New Methodologies for Popular Communication Research into Convergence

Singapore.
The next presenters at this ICA 2010 pre-conference are Lothar Mikos and Ilona Ammann, who begin by highlighting the idea of convergence (a dangerous word, according to Roger Silverstone in the mid-90s). Convergence means the flow of content across multiple media platforms, connected to the cooperation between multiple media industries and the movement of users across platforms - so it exists on various levels: on the level of texts and the media (in transmedia storytelling, hybrid forms, and global and national brands) and on the level of audiences (in transcultural audiences, audience engagement, and audiences as producers.

At the macro-level, there is social and cultural change, at the meso-level there's fragmentation, while at the micro-level there is individualisation, Lothar suggests. How do we capture texts and audiences? How do we define texts, audiences, media? Text is a complex of interrelated meanings which is interpreted by its readers; do analyse such texts across different media outlets gives us a more accurate picture of the text available to media users. Audiences themselves, too, are defined by the common social and cultural practices of individuals, but no longer by producers in connection to the type of media and text - individuals now construct audiences, not the production or distribution industries.

So how do we deal with this from a methodological perspective? Digitisation and archiving are one challenge here: we can engage in long-term archiving, but there are technological problems as well as legal and practical ones; what are the boundaries of the archive, how is content selected for archiving, how accurate for the original form is the archive, how is content sampled? Private collecting and saving is also problematic - when and how should data be collected, and how can embedded links and photos be captured as well? Specific media forms raise additional problems - from DVD extras to different regional versions of content, to the multiplicity of video excerpts on YouTube.

Overall, then, the database is endless and in(de)finite, stretches across multiple media platforms, and texts and audiences are volatile. Methodological approaches need to be clearly defined and documented. We will need to combine multiple perspectives, theories, and methods as well as work across the divide of audience and textual methods. If not a danger, convergence is a challenge.

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