London.


The post-lunch session at Transforming Audiences starts with a presentation by Mia Lövheim, whose study examines young (18-30 years) female A-List bloggers in Sweden. The interest here is not in link-blogging activities, but in the content created by the bloggers themselves, and the way they create identity and maintain personal relationships through these blogs; bloggers and readers in a way are co-creating the bloggers' identities here. How does this take place for A-List bloggers, though, whose popularity means that their posts are read by the established community of regular readers as well as by a much larger, more casual audience?

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Richard Mills, whose interest is in the presence of the Beatles on YouTube. The Beatles' image was carefully guided and constructed by their manager Brian Epstein, of course, and the nascent music press of the early to mid-1960 bought strongly into that, creating Beatlemania and connecting it to the wider Swinging Sixties rhetoric. The Beatles themselves eventually reacted against this commercialisation and commodification, and gradually changed their image to embrace countercultural ideas. The evolution of Beatles iconography on their record covers over time also points powerfully to this shift, of course - from the identical suits and haircuts of the first albums to the blankness of The White Album.

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Sebastien Francois, whose interest is in the fan videos deliberately combining material from various movies and television shows which are posted to spaces like YouTube; Sebastien describes this as 'homemade crossover'. Such videos are created only by a relatively small number of fans, of course, but may provide useful insights into active audiences.

Sebastien has studied such videos on YouTube using the ContextMiner analysis tool to examine the titles, descriptions, and other identifying characteristics of such videos. Such videos are often relatively short, with creators coming from a wide variety of countries; they exist at the intersection of vidding (adding popular music to edits of TV shows) and trailer mash-ups (parodies adding the soundtrack of movie trailers to collages of other movie or television material). Homemade crossover videos as Sebastien defines them do not necessarily use popular music, and are not necessarily parodic in intent - but instead often touch on the narratives within the original material.

London.

My paper at Transforming Audiences starts off the first of the paper sessions this morning. Here's the Powerpoint, and I'll try to add the audio as soon as possible the audio is online now, too...

Technorati : London.Transforming Audiences 2009, collaboration, produsage, produser, prosumer, user-led

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London.


I've arrived in occasionally sunny London for the Transforming Audiences conference, which kicks off with a keynote by Liz Bird. She notes that conversations about the death of the media audience go back some decades now; the idea of an 'audience' no longer fully captures the reality of media usage and participation, and Web 2.0 and similar phenomena have only provided an even more pointed reminder. There is rhetoric about 'the people formerly known as the audience', but of course these people - audience or not - still matter to us. What is the nature of the dynamic between media and their users, and how may this dynamic be researched further in the current context?