Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique

Many are observing with excitement the emergence of new opportunities for the public to create content - through file sharing, message boards, blogs, wikis, webcams, mobile communication, and diverse forms of peer-to-peer communication. Though more obvious in wealthy countries, parallel shifts are evident also in developing countries and emerging democracies. The growing importance of networked, hybrid and convergent information and communication technologies, as shaped by processes of globalisation, seems to demand new concepts, new methods, and ever more multidisciplinary and culturally comparative research.

Yet, others are sceptical, regarding such claims for change as overstated, questioning the supposed rise in interactive, alternative or democratising communication, noting how few among even wealthy populations engage in creative forms of participation, and arguing that our familiar research tools remain sufficient to the task of analysing communication. Many especially criticise the optimism that accompanies these opportunities to create as well as receive content, observing that much content created by the public is offensive, intolerant, banal or serves to exclude rather than include.

By focusing on a process - 'creating' - the conference theme invites insights across communication scholarship. The conference theme is concerned both with transformations in mass mediated content and with the diversity of ways in which people participate in complex information and communication environments. Does the enthusiastic response to opportunities to create 'user-generated content' require that we rethink traditional relations between sender and receiver, producer and audience? Today, face-to-face communication is increasingly merging with, rather than contrasting with, technologically mediated communication, suggesting new ways of conceptualizing the role of individuals and groups in the communication process across political, professional and personal spheres. What are the discursive or linguistic shifts involved? Who is being addressed, in what ways, and who is listening to this explosion of everyday communication? How do diverse cultural, expert or institutional framings shape the creation of content in different contexts?

Different areas of the field conceptualise change in different ways. Theme submissions might ask, what are the emerging forms of communication - their genres, aesthetics and appeal? Is it valuable that people can form their online health support groups? Does it really matter that the news draws on citizen journalism or on images from people's mobile phones? How are institutions managing and adapting to the internal and external networks sustained by employees? How have personalised and mobile media, especially among young people, become integral to, perhaps remediating, face-to-face communication and peer networks? Are there new opportunities for traditionally marginalised groups (on the grounds of age, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) to challenge long-standing forms of exclusion? Technology - and policy - may enable or impede these developments variously around the world, shaping the communicative possibilities for different cultures. The ethical and legal implications challenge communication researchers (and the public), pitting copyright and intellectual property, for example, against freedom of speech or the distribution of non-mainstream content.

Critique is needed more than ever, as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. How, for example, shall we balance the diversification of political expression, the exuberant irreverence of youth or the quieter flowering of digital storytelling among hitherto marginalised voices with the anti-democratic responses of repressive governments and the many legal, regulatory and economic responses seeking to limit, or exploit, the production and dissemination of communication? The diversification of content creation (in terms of sources, organisations, technologies, forms, processes, audiences) has implications in turn for our analysis of mass media production, including for news media, popular culture, and for supposedly fragmenting or active audiences. Is control less or more concentrated in the hands of big business? How do traditional producers adapt to new practices, co-opt alternative voices, or reassert their gate-keeping roles? What are the social, cultural and technological capital required to overcome barriers to digital exclusion, literacy and participation? In addressing such questions, the very standpoints from which critique draws its strength are also challenged in a globalising information and communication environment.

We hope that the conference theme sessions will explore questions about the constitutive and emergent properties of communication, mediated or not, new or established, so as to inquire whether and how the conditions for creating communications are changing and to pursue the wider implications of these changes across the field of communication and beyond. How should scholars conceptualise, research and evaluate these developments? To take this agenda forward, we invite ICA members' creative and thoughtful contributions to putting together an exciting programme for the San Francisco conference.

Sonia Livingstone (programme chair)
Nico Carpentier (theme chair)