convergence

The Convergence between Print and Digital Literature in Blackout Poetry study the phenomenon of the “blackout poetry” both in the digital and the physical world. According to Ralph Heibutzki, on Demand Media, “Blackout Poetry focuses on reordering words to create a different meaning. Also known as the newspaper blackout poetry, in it, the author uses a permanent marker to cross out or delete words or images that he sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he is trying to create. The central idea is to design a new text from the words and images published previously, but finally, the reader is free to interpret as he wants.”

Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways. Henry Jenkins, one of America’s most respected media analysts, delves beneath the new media hype to uncover the important cultural transformations that are taking place as media converge. He takes us into the secret world of Survivor Spoilers, where avid internet users pool their knowledge to unearth the show’s secrets before they are revealed on the air. He introduces us to young Harry Potter fans who are writing their own Hogwarts tales while executives at Warner Brothers struggle for control of their franchise. He shows us how The Matrix has pushed transmedia storytelling to new levels, creating a fictional world where consumers track down bits of the story across multiple media channels.Jenkins argues that struggles over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war. Jenkins provides a riveting introduction to the world where every story gets told and every brand gets sold across multiple media platforms. He explains the cultural shift that is occurring as consumers fight for control across disparate channels, changing the way we do business, elect our leaders, and educate our children. (source: NYU Press)

My presentation will discuss the use of information and social networking software in electronic writing with the aim of identifying and analyzing several important new directions in literary criticism in the digital era. As I argue, one of the most significant pedagogical outcomes of media convergence within the literary arts centres upon criticism’s necessary de-emphasis of traditional genre-based modes of analysis and assessment. While digital works may resemble, perhaps even aesthetically mimic, the various analogue formats upon which they are based, both the qualitative and quantitative distinctions between texts, audio and image-based forms remain conceptual, not actual. Subsequently, the primary interpretative paradigms for all forms of digital cultural production tend to emerge via spatially accrued tensions and patterns between the work and its literal location within an information network. To acquire meaning, to be, in other words, rationally interpretable, digital works depend upon some kind of placement within larger constellations of interrelated, inter-functioning data systems. New methods of literary criticism, it follows, must inevitably derive from careful consideration of such networks and their capacity to influence and authorise how texts appear as works of coherence and argument. To this end, I will exhibit several possible architectural plans for the design and construction of new media resource systems able to employ advanced semantic technologies for the interpretation and/or construction of meaning within texts. My argument will consider the possibility whether such systems are not only useful in the interpretation of digital writing, but necessary. Work and research I have recently completed towards implementing a full media lab for the Digital Humanities program at Capilano College will serve as an example of the type of critical tools and methods upon which the field of literary criticism may increasingly depend. Such systems, I suggest, not only help organise digital writing for the purpose of critical study and analysis, their very structure implies a completely new concept of literary meaning in itself, one in which a text's cultural significance and function remains essentially indeterminate, save for its relationship to different interpretative semantic networks. In this way, contexts of meaning and interpretation, regardless of the field of knowledge must, in themselves, be recast and reconsidered as dynamic, network driven structures rather than static archives of related texts.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

Discussion of how "thought" is visualized in television, computers, and video art.  The importance of the proliferation of new forms of inhuman visuality and artificial intelligence to new electronic art.