Abstract
In the United Kingdom there is a debate about how media studies should be taught to 16 to 18 year olds. Should they be studying the artefacts as literature students do with canonical readings of Austen and Shakespeare or the institutions and hegemonic structures of the means of production? If they are to study artefacts then what artefacts should these be? BBC news and the much exported period drama Downton Abbey or popular television franchises which have worldwide take-up such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (ITV 1998-)
The problem with this debate is that it misunderstands the ontological basis of media studies. Media studies have claimed the realms of television, newspapers, cinema, radio and audiovisual texts, their forms, the industries that produce them and the means of distribution and consumption as its object of study. New media researchers have added identity, interactivity, geolocation, engagement, affectivity, sharing, creativity and fan crowd and other forms of online and real life community building through new communications technologies. Ontologically we accept as a basis of our field that as humans we construct and visualize stories – both from fact and fiction – to make sense of the world around us and that by analysing and deconstructing these narratives as researchers we review, challenge or change erroneous or simply dominant knowledge paradigms.
Contrary to this basis of media studies, in this debate we are being asked to give dominance to the best of the type. For students and early career researchers this is confusing and we swiftly fall into a definitional méle: is this the form of the period drama or the industry format of the game show or the professional procedures that provenance and verify news stories we are required to study? Educationalists may refer to the canon of English literature, yet new media critics will cite the fans’ definition of the canon as the storyworld or the storyworld’s ‘bible’ or past set characters, storylines and rules. Just consider for a moment the array of attempts to define and revise the definition of transmedia storytelling. Researchers have found it easier to state the platforms and channels for transmedia stories – the book, periodical, game, television, Web, cinema, mobile app., radio and event – than to say comprehensively and decisively what it is. Like much of new media, transmedia storytelling is participatory, often soliciting creative contributions, it is user-led and engenders community. Nevertheless transmedia storytelling can involve the traditional analogue channels excluded by new media. Its storyworld is multifaceted with each platform having a linked story. The extent these are integrated depends on the narrative, in some cases, the narratives are synergistic, in others complete stories in their own right. In this new media form, there is no ‘type’ only examples of an emerging form.
Transmedia storytelling and other forms of mobile audio-visual media require users to have the ability to understand meaning across multiple visual and aural literacies. In its Media and Information Literacy Curriculum Strategy and Policy UNESCO calls for a literacy development strategy that: … harmonises and encapsulates the large number of related existing literacies that can be identified in the digital age, such as news literacy, television literacy, film literacy, computer literacy, Internet literacy and digital literacy, as well as other emerging concepts like social media literacy. (UNESCO, 2013: 13)
In today’s society it is increasingly difficult to function ‘as citizens, as producers, as private householders’ without some level of digital literacy and researching and teaching the various digital literacies requires the ability to adapt, be versatile and redefine terms and concepts with the changing pace of new communications technologies (UNESCO, 2006: 154).
Predictions of the future over-simplify as we cannot model the complexity of economic, social (or climate) systems beyond a few days or hours, and yet of course we must plan for development both of our students entering the workplace in four or seven years time, or to inform policy to shape the determinants of this future. The winds of the economic climate which envisioned media convergence in the 1990s incorporated trends in conglomeration and television’s dominance of the domestic space which did not last. Specialism and portfolio management proved better for market leadership, and technological development gave rise to the proliferation of flatscreens, which distributed viewing within the household. Since 2010, tablets have made television and film viewing as personal as listening to music on a 1980s walkman or reading a novel. These have become the prevailing winds of change and nuanced analysis is provided in this issue by Kennedy, Nansen et al. who examine the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home.
The key themes that emerge from this issue are indicative of this need to continually observe and revisit media theories. From the revision of Marxist media analysis by Rafael Alarcón Medina who observes that there is a reconfiguration of class in postwar El Salvador following a wider process of subordinated digitization in the Latin American Third World to Frith and Ahern’s reconsideration of the personalization of musical playback to the potential in synced mobile devices for a public arena.
Rethinking media studies is perhaps an inevitable effect of the digital switchover of television and the radical change in the media marketplace that has followed in the wake of the new communication technologies of the naughties. Those who have grown up with digital convergence have coming of age rituals in social media. They respond to online opinion leaders and participate in mediated distributed communities as ‘digital natives’. Nico Meißner delves into one aspect of this in ‘Opinion leaders as intermediaries: Audiences building for independent films in the Internet age’ in this issue, as he explores how independent filmmakers nurture personal audiences and can partially replace opinion leaders by shaping and leading opinion themselves. This is clearly an essential component for entrepreneurial early career film-makers. Getting on further in the industry requires proof of expertise as Bjarke Liboriussen shows in his exploration of intergenerational difference in signalling the creativity essential for attracting work projects and for professional identity formation among Chinese animators, architects and designers. Yet the essentials of creating trust within communication that builds a sense of community can fail even within the small and specialist networks of IT, Jonny Holmström argues, despite the abundance of such networks in cyberspace.
In this editorial, we have focused on the storytelling role of new media characterized in forms such as transmedia storytelling and genres such as fan fiction. However, one of its most salient characteristics is the way new media has restructured research and the communication of information affecting the global flow of knowledge. This in turn has changed social interaction and ultimately global economics. Such large claims can be evidenced through the research published in Convergence over the 21 years of its publication and in the specific case studies presented here: in the creative industries in China, the commercial messages through cell phones in El Salvador as well as in the community of the digital home, the online expert network or in the production of collaborative public soundscapes. Convergence will continue to publish research on the social and cultural implications of new media technologies as it did first in two, then four and now from 2016 six issues a year.