Singapore.
The next speaker at this ICA 2010 preconference is Ranjana Das, who also notes the changing nature of audiencing and the move towards user-led content creation. Audiences and users, she says, can now be placed in a continuum of sorts, and to grasp this requires methodological advances. There are a number of shared interests in audience and in user studies, and both move beyond a mere individualistic focus on motivations and take a strongly interdisciplinary approach.
There is an increasing conceptual challenge here, however: the visual is becoming more important; it does not simply replace the verbal; hypertextual formats offer new modes of engagement; and so a new communicative order us upon us. In the process, reception, interpretation, text and genre are becoming more and more difficult to define. Divergence and diversity in interpreting texts is highly important, too.
So, how do we research private practices of use? How do we research emphemeral texts? What new, large-scale, visual methods may be possible? Ranjana suggests five transmedia concepts which may be helpful here, organised around readers and texts, users and technologies: genre (the anticipated form, the conventions of form), interpretation (active, critical, and divergent acts of reading), literacies (often all too quickly reduced from the critical to the instrumental), resistance (the ability to reject, with a focus on contexts), and the interpretative contract (a relationship of mutuality, multiplied by the increasing layers of readership).
