Convergence:
Special Issue vol. 23, no. 3 (August 2017)
Guest Editors: Stine Lomborg and Mette Mortensen (University of Copenhagen)
The concept of crossmedia has primarily been associated with the production of media content for multiple platforms. At the same time,media users also cross media – they combine, juggle, and move almost seamlessly between various media platforms and services: to pursue information and entertainment, to communicate about and undertake tasks, and respond to demands in their everyday lives. Mobile media such as smartphones and tablets with ubiquitous internet access epitomize this development and converge various media on a single multi-purpose platform. A key observation in the current, digital media landscape is that media use – from television to telephones – is increasingly personalised, fragmented and connective. Blurring the boundaries not only between users and producers, but also between amateurs and professionals, laymen and experts, this development has prompted new forms of participation (collaboration, co-creation etc), and, consequently, new terms such as produsers, citizen journalists, prosumers etc. Crossmedia use transforms interpersonal communication, journalism, political communication, cultural consumption, celebrity culture, and many other central areas and aspects of society. But how might new types of users – and forms of crossmedia use – be defined? How do users combine and reinterpret the relationship between so-called 'old' and 'new' media? And to what extent are traditional distributions of power challenged and changed by the ability of users to circulate content on and across multiple platforms?
Understanding how individual media users cross media, and how they organise and make meaning in networks of media, is pivotal to furthering academic scholarship on crossmedia and the contemporary media user.
This speial issue of Convergence aims to develop the conceptualisation and analysis of contemporary crossmedia use and users in order to study the implications for users themselves as well as for media companies and society at large.
We encourage theoretical as well as empirically grounded contributions on crossmedia use and users addressing subjects such as:
- Conceptualisations of crossmedia in a personal media environment
- Changing relations between consumption and production (e.g. produsage, prosumption)
- Personalised and connective media use and its consequences
- The consequences of audience fragmentation for the measurement of media use and targeting
- New actor roles and forms of participation
- Power structures and flows in crossmedia communication
- Institutional and private crossmedia flows
- Audience studies adapted to cross media usage and users
Submission details:
Prospective authors should submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by email to Stine Lomberg and Mette Mortensen. A selection of authors will be invited to submit a full paper. Please note that acceptance of abstract does not guarantee publication, given that all papers will be put through the journal's peer review process. All enquiries should be directed to the editors of this special issue.
Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2015
Notification to authors: 15 October 2015
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 May 2016
Final revised papers due: 1 November 2016
Print publication: August 2017
