Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young:

This book is about how networked digital media are being used to bring together people and ideas, images and texts, industries and technologies in new ways — media convergence. The book explores the development of the Internet, the rise of social media, the global expansion and consolidation of the major media corporations, and the new opportunities for audiences to create, remix, collaborate upon and share their own media. The book focuses on how everyday media — such as Facebook, iTunes, Google and the BBC iPlayer — can be understood in new ways for the twenty-first century through ideas of convergence. Continue reading

Intact Workshop — Teleshared Actions. Connection and Cognition :: September 23-25, 2011; 10:00 am - 7:00 pm :: Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industria, Gijón, Spain — In collaboration for remote connection: Hangar.org, Barcelona, España.

Teleshared actions are procedures for collaborative creation in real time. The works are produced online between two or more users by means of interactive systems or telepresence. These expanded performative practices generate new spaces, languages and narrative forms. The possibility of the “body-less” message. And all of this founded on a basic concept: transform space into time. The workshop consists of teleshared actions which give an incentive to experimentation and critical reflection in relation to remote communication processes. Continue reading

Posted by Henry Jenkins on Confessions of an Aca-Fan (also see Part 2 and Part 3): “This week, I am sharing an extended conversation with Richard Grusin, co-author of Remediation and author of Premediation:Affect and Mediality After 9/11 about the relationship between our work…

Getting Started

HJ: Richard, you wrote to me a few weeks ago responding to the interview I did with Frank Rose about his new book, The Art of Immersion. That interview tried to clarify the relationship between Rose’s concept of “deep media” and my concept of “transmedia entertainment.” Continue reading

May 13-15, 2011 :: Massachusetts Institute for Technology :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 4, 2011.

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? Continue reading

“I would say for both of us though, unschooling has been more about slowness, about paying attention, immersing ourselves bizarre art projects, volunteering, staring off into space, talking to friends, and reading books, reading books, reading books. We sometimes learned quickly, when motivated or excited to master some skill, but typically we learned at our own pace, which was often slow (sometimes so slow it looked as though we were doing nothing at all) and with lots of detours.”

“I know we’re excited about learning networks and social media and peer this and that. But maybe the most radical thing a teacher can do is tell students to be alone with an idea.” Continue reading

Morgan Currie wrote:

“How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce” - Deleuze and Guattari.

Despite the recent hype around ebooks, the future of publishing remains uncertain. The growth in markets for electronic distribution has resulted in a messy and highly competitive ecology of digital rights management systems, conflicting file formats and devices, and an online book market driven by new players such as Google and Apple. Meanwhile, pirate networks for ‘liberated knowledge’ have opened other avenues for delivering content (whether legal or not), while the open access movement has increasingly consolidated as a legitimate alternative to corporate publishers. These are the realities of media convergence as perpetual crisis, or at least an ongoing entanglement of interests, and a situation full of potential for the future of the book. Continue reading

PSi 16, Performing Publics, will take place in downtown Toronto as part of a collaboration between York University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Ontario College of Art & Design. The conference will investigate the power of performance to intervene in, reshape, and reinvigorate the public sphere at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We invite proposals that take up notions of “public” in a variety of ways, pointing to the critically generative and fraught aspects of term as it has been adopted within performance studies.

The conference will theorize the relationship between performance, “official” public culture (public culture framed and sanctioned by state and/or corporate institutions), and the production of what Michael Warner calls “counter-publics” (social formations developed in opposition to the discourses and interests of the official public sphere). Continue reading

YouParticipate: The Politics of YouTube’s Flagging System by Minke Kampman, Masters of Media, University of Amsterdam:

“My thesis is about a seemingly small detail of YouTube’s interface, the ‘flag’ button … By deconstructing the flagging system in how it relates to YouTube’s overall model of moderation, how it is presented by the company and how it is both experienced and used by the community, I am giving not only an overview of the politics that are at play within the flagging system. But it also forms the beginnings of the next step of the grassroots convergence that is taking place at YouTube, in which I disagree with Jenkins’ distinction between the concept of ‘participation’ and ‘interactivity’. Continue reading

Synthetic Times: Media Art China — Edited by Fan Di’an and Zhang Ga: We live in a world that operates on bits and bytes. Reality has become synthetic, a convergence of the material and the immaterial. The synthetic power of new media art — integrative, interdisciplinary, interactive — expresses the blurred boundary between the physical and the digital. Synthetic Times collects new media art created since 2001 by artists and art collectives from nearly thirty countries. These innovative and groundbreaking works investigate how we perceive reality and what it means to be human on the threshold of human-machine symbiosis.

The artworks in Synthetic Times (which accompanies a milestone exhibition at the National Art Museum in China, an Olympics Cultural Project) explore a trajectory of uncanny visions ranging from the desire to transcend the corporal to the construction of synthetic worlds; from telematic dreaming to transgenic hybrids; from whimsical apparatuses to the deadpan gaze of magnetic fields. Continue reading

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized. Continue reading