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Singapore.


The next presenter at ICA 2010 is Limor Shifman, who shifts our focus to YouTube and notes the rapid increase in the number of videos shared on the site (some 2000 more by the time this presentation is finished). There's a massive amount of people spending a massive amount of time on creating such videos - many of whom draw on existing videos by imitating and replicating them. YouTube videos which are taken up in this way are memes.

Memes are understood as similar to genes, reproduced by copying and imitation and undergoing subtle mutations in the process. The Net has further multiplied and accelerated memes; it is a paradise for memes (and for people who research them). Some such memes spread with no significant variation (Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent performance is one such example), while some serve as the basis for extensive user-generated parody and derivation.

Singapore.


For the second round of ICA 2010 papers this morning, I'm in a popular communication session, and Matt Stahl is the first presenter. He notes the ongoing turbulence in the recording industry, dating back to the late 1970s which led it to embrace a blockbuster model for which Thriller is the best example; there was an intensification of rigidity in labour relations as a result (with a focus on high-earning artists in both industry employment and product marketing), but also a flexibility in the exploration of new business models to support this and identify new artists.

Singapore.


The final speaker on this panel at ICA 2010 is James Hay, who questions the assumption that the move from broadcast to networked media results in a greater potential for grassroots activism and alternative media practice. Grassroots activism is now also often seen as astroturfing - a kind of genetically modified grassroots - and we have seen a resurgence of populism as well.

Such tendencies are predicated often on new media practices, and there is a legacy of the popular in cultural studies which is now being trumped by a focus on grassroots; the media economy, too, is increasingly organised around the management of populations (not least also aiming to know more about the life of population). New forms of populism from the US Tea Party movement on the right to its counterparts on the left still need to be explored more energetically by the people who research user-generated content.

Singapore.


Mel is followed at ICA 2010 by Jack Bratich, who highlights the importance of convergence outside of media convergence, and also introduces the idea of divergence as the opposite of convergence - what are the conditions for social antagonism as a form of divergence, and how is such antagonism dissuaded and diverted? Reality TV, for example, is a set of dividing and organising practices that might produce a new kind of antagonism around the programme as a kind of subject.

Second, as media are now incorporated into more conventional practices (warfare and the military is one example), what are the conditions of dissent? Jack introduces the idea of polemology as the study of warfare (which gave us de Certeau's work on strategies and tactics, for example), and suggests that Jenkins now argues that fans have already won the war, so there is no longer a clear antagonism between fans and producers; Jack suggests, by interest, further research into the phenomenon of user-generated discontent.

Singapore.


From this opening presentation in this convergence culture session at ICA 2010, we move on to a number of shorter presentations. The next speaker is Mel Gregg, who also problematises Jenkins's work - in this case, from a gender studies perspective (which she says is less present in Convergence Culture than in Jenkins's earlier work, e.g. Textual Poachers). Indeed, taking a historical perspective, Mel says that the boom in cultural studies publishing ended up marginalising gender studies scholarship, and the same might be happening again with the recent increase in works on convergence. This is a problem not least also in teaching, if students are now unable to find alternative voices.

Singapore.


The first full day of ICA 2010 starts with a session on convergence and culture, and a rather lengthy introduction, citing especially Henry Jenkins's work on convergence culture - however, historical perspectives on convergence, the geospatial distribution of convergence, the human and technological networks of convergence, the role of convergence beyond the media industries, the role of convergence in the creative industries, and the political implications of convergence all need to be considered further.

Singapore.


We're now in the opening plenary session here at ICA 2010 - with a relatively low turnout, though; perhaps people haven't realised it's on today, after all the pre-conferences? Overall, some 1,700 delegates have registered for the conference, we're told... Anyway, the speaker tonight is Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, who begins by noting the challenge of communication - it is the central concept (the organon) of our historical period; it explains everything, and everything turns into communication. Therefore, seeing communication from the outside, studying it, is a particular challenge; all we can say about the world is already communication.

Singapore.


The next speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Debashis Aikat, whose interest is in how popular communication is transformed in the digital age, with a specific view towards India. India and a number of other countries, like China, continue to be areas of significant growth in Internet access, while there is saturation uptake in the US and a number of European countries already.

Aligned with this is the explosion in Web 2.0 sites and platforms, some of which last only a very short time, while others develop into major market leaders. In light of this, how are emerging technologies reshaping concepts and theories of communication and technology? How does this communication revolution play out? How does it affect us? Debashis runs through a number of ways to conceptualise this - categorising the range of Web 2.0 activities, and outlining the changing value chains from mass media to mass social media.

Singapore.


The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Singapore.


Our CCI roundtable on methodological challenges and cultural science was next in this pre-conference at ICA 2010, but we were presenting from my laptop so I couldn't blog it... Skipping to the first of the post-lunch sessions instead, we're starting Knut Arne Futsaeter, whose focus is on the growth of Facebook in Norway as a process of diffusion. Norway is a world leader in Internet access (at some 92% of the population), and Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites (with a market penetration of 50%).