Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Emil Bakke, whose interest is especially in the mobile uses of Facebook in a post-convergence environment. What drives convergence, presumably, are the users, not just the techological possibilities, but what are the processes here? Emil notes that people operate in clusters of technology, and this depends also on the context of use.
Technology clusters, especially, really matter: users and non-users operate in a multiple media environment (accessing services through various devices, but not necessarily with great awareness of the features of the various technologies and media features available to them); any single communication technology will have diminished importance because of a user-driven environment; and technological affordances and user preferences intersect in various ways.
Further, through processes of hypercoordination, people who conduct multiple communicative interactions at the same time must constantly negotiate and renegotiate their personal identities to others; the different media profiles we have across different spaces need to be coordinated with as well as distinguished from one another.
Researchers in this field, then, need to combine a range of traditions: interpersonal communication, online media studies, mass communication, and mobile media. There is a need for post-convergent scholarship, too.
