as an investigatory tool, rather than as a medium with specific materials and techniques, is indebted

Abstract: Considerations of media consumption typically focus upon the relationships fostered via economic exchange for the purposes of receiving a service, such as a licence fee, a subscription fee, or some other single-use cost. However, the growth of alternative electronic distribution channels enabled via the Internet have presented a number of challenges and opportunities for all involved, be the media organisations, artists, or consumers. Digitisation of media content, coupled with increased connectivity between individuals, has acted as a fertile breeding ground for the emergence of unofficial distribution of media and its subsequent consumption. The increasing affordability of technology that allows users to alter, modify, remix, or create their own content before sharing that across the network poses a range of problems to those groups who seek to control how content is accessed, distributed, and appropriated, especially if their ownership rights have been compromised in some manner. Anxieties of this type were manifested in several high-profile legal battles between the recorded music industry and music consumers in the United States (e.g. Virgin/Capitol v. Thomas, Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum), after individuals were caught sharing music files across peer-to-peer networks. Many subsequent discussions of illicit media consumption tended to concern themselves with economic predictions regarding the future livelihood of the content industries. Much has been made of the potential threat posed by networked digital distribution to the established interests and business practices of the culture industries. Lobbying on behalf of the content industries by powerful groups with deep pockets – such as the Motion Pictures Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and so on – has produced a particularly skewed picture of the ‘problem’. This often features huge numbers, whether they are speculative estimates about the damage caused by piracy cannibalising sales or the estimated damages expected from a successful court ruling. Indeed, in March 2011, it was estimated that the peer-to-peer network Limewire owed the RIAA

Abstract: This extended Debates section brings together a collection of articles based on papers presented at the symposium ‘Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’, which took place on 18 June 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. The event was sprinkled with stardust thanks to the participation of Henry Jenkins. In spite of (or rather because of) Jenkins’ appearance, we tried to avoid straightforwardly uniform reverberation of his key thesis about the creative potential of media audiences. On the contrary, the symposium – as well as this Debates section – took the appearance of Jenkins’ paradigmatic figure as an opportunity for sparking a discussion. Not that there is any shortage of it. The study of media audiences’ agency has been fully saturated with polemic. The dispute over audiences’ self-determination as opposed to external structural determination has been long impersonated in the controversy between cultural studies and critical theory/political economy. Reflecting the sociological matrix of the dilemma between structure and agency, mirrored in the dichotomy of ‘structuralism’ and ‘culturalism’ in cultural studies coined by Stuart Hall (1986: 33–48), revived a countless number of times (Kellner, 1995; McGuigan, 1992), and having survived attempts for integration (Babe, 2011), the clash between cultural studies and critical theory still shapes the field and produces an ongoing polemic. Despite the long-lasting exchange, the borderline separating the two paradigmatic camps does not seem to shift – there has been no consensus and neither of the two paradigms has prevailed. It seems that the polemic between cultural studies and critical theory is showing its limits; the disparity of perspectives concentrated on structures on one hand and actors on the other is so vast

