Abstract
Welcome to our final issue of 2022 which presents an exciting global line up of current research along four lines of enquiry – the first is storytelling, experimentation and playfulness in all it’s shades, the second opens up some of the darker issues of our convergent technosphere, the third is concerned with innovation spaces and practices, and the fourth considers isolation and connection with and through artificial intelligence and new assistive technologies. As with all our general issues, the range of topics provides an insight into new and emerging research that aligns most closely with the concerns and objectives of this journal.
In this our fifth year as editors, we have taken the opportunity to refresh our editorial board giving all of our board members the opportunity to either reaffirm their commitment or to step down to enable others the opportunity to contribute and participate in the work of the journal. At the same time, we have sought to increase the diversity and reach of our board to reflect the global, borderless nature of the digital technologies at the heart of the intellectual project of the journal.
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to our outgoing board members who have worked with us over the past 5 years (and some of whom had previously worked with the journals founding editors Julia Knight and Alexis Weedon):
Jay Bolter, Francesca Coppa, Abigail De Kosnik, Seth Giddings, Caroline Guertin, Samantha Krukowsa, Gregory Lowe, Smeeta Mishra, Mette Mortensen, Anna Munster, John Pavlik, Miriam Ross, Marie-Laure Ryan, Carlos Scolari, Will Straw, Trine Syversen and Chuck Tryon.
We are immensely grateful to them for their work and for their incredible support for the journal. We would also like to thank our outgoing book reviews editor: Ysabel Gerrard. After 4 years of service, Dr Gerrard from the University of Sheffield has stepped down from the role to pursue other commitments. We are hugely grateful to her for relaunching the book reviews section of the journal in 2018 and taking it from strength-to-strength.
As well as the support of our editorial board, we have also benefited from the work and support of a highly expansive, expert reviewing community and we thank you all for your incredible support, and for your unpaid but highly valued labour. We have been particularly grateful to all those reviewers who have been able to respond during a period of time shaped by ongoing pressures wrought by the pandemic. These have been a difficult few years that have severely impacted on our timeframes for publication. We are grateful to all our contributors not only for choosing Convergence for their scholarly work but also for their patience with these extended timelines.
With their support, we have been proud to publish and platform ground-breaking critical research into new and emerging media technologies over the past 5 years which has featured special issues on the following:
Haptic Play; From Emergence to Convergence: new critical perspectives, innovative methods and innovate approaches to the digital subject; Rethinking the distinctions between old and new media; Playful approaches to news engagement; Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies; Digital Culture Meets Data: Critical Perspectives; The Digital Face and Deepfakes on Screen; Smart Homes; Digital Disconnection; Digital Placemaking; Data Visualisation and Policy; Politicizing Agency in Digital Play After Humanism; and Conspiracy Theories in Digital Environments. From the call for contributions all the way through to final publication, each of these issues have been significant in setting research agendas and providing the wider community with rich scholarly resources through which to tackle a diverse range of issues and challenges. These special issues also reflect the concerns and preoccupations of our scholarly community and they would not be possible without the incredible work and commitment of our special issue editors – we are very grateful for the significant contribution that they have made to the journal.
Looking forwards
We are now delighted to welcome our new board members who support our intention to continue to achieve greater international diversity in our objects of study and our perspectives. A warm welcome to: Harikrishnan Bhaskaran, Olga Boichak, Andre Brock, Earvin Cabalquinto, Aleena Chia, Patricio Cabello, Rodrigo Gomez Garcia, Jin Lee, Bojana Romic, Ravi Sundaram, Jing Zeng, Brandy Monk-Paton, Hayes Mabweazara and Shepherd Mpofu. We are also welcoming our new book reviews editor: Ngai Keung Chan. We very much look forward to working with them all.
Looking forward to the years ahead, we have commissioned a series of timely Special Issues that capture a shift in priorities and focus of our fields in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coming up in the months ahead are: Digital Pedagogies; Digital Expressions of the Self; Participatory Culture Wars and Politics; Platform Work; Agency in Datafied Societies; Critical Technical Practice(s) in Digital Research; Immersive Storytelling; Digital Inequalities in the Middle East and North Africa and Digital Wellbeing Studies. We look forward to these curated contributions and to all the submissions to come.
There is an ongoing need for critical reflection in the area of technological innovation – particularly in a period when this has accelerated due to the urgent needs presented by the pandemic. These past 2 years have seen an outpouring of technomanic, techno-euphoric rhetoric that needs our constant vigilance and our attentiveness to all that is excluded and marginalized through this dominant voice and its alignments with the needs and priorities of the global flow of capital. As journal editors, we are taking this opportunity to reaffirm our vision for the journal and its global outreach and its inclusive publishing agenda, and we are very interested in proposals for special issues that tackle the urgent challenges we face in this period of the acceleration of technological innovation, the forces of capitalism, the rise in extremism and the climate catastrophe faced by our planet.