Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

This conversation started in Prague, the Czech Republic, during a panel moderated by Irena Reifová at the symposium ‘On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’. The event was organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. The text contains a series of discussions. First, there is a conversation about the nature of the participatory democratic utopia and participatory culture and how groups take (or do not take) advantage of the affordances of new and emerging media. It also emphasizes the political nature and potential of popular culture and touches upon its connection to institutionalized politics. Three other key areas are mentioned: the role of different cultures of leadership, the significance of organizations in structuring participatory processes, and the need to enhance civic learning, providing more support for participatory cultures. This is combined with an interlocking discussion about the definition of participation and how it is tied up with power. It covers the differences between participation and interaction, engagement, interpretation, production, curation, and circulation. Finally, there is an underlying strand of discussion about the role of academia, focusing on the relationship between critical theory and cultural studies, the need to deconstruct our own frameworks and the question of which language to use to communicate academic research to the public.

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.

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 construct texts for consumption and recirculation.

Following the discussion of silences and absences in user participation, this short paper aims to analyze the limits of participation in defining and evaluating quality of user-generated content. It focuses on user reviews of the fan-made Czech subtitles for the HBO series Game of Thrones on the fan subtitling website titulky.com. It works from the discovery that many users tend not to `review' the subtitles by evaluating them, choosing instead to praise their author or remain in `silent gratitude'. Based mainly on qualitative analysis of user reviews, the case study identifies two main reasons for this lack of participation, mainly the dependency of the non-contributing users on the translator (who is called a `saviour') and his authority and merits in the community. His dominance in the discussion is bolstered by the fact that his work was approved by the local fandom of the show's source material. Based on the case study, I argue that while gratitude drives participation in creating content, it may also thwart attempts at critiquing the content.

On November 27, 2011, a flash mob took place in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) train station in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, as a group of mostly young people performed a dance set to a Bollywood song. Soon, videos of the event appeared online sparking lively debates and media coverage. Here, I engage the ‘CST flash mob’ and its use of Bollywood dance to grapple with the democratic potential that lies at the intersection of live performance, popular culture, and new media. Situating the flash mob within Bollywood dance scholarship, I explore the global proliferation and online circulation of Bollywood flash mobs as fandom in performance. I am particularly interested in the implicit political dimensions of these performances and how these play out in local and new media contexts.

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 not absent from digital media, but that communicative functions typically enacted nonverbally are transposed into new spaces of interaction afforded by synchronous and near-synchronous textual media. Digital and social media text is conversational text that fulfills the phatic needs of typical social interaction: ‘keeping in touch’ does not in any way constitute a cultural regression but represents the fundamental ground of human cognition, which is inescapably both social and technologically dependent. An analysis of examples from the popular microblogging service Twitter serves to illustrate the gestural functions of digital media text, including the enactment of mediated social ‘spaces’. The closing section explores the theoretical implications for identity and agency of connecting embodied nonverbal communication to digital media communication that is all too often erroneously understood to be or implicitly approached as ‘disembodied’.

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.

The debates on new communication patterns between journalists and their audiences have been coupled with the concept of interactivity, which has become one of the pillar terms in discussions on the future evolution of journalism. By exploring general understanding of interactivity between news editors and organisational circumstances where interactivity as a set of new communication practices is articulated in journalism, this study shifts the attention from the user perspective to occupational ideology, news production culture and the organisation of news production. The aim of this study is to explore to what extent such realities can be identified to Slovenian online news culture that has gone through many changes in recent years. By adopting two ethnographic methods – news website analysis and in-depth interviews with print and online editors – the article offers a case study of the new websites of three prominent Slovenian print media organisations: Delo, Dnevnik and Žurnal. Productivity, efficiency and profitability have pushed traditional journalistic values in Slovenian online media to the margins. When it comes to interactive modes of audience engagement, editors and journalists control online news production. As a consequence, despite various interactive features provided on news websites, news production culture develops with the aim of retaining control over information delivery rather than of creating a new space of dialogue and interactive communication.