From emergence to convergence: New critical perspectives,innovative methods and novel approaches to the study of the digital subject

The pioneering past and the future vision for Convergence

As incoming editors of Convergence (from January 2018), we are taking the opportunity of this very special issue – the 100th edition – to formally relaunch the journal, its mission statement, its focus and our revised editorial board. We would like both to reflect back on the achievements of our editorial predecessors over their past 22-year period of leadership and to look forwards to the future direction of the journal under our steerage.

Now in its 25th volume, and its 100th issue, Convergence was initially launched by Julia Knight and Alexis Weedon in 1995 and published then by the University of Luton Press. Sage took over the publication of the journal in 2005. At the time, Convergence was one of the first interdisciplinary journals of its kind, standing out from the shelves that it shared with titles such as Media, Culture & Society; Communication Research; and the European Journal of Communication.

Knight and Weedon originally set up Convergence to address the creative, social, political and pedagogical issues that were being raised by the advent of what were then ‘emergent’ new media technologies. In doing so, they provided a platform for the development and promotion of new enquiry and scholarship in this area and laid the ground for an entirely new field of research. The originary object of study was the very notion of convergence itself, and what was interrogated was the ontological specificity of that site of convergence. The foci of early articles in the first two issues included hypertext, artificial intelligence, telematic culture, CD Roms, interactive television, Virtual Reality (VR), electronic news and multimedia in museums. These were the novel and emergent sites of convergence – each of them bringing together techniques, technologies and expertise from distinct and separate disciplines.

As Knight and Weedon stated in their editorial text from the inaugural issue of the journal:

…we are in a transitional process – one where it is not always clear what the new media products will be – and it is crucial that existing approaches to the study of the media are developed, expanded and revised in order to address this process. (Knight and Weedon, 1995: 5)

Over the years since the journal’s launch, we have seen the intense and ubiquitous integration and absorption of these early technologies into almost every aspect of our everyday cultural, social, creative and political lives. The research that was at the heart of the journal has expanded such that there is now a proliferation of journals and platforms exploring new media technologies from all aspects – technology, social implications, infrastructural changes and developments and so on. This diffusion of new journal titles illustrates the spawning of sub-disciplines that focus on the forms and the practices that have emerged from what we will now refer to as ‘convergence studies’ including New Media & Society (1999–), Television & New Media (2000–), Global Media & Communication (2005–), Games and Culture (2006–), Electronic News (2007–), Mobile Media & Communication (2013–), Big Data & Society (2014–) and Social Media + Society (2015–).

In light of this proliferation of titles and topics, we believe the time is right for Convergence to revisit its early purpose and ambition and to refocus the editorial intervention around the specific contemporary sites of convergence. As incoming editors we have started by returning to this original aim as stated by Knight and Weedon:

…to monitor the conditions of emergence of the new media technologies and their subsequent mass production, circulation, reception and consumption by providing a forum for intellectual debate and for the publication of quality research in this important and growing field. (Knight and Weedon, 1995: 8)

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Professor Erkki Huhtamo – Convergence editorial board member, speaking at the Convergence journal editorial inauguration, King’s College London, 19 April 2019. Image: Richard Eaton.

Since stepping into the role as co-editors in January 2018, we have revised and refreshed the editorial board, as well as appointing a new book reviews editor, taking the opportunity of the journals relaunch to reinstate the book reviews section. We initiated a search for an early career researcher to lead and shape this – as both an important platform for new and emerging scholars and a place to track, review and highlight significant new scholarship in the field of Convergence studies. We are delighted to have appointed Ysabel Gerrard and that we are able to include the first three book reviews under her leadership in this special issue.

It is an appropriate moment to note our thanks and gratitude to our editorial board, past and present, who have actively contributed to the life and direction of the journal through their commitment to the advancement of rich and innovative scholarship. We would also like to thank our peer reviewers all over the world – without whom, we wouldn’t be able to support and progress the many submissions that we receive. This reviewer community, their diligent and generous commentary, also enables us to support a diverse range of scholarship, while maintaining a very high threshold of quality. We are also deeply indebted to all those authors who share our vision and mission and see Convergence as the appropriate home for their work.

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The Convergence journal editorial inauguration, King's College London, 19 April 2019, from left to right: Simone Natale, Crystal Abidin, Pat Brereton, Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Indrek Ibrus, Sarah Atkinson, Erkki Huhtamo, Helen W. Kennedy, James Skelding-Tattle (Sage), Alexis Weedon, Trine Syversen, Julia Knight, Hannah Settle (Sage), Ysabel Gerrard. Image: Richard Eaton.