Abstract: This issue of Convergence opens with an extended special Debates section, edited by Irena Reifová and Jaroslav Švelch, which – as they explain in their Introduction – brings together a selection of papers resulting from a symposium they held in June 2012 in Prague. At the heart of the symposium was discussion about and investigation of media audience ‘participation’ in the digital era, which generated post-symposium the wide ranging and illuminating conversation between Henry Jenkins and Nico Carpentier that opens and frames the Debates section. In particular, the symposium organisers, together with Jenkins and Carpentier, were keen to not only interrogate the ‘grand narratives’ that have emerged in the ‘age of media convergence’ but perhaps more importantly focus in more depth on the kinds of participation that have developed, under what circumstances and for what purpose. In both Jenkins and Carpentier’s opening conversation and the shorter pieces that follow, the contributors to this special Debates section explore a wide range of participatory practices, from those with more overtly political aims, like the Invisible Children group discussed by Jenkins, through to the supposedly more playful, ‘just for fun’ Bollywood flash mobs studied by Sangita Shresthova. However, what emerges from these Debates is the complexity of participatory practices. For instance, it involves Jenkins and Carpentier in a detailed discussion of how we define ‘participation’ – and related terms such as interaction, engagement, interpretation and access – and prompts recognition by Jenkins that inequality of access to technological infrastructure, opportunities, skills and knowledge make it more difficult for some groups to participate than others, while Carpentier asserts that full participatory culture will never be realised. But the Debates section also raises the thorny issue of participation in what? As Jenkins notes, although many new platforms, such as YouTube, describe themselves as participatory, the emphasis remains on individual self-expression rather than facilitating or supporting a participatory community based on shared values. In the course of their conversation, Jenkins acknowledges that his research tends to start with specific case studies and look for conceptual tools to explain what’s being observed, whereas Carpentier begins with abstract definitions and assesses their applicability to specific cases. Yet editors Reifová and Švelch argue that their Debates section precisely demonstrates that our

Abstract: The basis for an ‘emerging universe and emerging consciousness,’ Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) wrote in 1985, ‘is the calculation of probability.’ That is, the use of mathematics and information theory to determine what would, could, and will happen. But make no mistake: the Flusserian universe is no dystopia. Rather, it is seeped in thick ambivalence; at once utopia and hell. On the one hand, the new universe of technical images, which has already begun to materialize, will ensure a ‘fabulous’ future society full of ‘creativity’. But on the other hand, Flusser admits, ‘I am horrified [of] the emerging universe. Thank God I will not experience it.’ (p. 128). These constitutive tensions run throughout the highly provocative and uniquely written Into the Universe of Technical Images. Flusser’s ‘telematic’ universe was conceived in 1985. It consists perhaps entirely of what he terms ‘technical images’. Unlike ‘traditional images,’ where one can grasp the world and environment through magical action (p. 9), technical images are not surfaces but rather ‘mosaics assembled from particles’ (p. 6); particles assembled into visual images (p. 10). What exists between these particles? Voids or ‘intervals that hold the elemental points apart’ (p. 15). The technical universe is a cosmos of pure particles. Technical images begin as ‘raw’ particles, which, through the rubrics of information theory and cybernetics, are then sorted into a new order of ‘negative entropy’, as he terms it elsewhere. However, technical images are not exclusively digital and this is where Flusser’s philosophy of technology is truly distinct from his contemporaries. The universe of technical images includes film, photography, television, video, computing, and even the typewriter. How is this possible? Recall first that the logic of computation existed long before the electronic computer. Second, all of these media involve technical sorting and ordering processes that transform raw materials— photons, electrons, or dye substances—into a new order and intelligibility. Technical images turn a ‘concept’ into a ‘visualization’ by making the abstract concrete. In distinction, traditional images, like paintings, depict the empirically perceived world more or less directly (they do not require any ‘keys’ for translation like a shutter release or keyboard). At the same time, Flusser suggest that electronic images are purer forms of technical images. ‘After the Information Revolution,’ he writes ‘contemporary films [will] resemble the cave paintings at Lascaux more closely than they do images of fractal equations of computer screens’ (p. 102). Electronic images are better technical images because their transcoding is more substantial. It is on the level of interpretation, however, that images in the telematic universe mark a radical departure from conventional visual studies. Traditional images mean and explain things and this is why, they are the age-old friend of hermeneutics. In contrast, technical images cannot be grasped or interpreted for ‘meaning’ in the way that traditional images can. Instead, they are posthermeneutic and consist of no tangible substrate; projecting organized particles into an empty field (p. 47). Thus, what a technical image means is also how it is structured—that is, the algorithmic protocols that condition its possibilities for visualization (p. 44). ‘To decode a technical image’ Flusser writes ‘is not to decode what it shows but to read how it is programmed’ (p. 48). The future requires these post-hermeneutic reading strategies that run along the surface of material relations, operations, and connections. Book reviews 119