Liquid Life, Convergence Culture and Media Work

Life today has become analogous with work – and it increasingly displays all the contemporary characteristics of work in what has been described as the ‘new capitalism’: permanent flux, constant change, and structural indeterminacy. Zygmunt Bauman thus argues how we are all living a ‘liquid’ life, which is “a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty.” In liquid life, the modern categories of production (work) and consumption (life) have converged, which trend is particularly visible in our almost constant and concurrent immersion in media. According to Henry Jenkins, these are the conditions of an emerging convergence culture. In this paper these trends will be explored in detail, coupling insights from contemporary social theory, new media studies and popular culture to show how our modern conceptions of media, culture and society have modernized, and how the emerging media ecosystem can be illuminated by setting it against the ways in which those at the forefront of these cultural and technological changes negotiate their professional identity: the mediaworkers

Media Industries, Work and Life

Convergence culture, as a concept, articulates a shift in the way global media industries operate, and how people as audiences interact with them. It recognizes contemporary media culture as a primarily participatory culture. In turn, this assumption renders notions of production and consumption of (mass, mediated) culture not just theoretically problematic – as has been established earlier in disciplines as varied as communication studies, cultural geography, and media anthropology – but also less than useful on a practical level when making sense of the role media play in people’s everyday lives. This paper explores the practical applications of convergence culture from the perspectives of media workers, suggesting not so much the use of “new” categories, but rather an alignment of production, mediation and consumption as constituent practices in all experience of (in) media life

Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture

Within media theory the worldwide shift from a 19th century print culture via a 20th century electronic culture to a 21st century digital culture is well documented. In this essay the emergence of a digital culture as amplified and accelerated by the popularity of networked computers, multiple-user software and Internet is investigated in terms of its principal components. A digital culture as an undetermined praxis is conceptualized as consisting of participation, remediation and bricolage. Using the literature on presumably ‘typical’ Internet phenomena such as the worldwide proliferation of Independent Media Centres (Indymedia) linked with (radical) online journalism practices and the popularity of (individual and group) weblogging, the various meanings and implications of this particular understanding of digital culture are explored. In the context of this essay digital culture can be seen as an emerging set of values, practices and expectations regarding the way people (should) act and interact within the contemporary network society. This digital culture has emergent properties with roots both in online and offline phenomena, with links to trends and developments pre-dating the World Wide Web, yet having an immediate impact and particularly changing the ways in which we use and give meaning to living in an increasingly interconnected, always on(line) environment

Liquid Journalism

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