We are really pleased to have commissioned a number of special issues since our appointment, which collectively set the tone and the agenda of the journal going forwards. These include ‘Rethinking the distinction between old and new media’, guest edited by Frederik Lesage and Simone Natale, to be published in August 2019; the theme of the February 2020 issue is ‘Gamifying News: Playful approaches to public engagement’ edited by Raul Ferrer-Conill, Maxwell Foxman, Janet Jones, Tanja Sihvonen and Marko Siitonen; in April 2020, the special issue will be ‘Digital Culture Meets Data: Critical Perspectives’ edited by Aristea Fotopoulou and Helen Thornham; and in August 2020, Christian Pentzold, Anne Kaun and Christine Lohmeier will guest edit the special issue: ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’.

We truly value the contribution that thematized special issues provide to shaping debate and stimulating scholarship that responds to emergent research priorities, and we would be very pleased to receive more proposals.

Introduction to special issue articles

In the context of the ubiquity and the interpenetration of once emergent technologies, our first themed issue as the journal’s editors is entitled ‘From Emergence to Convergence’. In this issue, we set out to refocus our attention on the contemporary very specific sites of ‘convergence’ – those practices, places and processes where technologies, cultures and aesthetics merge and coalesce in the creation of new subjects, new experiences, new artefacts and new knowledge. This issue includes work that brings together a corresponding convergence of methods and approaches in the illumination of new phenomena, their impacts, their effects and their affects.

Particularly focused on methodological innovations and specifically interdisciplinary or convergent methodological approaches, our call for papers heralded a deluge of submissions covering areas such as artificial intelligence, internet research, electronic journalism, algorithms and VR – a range of topics not too dissimilar to those explored in the inaugural volume of the journal in 1995.

The study of technological phenomena and its impact upon subjects, economies, cultures and aesthetics has stimulated new methodologies that combine and respond to established empirical methods, digital tools, social media analysis, digital humanities methods and collaborative working with cultural partners, industries and external agencies. There is a significant amount of work where it is the methodological design itself that provides new insights, and it is this work that this issue showcases and celebrates.

Our special issue opens with Helen Thornham’s ‘Algorithmic vulnerabilities and the datalogical anthropocene: Early motherhood and the tracking-as-care regimes’. This article opens up for scrutiny the new subjectivities produced through the now established tools and technologies that create and sustain what researchers are describing as the quantified self. In this instance, we see a careful and intimate qualitative engagement with the specific embodied experience of being rendered as ‘data’ via breastfeeding and other maternal monitoring apps. Thornham situates her analysis of these ‘apps’ as part of a very long history of medical and technological processes that work to efface the maternal body and engages directly with the influential work of Deborah Lupton and the recent work by Aristea Fotopoulou in getting to the heart of the ‘biopolitics’ at play in these processes of self-monitoring and regulation. This article brings fully up to date the feminist analysis of the role that technologies – particularly medical technologies – play in rendering invisible the complexity and messy materiality of the maternal body. Thornham illuminates how the apps at the heart of this analysis put the mothers in a complex relationship with their bodies, their experience and their identity as a ‘mother’ and importantly a ‘good’ or ‘good enough’ mother. This article underscores the need to engage with data as a material process of representation and subjectification that take on legal, medical and political authority often at the expense of the body or the process they allege to capture. In this illuminating example, digital methods of data collection are both the means of the study and the object of study.

In ‘Doing’ Media Studies, authors Martyn Thayne and Andrew West provide a model for considering the new spaces and practices of media production as well as the novel experiences, artefacts and objects that challenge the established ontologies of what counts as ‘media’. They argue for new ways of thinking about media studies as praxis to shape a new pedagogy that acknowledges the emergence of new phenomena and the need this generates for new tools and techniques for analysis and practice. The framework they propose calls for transdisciplinary modes of practice research and ‘critical making’, whereby students, artists, creative technologists and academics work collaboratively to address the affective and subjective conditions of contemporary digital culture. The authors propose a consideration of the Media Lab as a space for the performance of rich transdisciplinary practice research where knowledge is produced, contextualized and understood through the embodied experiences of the lab participants. The authors demonstrate the value of this approach and how it has evolved through two case studies through which emerge 10 distinct principles through which to instantiate the media lab. This article seeks to stimulate further engagement, application, critique and elaboration and as such is an important step in a reconfiguration of an integrated approach to the study of media practice and theory, one that is attentive to the evolution of the digital subject and its new processes, practices and aesthetics.

In ‘Experiencing convergence: Examining digital innovation in journalism through action research’, Andrea Wagemans and Tamara Witschge foreground methodological insights drawn from a project funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 innovation programme. The ‘Inject Project’ centred on the development of an online tool to support creativity in journalistic practice. The project developed an easy to use search tool that links to articles, people, creative content relevant to a particular topic and also provides access to explore concepts, visuals and data as appropriate. The project is the central case study of the article and provided the platform through which to research the process of collaboration and innovation through which the tool was developed, tested and launched. The article proposes an adaptation of an action research methodology as the core means through which to support the reflexive framework they establish for the project. A critical ‘object’ being scrutinized in this article is the process of innovation through which the ‘tool’ was developed, specifically the authors elaborate a nuanced account of what they describe as the ‘four features of innovation in the current “digital” media landscape’ and the specific methodological challenges posed by these features. Significantly, what these authors provide is a detailed account of the shifts, reflections, adaptations and adoptions required as they engaged with these different aspects of innovation, carefully teasing out the complexity and demonstrating the effectiveness of the action research approach. The authors also capture the dynamic nature of a research consortia at this scale and the extent to which this was itself a shifting and morphing entity that shaped the enquiry.

