MeCCSA 2023: Connected Futures?

Rapid changes in the media industry have meant both producers and consumers have had to adapt very quickly to the many transformations of recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated some of these existing trends, including the rise of streaming services and the 24-hour news cycle, both of which have had significant impacts on production and consumption habits.

Media bring people together but also keep them apart, simultaneously connecting and separating, bridging physical distances, yet also potentially creating emotional voids. It is often said media technology is speeding up the pace of human life at the expense of connecting and relating to fellow human beings, though arguably, this has been a perennial concern and anxiety about communication media for at least the last century.

This conference wishes to open up the whole question and theme of our connected media futures: exploring where we are, how we got here, and where we might be heading in the future. What are the implications of technological developments for content producers, screenwriters, journalists, scholars, and other professionals?

The draft programme is now available to view on the Easychair pages.

Early Bird registration available until 1 June

Standard registration available until 31 July latest

The First draft programme is now available on Easychair, but is subject to amendment.

* Please do not forget, we will be holding a conference dinner and ceilidh in the Radisson Blu hotel on Tuesday 5th September which is an additional cost of, £50 on top of registration so please do not forget to add this if you wish to attend the conference dinner and ceilidh! It's going to be a great night with one of Scotland's top ceilidh bands (no experience necessary!).

Keynote: Platform Imaginaries

Professor Annette Hill (Jönköping University, Sweden)

Streaming platforms recognise the extent to which the potential audiences for their products are now made up significantly of “roamers,” people finding diverse routes through the options available and combining them in different ways.

This presentation reflects on methodological and theoretical developments for understanding the precise movements, combinations and connections that become possible for roamers in commercial entertainment platforms. A key question is how do we imagine entertainment platforms today, yesterday or tomorrow?

Drawing upon a qualitative transnational audience study in South East Asia and Europe , the presentation considers how to analyse patterns of movement across streaming services, for example Netflix, entertainment platforms, for example  YouTube, music platforms such as Spotify, alongside national cable and public television channels.

Through the use of visualisations of platforms, combining creative and walking methodologies, this empirical entry point to platform imaginaries enables perspectives by roamers themselves regarding spatial, mobility and affective relations. How we create, talk about, dislike and dispute platform imaginaries is of pressing concern for citizens, media researchers and industry professionals.

Annette Hill is a Professor of Media and Communication at Jönköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on audiences and popular culture, with interests in media engagement, everyday life, genres, production studies and cultures of viewing.

She is the author of ten books, and many articles and book chapters in journals and edited collections, which address varieties of engagement with entertainment platforms, reality television, news and documentary, television drama, entertainment formats, live events and sports entertainment, film violence and media ethics.

Her latest books are Media Engagement (with Peter Dahlgren Routledge 2023), The Handbook of Mobile Socialities (with M Hartmann and M Andersson Routledge 2021) and her next books are Roaming Audiences (Routledge 2024) and the Companion to Media Audiences (with Peter Lunt, Routledge 2024).

Narinder Minhas - Chief Executive Officer, Cardiff Productions.

Narinder is an award-winning executive producer and creative leader. With over sixty productions under his belt, he's delivered shows across all genres for the world's top broadcasters.

Born in India, Narinder moved to Britain with his family when he was a child. He grew up in a working-class community in South East London, where Punjabi was the main language.

His varied career has seen him move from executive positions at the BBC (working on blue-chip series like Panorama and The Money Programme); to Channel 4, where he became a commissioning editor; and into senior roles in the independent sector, where he helped to build superbrand companies and make award-winning content.

As a programme maker, Narinder has produced a huge range of critically acclaimed and popular shows: from the heart-wrenching Peter: The Human Cyborg (Channel 4), to the provocative We Are Black and British (BBC), and the groundbreaking White Tribe (Channel 4) - to name a few.

Narinder has also worked with a broad mix of high-profile individuals - from Noam Chomsky, to Francis Fukuyama, Nigella Lawson, Andrew Marr, Tan France, Bill Clinton and Zeze Millz.

Passionate about television, film, education and the arts - Narinder is an Honorary Research Fellow at his alma mater, the University of Exeter, and a member of BAFTA.

Graham Meikle is Professor of Communication and Digital Media at the University of Westminster, and Director of its Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). He is a National Teaching Fellow, and has led Westminster’s MA in Social Media and Digital Communication since 2013. Graham has published eight books, including Deepfakes (2022), The Internet of Things (with Mercedes Bunz, 2018), and Future Active (2002).

Deepfake Videos and Connected Futures

Synthetic media are videos, images, audio, or other texts that are created or significantly altered using AI techniques such as deep learning. Deepfakes are among the most prominent examples so far of synthetic media. This paper will argue that deepfake videos are not just significant in their own right, but that they also offer important perspective on the wider digital media environment of the 2020s.

The theme of this conference is “connected futures.” Deepfakes point to some ways in which our futures are being connected without our consent. Deepfakes did not just happen to emerge in the time of social media — they are a product of those media. Through two decades of everyday sharing on social media platforms, we have unwittingly created vast archives of images, video, text and audio. These data have been appropriated as raw material that enable machine-learning researchers to train AI systems to recognise, classify and create images for use in synthetic media. Deepfakes expand the social media environment in which the public and the personal converge. They are a logical extension of those social media business models in which all human experience becomes content to be shared, data to be exploited.

This talk will give an overview of some key uses of deepfakes to date, including satirising the powerful, reimagining histories, conscripting women into non-consensual pornography, and resurrecting the dead.

MeCCSA AGM invited speaker: 3pm, Tuesday 5 September 2023, W011.

Dr Lena Wånggren is a researcher and teacher at the Universities of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt. Her work concerns the role of literature and arts in social change, feminist writing and activism, gender and intersectionality, and workplace/social justice. She is also a trade union representative, and until recently (2021-23) served as President of University and College Union Scotland.

Abstract

Higher Education in the United Kingdom has witnessed a rise in the number of casualised staff, that is to say workers who are employed on insecure hourly-paid or fixed-term contracts: some numbers show that more than half (54%) of all academic staff in the UK are employed on these types of contract (UCU 2016). While a generation ago, these contracts may have been part of a ‘rite of passage’ before permanency, the precarisation of work has become the defining feature of a majority of academic workers’ lives.

This talk, built on a forthcoming book, provides a snapshot of the experiences of a generation of teachers and researchers for whom insecurity and ill health is the norm. Combining critical analysis of employment statistics with qualitative data from interviews with 22 casualised workers, the talk will share not only experiences of insecure work but also strategies of resistance.