Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases    

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that has emerged in recent years. Notable examples of the model include Threadless, iStockphoto, InnoCentive, the Goldcorp Challenge, and user-generated advertising contests. This article provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, both its theoretical grounding and exemplar cases, taking care to distinguish crowdsourcing from open source production. This article also explores the possibilities for the model, its potential to exploit a crowd of innovators, and its potential for use beyond forprofit sectors. Finally, this article proposes an agenda for research into crowdsourcing.

Brabham, Daren C. Convergence (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Methods>Open Source

Early Home Cinema    

Current developments in high-definition technological systems for home viewing link definitively with early Home Cinema, as practised from the late 1890s, as an alternative to public spectatorship. The traditions of Home Cinema, in encompassing degrees of informality, interaction and control within domestic exhibition, served to lay foundations for a televisual experience which, today, having come full-circle, is defining itself once more as `Home Cinema'.

Chalke, Sheila. Convergence (2008). Articles>Multimedia>Video>History

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence    

Not all Facebook users appreciated the September 2006 launch of the `News Feeds' feature. Concerned about privacy implications, thousands of users vocalized their discontent through the site itself, forcing the company to implement privacy tools. This essay examines the privacy concerns voiced following these events. Because the data made easily visible were already accessible with effort, what disturbed people was primarily the sense of exposure and invasion. In essence, the `privacy trainwreck' that people experienced was the cost of social convergence.

Boyd, Danah. Convergence (2008). Articles>Web Design>Privacy

Little Players, Big Shows: Format, Narration, and Style on Television's New Smaller Screens    

This article highlights the role that aesthetics play in television's current convergence with mobile telephones and portable media players like the iPod. I contend that contemporary television style does not just constitute a response to the demands of technological convergence -- it is rather an integral component of that which allows television to merge with new devices in the first place. When we engage with style as a precursor to these developments, important continuities emerge between the aesthetics of the small screen and those of the new smaller screens. These continuities underscore that convergence is at once a technical and aesthetic process that entails the hybridization of hardware and cultural forms.

Dawson, Max. Convergence (2008). Articles>Multimedia>Video

A Sack in the Sand: Photography in the Age of Information    

Throughout the 1990s the relationship between culture and technology was sharply focused in a debate about whether digital technologies signalled the death or radical displacement of photography. The case for the cultural continuity of photography centred upon a rejection of a strong form of technological determinism. It is now clear that far from being displaced to the margins of culture, there is now more photography than ever. There have also been dramatic developments: mobile phone manufacturers have put more cameras into people's hands then ever before; the photograph as social document and historical witness persists but in changing ways; photographs circulate globally on an unprecedented scale via electronic image banks. It is clear that such changes and developments do involve new technologies. However, rather than being due to the kind of technological determinism debated earlier, this is because photography has come to exist within a new technological environment. In many recent accounts, 'information' and information technology are repeatedly cited as constituting a new and shaping context for photographic practices.

Lister, Martin. Convergence (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Photography

Time Well Spent: The Magazine Publishing Industry's Online Niche    

This article compares the uses of the print and online versions of the same magazine by its readership. Combining surveys of the readership and commercial data from the publisher and web designer, the study examines how one magazine has developed an online publication for its readers. Group Leisure is a niche magazine which has been in print for over a decade and online for two years. This article analyses the usage of the magazine in terms of age, gender and modal occupation of its readers and examines how their understanding of spending and saving time on the magazine underpins their perceptions of its value. The results and conclusions of this research have relevance to the publishing industry and to the study of online journalism.

Ingham, Deena and Alexis Weedon. Convergence (2008). Articles>Publishing>Online>Assessment

Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning Intellectual Property among Modders and Fans

This article investigates an instance in convergence culture: the conflicts and compromises between modders (fans of a video game who actually make changes to the game) and their supporters, and the owners of the copyrighted works they appropriate. I suggest that current copyright ownership in cultural products interferes with the way creative industries can benefit from convergence; that modders (and fans generally) develop a specific rationale and set of norms rooted in Jenkins' concept of a `moral economy' (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006) to justify their appropriations; and that mutually beneficial relationships can be teased out of the apparently contradictory positions of modders and copyright owners. This article focuses on two case studies that illustrate the ways modders reuse cultural products and incorporate them into their video game modifications to achieve a sense of creative ownership and meaning over their entertainment experience.

Postigo, Hector. Convergence (2008). Articles>Intellectual Property

Using Blogs to Create Cybernetic Space: Examples from People of Indian Origin    

This article examines the phenomenon of blogging as a way to create a cybernetic space that is defined by the digital/virtual space of the blog discourse and the real space where the blogger is located. By examining several blogs it is argued that for people who have to move from place to place and undergo the diasporic experience, the anxieties of movement and placelessness produced by diaspora can be partly managed by entry into the cybernetic space produced by bloggers. Specifically, this article examines blogs maintained by people of Indian origin who produce a sense of spatial identity through their blogs.