Craig Hamilton’s ‘Popular music, digital technologies, and data analysis: new methods and questions’ provides fascinating insights into his innovative ‘Harkive’ project, an online platform which enables participants to upload stories about their musical engagement – what they are listening to, how and where they are listening – on one single day in July every year. Launched in 2013, Hamilton has gathered over 10,000 stories and maps the ways and transformations of how music fans listen and engage with music. The article pays particular attention to how and when respondents are adopting and embedding music streaming services and recommender services into their listening habits. The project provides a very vivid account of the process of change in these habits, the adoption of these new technologies and their domestication. As well as mapping these transformative processes, the project provides a novel, simple and remarkably effective framework of generating, refreshing and analysing primary research data that have the potential to be replicated in other disciplinary domains. Drawing from the rich data provided by the participants, Hamilton reveals how long-established habits of music consumption are being translated onto the new streaming services. What is also significant is that despite the clear intention that these platforms have in shaping and forming taste, introducing new talent and promoting particular content; his respondents reveal how they draw on traditional media outlet recommendations, peer networks and nostalgic journeys through their own life histories in their navigation and ‘discovery’ processes. These well-established habits and affective engagements appear to resist and persist across the processes of digital transformation. The article provides an illuminating site to examine the tensions and contradictions between the marketplace, technologies and cultural practices of music.

In ‘Computer generated pornography and convergence’, Rebecca Saunders examines this convergent form that combines video game content, anime and cartoons with hard core pornography – through three lenses. Firstly, she examines these techno-cultural synthesized and highly convergent forms in terms of the specific post human aesthetic that is so commonly adopted and the extent to which it deviates from the common norms of pornography that tends to attempt to efface the apparatus of filmmaking and postproduction in pursuit of realism. In distinction, these UCGP forms offer a ‘different real, one based not on the materiality of bodies but on the foregrounded materiality of the digital medium itself’. Secondly, Saunders also demonstrates how the audience of these texts respond to, critique and evaluate these texts, the declarations of arousal and pleasures that circulate in response to these forms that are as likely to feature post-human alien/animal hybrids as they are to include more humanoid forms. Thirdly, Saunders also considers how the producers and creators of these new texts describe the labour of their processes of creation, including graphic, detailed enunciations of the minutiae of production. The article examines in detail the extent to which the parodic crudeness of the form opens up a space for a critique of the norms and aesthetics of pornography while paying attention to where and how these playful convergent practices themselves also replicate and reinforce the dominant hegemonic pornographic conventions and power dynamics.

In the final article in our special issue, ‘ASMR’ Autobiographies and the (Life-)Writing of Digital Subjectivity, Rob Gallagher considers another novel form – ASMR videos – from multiple perspectives, analysing the autobiographical writings produced by practitioners and by consumers. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response which is an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. The phenomena began to circulate in the late noughties amidst a great deal of definitional debate before the naming of ASMR stabilized in 2013/2014. The quality or experience of ASMR is stimulated/produced through specific visual and aural cues and is far from universal, but an entire subculture of ASMR video production has emerged which has led to swift evolution of this phenomenon, supported by critical discussion and scientific research. This has led to the development of the ASMR University which aggregates academic and scientific research but also provides a platform for ‘asmrtists’ work and user/viewer responses. Gallagher adapts the methodologies for the analysis of life writing to examine the blogs, audio essays, podcasts and videos produced by ASMR consumers to identify and analyse the wider implications of this phenomenon and how it makes visible digital subjectivity, the emergence of algorithmic subjectivities alongside the rise in neurocentric or neurobiological conceptions of personhood. These phenomena are contextualized within ‘a broader tendency to view bodies, brains and digital technologies (and indeed more or less everything else) as nodes in cybernetic networks through which energy and information flow’. It would be our hope that the publication of this article would stimulate further work that examines the new phenomena through which a post-digital subjectivity is being made, remade and defined.

Indeed, we see all six of these articles making a significant contribution to convergence studies methodologies, in the deepening and nuancing of our understandings of new critical perspectives, innovative methods and novel approaches to the study of the digital subject. What we can see emerging is the efficacy of a three-dimensional approach to these complex phenomena – an approach that takes in the digital object; the new digital creatives; and the increasingly affectively driven and datafied engagements that emerge. We cannot think of a more befitting way to inaugurate our editorship than through the advancement of this endeavour. Here’s to the next 100 issues!