The next session I'm attending at ICA 2010 starts with Jieyoung Kong, whose focus is on US megachurches online - how are these 'faith brands' building online brand communities? Megachurches are a trend of the last decade, well beyond the US; they are defined as protestant religious organisations with more than 2000 members each which conduct weekly services and engage in significant strategic communication activities. The marketing of megachurches involves storytelling that constructs and maintains the brand.
The final speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Marc Verboord, who shifts our focus to the book market. Traditionally, book reviews in the conventional media had paramount authority; today, there are a number of alternative, peer-produced sources online - customer ratings and recommendations on Amazon, for example, as well as recommendations through social networking sites. So, is this part of a decline of cultural authorities? Does it democratise the market, from the grassroots up? Does it lead to (or result from) a larger, long-tail market for a wider range of books?
The next presenter at ICA 2010 is Aymar Christian, who continues our focus on YouTube: his interest is on music videos on the site, and he argues that music video remakes shared on YouTube are almost always fair use. User-generated music videos (riffing on official videos) are amongst the most popular genres on YouTube, following in a long tradition (also incorporating professional work, such as the Weird Al videos); music videos and their remakes stand in a postmodernist tradition that may critique representation and reject standard Hollywood narrative (not least also characterised by the emergenceof MTV.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