Mitra, Ananda. Convergence (2008). Articles>Writing>Blogging>Ethnicity

Convergence Calls: Multimedia Storytelling at British News Websites    

This article uses qualitative interviews with senior editors and managers from a selection of the UK’s national online news providers to describe and analyse their current experimentation with multimedia and video storytelling. The results show that, in a period of declining newspaper readership and TV news viewing, editors are keen to embrace new technologies, which are seen as being part of the future of news. At the same time, text is still reported to be the cornerstone for news websites, leading to changes in the grammar and function of news video when used online. The economic rationale for convergence is examined and the article investigates the partnerships sites have entered into in order to be able to serve their audience with video content. In-house video is complementing syndicated content, and the authors examine the resulting developments in newsroom training and recruitment practices. The article provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in newsrooms as a result of the shift towards multimedia, multiplatform news consumption.

Thurman, Neil and Ben Lupton. Convergence (2008). Articles>Publishing>Multimedia

Community Informatics, Local Community and Conflict: Investigating Under-Researched Elements of a Developing Field of Study    

Conflict within local communities is an under-researched theme in Community Informatics (CI). This article therefore aims to contribute to the development of CI as a field of study by analysing forms of internal conflict within Moseley Egroup – a CI initiative developed in Moseley, Birmingham (UK). Ultimately it is argued that conflict is an inherent part of local community and is important to CI for a number of reasons. Conflict impacts on the appropriation and social shaping of internet technology by local communities, and has broader implications on the extent to which CI regenerates localities and empowers citizens. In this sense conflict is identified as a productive force, shaping and reshaping both local community and internet projects mobilized in its name. Conflict also draws attention to the contested and mutable relationship that exists in CI between the online spaces that are created and the localities they are set up to serve. It is concluded that conflict and forms of social struggle within communities should form a central part of the developing CI research agenda.

Goodwin, Ian. Convergence (2008). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets?    

Co-creative relations among professional media producers and consumers indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labour theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are perhaps less helpful than before. Can this phenomenon just be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of users, or is something else, potentially more profound and challenging, playing out here? Does consumer co-creation contribute to the precarious conditions of professional creative workers? This article draws from ethnographic research undertaken from 2000 to 2005 with Auran games (a game development company based in Brisbane, Australia) to engage with debates about the status of user co-creation as labour. The article argues that as a hybrid and emergent social network market these relationships introduce a form of creative destruction to labour relations in the context of the creative industries.

Banks, John and Sal Humphreys. Convergence (2008). Articles>Web Design>Social Networking>Ethnographies

New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture    

This article will demonstrate how the notion of ‘phatic communion’ has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking profiles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of ‘individualization’ and ‘network sociality’, alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and ‘connected presence’ has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture.

Miller, Vincent. Convergence (2009). Articles>Web Design>Multimedia>Social Networking

Rigorous Interdisciplinary Pedagogy: Five Years of ACE    

The emergence of media-arts and digital cultural practices has provided a highly charged context for the development of interdisciplinary pedagogy, combining as it does, practices and traditions from historically, culturally and theoretically wildly divergent disciplines. This article addresses aspects of effective interdisciplinary educational process, attending to questions of pedagogy, theory and institutional pragmatics. In my analysis, the key components of such a project are: deep technical training and understanding; deep training in artmaking and cultural practice; deep theoretical and historical contextualization, and an open and rigorous interdisciplinary context which maximally facilitates the negotiation of these often divergent ways of thinking and making. In building such interdisciplinary practice in the context of a campus, one abruptly confronts the discontinuity between the rapidly changing fluidity of the contemporary moment and the relative stasis of institutionalized disciplines which have an investment in maintaining their identity in the face of such change. Implicit in the project then, is not simply the development of a context for deep interdisciplinary invention, but the formation of practitioners who are neither artists nor engineers, or who are equal parts both. In either case, this formation confounds the disciplines and creates a vacuum of institutional context, which has resounding implications for the survival and flourishing of such initiatives and their practitioners.

Penny, Simon. Convergence (2009). Articles>Education>Multimedia

Teaching Button-Pushing versus Teaching Thinking: The State of New Media Education in US Universities    

Using content analysis and survey, this study examines how the teaching of thinking skills and that of technological skills have been balanced in US new media programs to produce both employable graduates and life-long learners. Findings show that most programs have balanced the two skill sets but that more effort should be made to integrate the teaching of both skill sets in individual courses to give students an expedited, holistic learning experience.

Huang, Edgar. Convergence (2009). Articles>Education>Multimedia>United States