Abstract
Wifi, 3G and other wireless technologies have raised our expectations of connectivity and as a result irrevocably changed our social interactions. We can, as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and my email inboxes tell me, connect as an individual to more people more directly than we have ever been able to do so before. But if communication is liberated though new technologies, who holds the reins of responsibility? Investigating this question reveals a complexity of professional practices, which are explored in this issue of Convergence.
One of the advantages of wireless for us is the ability to access the virtual world from different devices. For example I can read a book in the coffee queue on a portable HTC phone or on the train on an outsized (A4) kindle with its ability to enlarge the type. When synced, I can pick up the page anywhere I can connect to the wifi. This means that the text becomes independent of the physical device but the reading experience is not. As a reader I have a material connection with the screen-device I read the book on. David Beer reminds us in his debates piece that the physicality of mobile devices should not be ignored. Such devices are ‘objects with which individuals may develop an attachment’ and he argues that ‘these connections are actually an important part of how mobile media have become such a prominent and embedded part of contemporary life’. Beer’s debate is thought provoking and can be read next to Kurt Squires and Seann Dikkers’s positive investigation into the use of mobile media devices among young adults to amplify learning in this issue. Squires and Dikkers show how access to mobile devices is deeply tied to personal power for these young adults as they found they were ‘able to function more effectively to meet their goals with employers, teachers, and peers’ (p. 445). The ownership of the physical object – even temporarily – was a part of this feeling of empowerment.
Investigating the question of who holds the reins of responsibility when communication is liberated by technology, Fan Dong analyses the complexity of professional practices controlling the internet in China. Her interesting study describes five layers ‘ranging from the government, service and content providers to webmasters and individual users’ (p. 403). Employing comparative online ethnography of two of the major Chinese online forums underpinned by interviews of key individuals, Dong reveals the relationship between different components of the control mechanism and demonstrates how these evolve in different phases of an online forum’s growth.
We are familiar with participative forums which share responsibility for content though various mechanisms from active moderation to flagging inappropriate responses. These mechanisms allow the community to regulate itself. However they are never in isolation and external factors play a significant part in how the moderation takes place. An imagined participative democracy created by altruistic citizens of the world, responsible companies and benign NGOs such as Jacques Attali’s positivist vision of A Brief History of the Future (2009 [2006]) has to be created after a rift with the past. In reality the research evidence suggests that historical factors and practices exercise a deterministic influence over contemporary political communication. In this issue Juha Herkman analyses political elections in Finland showing that ‘political communication takes place by increasing the number of media channels and communication technologies, which are inherently linked to each other, but which also have histories and traditions of their own’ (p. 369). These should be analysed in terms of intermediality rather then convergence as Herkman concludes ‘authoritative political performances of both politicians and journalists do not encourage the participatory practices of convergence culture (p. 369).’ If you read this in parallel with Itai Himelboim and Steve McCreery’s examination of news websites from a professional perspective in this issue, you will see how embedded professional practices determine which of the affordances of online communication technologies are exploited.
In 2009 Jacques Attali controversially expressed the view that videogames may well become the future of cinema itself. It was a significant statement, as Hugh Dauncey explains in his article, because the role of videogames in France’s cultural presence in the world has been hotly debated since the millennium. Raising them to the level of film gives them an aesthetic status uncommon in commercial art. This theme recurs in Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, Theo Van Leeuwen’s book Voice: Vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media reviewed in this issue by Evi Karathanasopoulou. This eclectic compilation has chapters by Mark Ward on voice, videogames and technologies of immersion and Axel Stockberger explores the role of the voice in contemporary videogames.
Our feature report returns to the personal. Lijun Tang analyses the correspondence of Chinese seafarers and their partners observing how traditional gendered roles persisted in the online forum. What was different, Tang observes, is how gender issues served to influence women’s informal learning process online. Some seafarer partners had visited the ship, others searched the internet for an understanding of their loved-one’s life on board. The narratives they articulated were of a life managed by technology, industrial routines in which the seafarer worked to the dictates of the machinery, while the ethics of this were unchallenged. In contrast Joanna Zylinska asks us to reconsider the moral relationship between the human, technology and animals. Her collection of opinion pieces, Bioethics in the Age of New Media, is reviewed in this issue by P Donal O’Mathúna and covers the role of narcissism in blogging, the biopolitics of reality makeover shows, the ethical implications of labelling DNA the building blocks of life and ‘bioart’. Always thought provoking, Zylinska observes that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have sought an increasing degree of life management of their citizenry – from stopping-smoking agendas to one-child policies.
We may conclude that while we can connect as individuals to more people more directly than we have ever been able to do so before, this does not mean that communication is consequently more liberated. Near-ubiquitous connectivity is seductive. It is convenient and in the case of young adults apparently empowering. However professional practices, whether they are from journalism or politics, are rooted in the desire to shape communication in order to convey a particular message – and, of course, to be heard.