[ecrea] CfP: Standards, Disruptions and Values in Digital Culture and Communication (ECREA Section Workshop)

The Digital Culture and Communication Section in ECREA will be hosting 
its next workshop on “Standards, Disruptions and Values in Digital 
Culture and Communication” in cooperation with the University of 
Salzburg, 26-28 November, 2015. Please submit your abstracts by May 11, 
2015 via email to (ecreadigitalculture /at/ gmail.com). The full call is also 
available on the section's website: http://wp.me/p2XXkX-6v

Call for Papers

Technical and social standards are consistent, formal and informal 
norms, values or conventions of doing, operating, producing, and/or 
performing something. As the basis of technical transmission, standards 
in media allow transferability and interoperability, reduce complexity, 
and facilitate communication across formats, platforms and boundaries. 
Their relevance and power become evident with regard to co-existing or 
competing standards that result in disruptions and interferences, as 
expressed in the ‘videotape format war’ of the late 1970s or in the 
ongoing incompatibilities between Apple and Microsoft. But 
standardisation can also limit diversification and create lock-ins, 
which restrict future choices and prevent more radical changes. In 
society, standards generate common understandings and shared meanings, 
but can likewise be a source of inequalities, discrimination, and forms 
of exclusion – especially as not all people equally contribute to, or 
even participate in creating new standards. Media technologies provide 
standardised patterns of media production. Such patterns, in turn, may 
encounter a great diversity of publics and audiences, who remix, modify 
or create alternative narratives and hegemonies.

In digital culture and communication, standards and values are contested 
in many respects. In the last few years, with the emergence and 
pervasiveness of the Internet and online technologies, well-established 
paths in the production and circulation of information have been newly 
arranged or abandoned altogether. As a consequence, transformations and 
re-orientations are continuously happening in almost all fields of media 
and communication, such as media industries, media politics, media usage 
or journalism. New technological standards, ethical codes as well as 
narrative and visual canons are appearing in this process – not only 
with regard to technical systems, but also in terms of audience 
behaviour, media accountability, production ethics and regulation. In 
this context, standards also refer to professional requirements, for 
example, in journalistic writing, broadcasting or media content production.

These new canons, standards and regulations in digital culture and 
communication are of different type, significance, scale and scope. It 
is important to critically evaluate the relationship between standards 
and values in their social, political, technological and artistic 
dimensions. Such questions include who has the power to define, develop 
and implement standards? What social values emerge in transformed 
communication spaces? Which values are attached to standardisation 
processes in creative industries and how are they related to copyright 
and patents in technological development? Are peer-production, 
open-access publishing and free-culture movements different kinds of 
markets or disruptions to existing models of markets? What is the 
relationship between technological standardisation and cultural 
diversity? Are there new canons in storytelling? What is the 
relationship between people’s creative processes and media and art canons?

Within all these processes, values play a significant role as they 
provide orientation and guidance for the actions and decisions involved. 
Through the articulation of values, societies define what kinds of 
standards are desirable and which ones are less wanted. How do values, 
technology and media production relate to one another? How are values 
put on play in technology design, mass media production and popular 
culture processes of standardization? How can local adaptations of 
global formats in different communities and cultural backgrounds be 
regarded as sources of power, agency or new identities?

The workshop aims at collecting papers that analyse standards and values 
from different angles and perspectives in media and communication 
research, taking into account disruptions and continuities. The papers 
should represent the broad diversity of the section with regard to 
theoretical and empirical approaches. The conference organizers propose 
the following thematic fields:
A. Technical and Social Standards in Digital Communication and Media

    * How do new technical standards evolve in the media industry? What 
values guide this process? What does the establishment of new standards 
mean for older technical systems?
    * How do the diverse pressures to innovate in media industries 
interact with the resistance to and/or transformation of extant 
standards, and/or the development of new standards?
    * How is the implementation of new standards negotiated? How and by 
whom are decisions taken and what modes of intervention exist (e.g. 
between players like platform operators and users)?
    * How and to what extent are standards in digital culture and 
communication socially constructed by the media users?
    * What is expected from media users by technological capacities of 
devices, by industry decisions or politics?
    * How do heterogeneous social practices of users affect or 
influence technical standardisation?
    * What values guide people’s choice of media, technologies and 
platforms? What standards and values are people expecting from different 
media outlets?

B. Visual and Narrative Standards and Disruptions in Digital Culture

    * How are visual standards and codes built? For instance, 
visualization of data is currently being developed as a field and there 
are no consolidated visual standards.
    * Ethics and aesthetics of data: How do visual standards influence 
the comprehension of data in aesthetic, practical and epistemological ways?
    * Remix cultures: Has remix become a standard? Which types of 
remixes and memes are disruptive? Are there new storytelling formulas 
emerging?
    * How is the visual developing in digital culture? For instance in 
the social use of images such as selfies, which types of narratives are 
emerging?
    * And finally, how all the previous issues are dealt with in terms 
of digital and visual literacies?

C. Professional Ethical Standards and Disruptions

    * What are current challenges and issues regarding professional and 
ethical standards in digital culture and communication?
    * How have professional standards and values (e.g. in journalism) 
changed with the pervasiveness of digital culture and communication?
    * Who is responsible of implementing professional and ethical 
standards in digital culture and communication?  How and by whom are 
these standards negotiated?
    * How do ethical codes inform digital culture research?
    * What explicit and implicit norms, frameworks, and/or ethical 
traditions ground the emergence, interpretation, transformation, and 
enforcement of and/or resistance to earlier and current standards?
    * Are there emerging developments that offer new and potentially 
better grounds and frameworks for current and future technical and 
ethical standards in digital communication and media?

We welcome papers picking up any of the described issues and topics. 
Extended abstracts should be no longer than 700 words, written in 
English and contain a clear outline of the argument, the theoretical 
framework, methodology and results (if applicable). Participants may 
submit more than one proposal, but only one paper by the same first 
author will be accepted. Panel and paper proposals from PhD students and 
early career scholars are particularly welcome.

All proposals should be submitted by May 11, 2015 to 
(ecreadigitalculture /at/ gmail.com). Notifications of acceptance will be sent 
out approx. 4-6 weeks after the deadline. Keynote speakers to be announced.
We are looking forward to your submissions and hope to see many 
participants in Salzburg in autumn.

Gemma San Cornelio (Chair), Aristea Fotopoulou and Christoph Raetzsch 
(Vice Chairs)


---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------