In this special issue of the journal, linked to the first-ever
Association of Internet Researchers conference to be held
in Australia (IRv7.0 – Internet Convergences), we
present four papers. They explore, from different perspectives,
the ways in which convergence may be understood as a lived
experience for users of digital media technologies.
In Situating Machinima in the
New Mediascape,
Berkeley examines a new form of digital movie-making.
Machinima exists at the intersection of traditional film
practice, computer gaming and the Internet. It is clearly
a convergence of two very distinct audio-visual story
experiences (film and game) that exists because of the
addition of a third, distinct element - an alternative
network for the distribution and consumption of this new
media form.
While machinima is a classic ‘unexpected’ outcome
of the interaction of old and new media forms, Kibby’s
Radio That Listens to Me: Y!Music Web Radio considers
a more traditionally recognisable form of convergence – the
utilisation of the Internet to produce a ‘radio’ experience.
Crucially, Kibby argues, user actions in this domain directly
influence the contours of the musical terrain – an
influence that can take them in unexpected directions.
The effort required to shape that terrain, as much as
the technology itself, makes Y!Music interactive.
Bechmann Petersen’s Internet
and Cross Media Productions interrogates convergence from the important perspective
of the media professionals whose jobs, increasingly, involve
the production of content for mixed and interacting media,
both old and new. She finds that, in her two case study
organisations, the path to convergence is not a smooth
one: by and large, the embedded cultural and organisational
routines of traditional print and broadcast media dominate
attempts to forge cross-media production.
The article Re-Conceptualizing
the Mobile Phone concentrates on that most important locus for debate
about convergence – mobile
telephony. As Souza e Silva shows, ‘telephony’ is
hardly the right term now to describe these devices and
their services. She considers a critical aspect of the
consequences of convergence –media technologies
can serve as interfaces which, in quite new ways, mediate
the interactions of people with each other through their
environment.
These articles collectively demonstrate
how the notion of convergence is best understood in diverging
ways, covering the wide variety of convergent media experiences
now at play in our lives. Convergence is neither a technological
certainty, nor a compelling business case. It is, instead,
a contingent socio-technological construct. As these articles
show, convergence may be best understood as ‘convergences’ -
a series of new intersections that occur as various different
routes of media development meet one another, for a time,
and then diverge again. Convergence is not a teleological
endpoint but a state of play.
For the authors in this issue, the common
theme which binds them together is a concern for the relationship
between those who produce and consume mediated reality
and the differing values and understandings producers
and consumers have about networked media. In the end,
convergence would appear to describe the development
of, and capacity to occupy, individual and collective
positions that are hybrids of those traditional producer
/ consumer norms.
