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| Ben Light |
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Director of the Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre, University of Salford, UK
Keynote lecture - title: The State of Play: Digital Media Convergence and Everyday Life Whilst it is contested that Web 2.0 technologies and other forms of digital/social media are fundamentally new (and rather merely recombinants of extant technologies) it is impossible to deny the shift in our usage patterns of these artefacts over the past 5 years in the so called developed world at least. Names such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the like have enterend the common vernacular of our everyday lives most importantly the everyday lives of those who wouldn't have engaged with the web before. Simultaneously, we have witnessed an increase in media convergence for instance games consoles have become home entertainment systems and mobile phones gateways to the interent. Many of us have also experienced increases in bandwidth and the bundling of the internet with home entertainment services by the likes of Sky, and in the UK, Virgin Media and British Telecom. There is a growing body of work examining the effects of these changes, some which links with the work of internet researchers from the 1990s some which does not. In this talk, I will contribute to this area emphasising the part digital media convergence is taking in our experiences of play in everyday life. Drawing from work I have been involved with about a range of digital media including YouTube, Internet Dating, Facebook, SingStar and Habbo Hotel, I will consider issues of appropriation, resistance, domestication, identity work, ethics and preference formation. I argue that whilst we have learned much about the continuties and discontinuities within which digital media are implicated, to obtain greater insight, we need to engage a greater diversity of digital media in our programmes of research, pay increased attention to where and why they connect, and the implications arising.
BIO: I am Professor of Digital Media, in the University of Salford's school of Media, Music and Performance. You can also find versions of me on Facebook, Twitter and Gaydar - you'll need to look hard to find the latter! I joined the University of Salford in 1999 after working at the University of Manchester. Before working in |
higher education, I undertook several administrative jobs within the UK's National Health Service and even spent some time as a Health Promotion worker with MESMAC, a sexual health organisation. I'm interested in how people get different kinds of technologies to work for them on an everyday basis. I started out looking at this in the 1990s, generally in the workplace. However, since then I have found that developments outside work have tended to hold my attention more. I still do research about people and work, but given the way life is being played out in many (but not all) parts of the world I think there's more to do beyond this. My current research agenda centres on analysing the development and use of social media such as those that support romantic relationships - internet dating (specifically Gaydar), those that are more focussed upon platonic relationships (such as Facebook), and Digital Gaming artefacts. You can find out more about me and my work at: