Access All Areas: Symposium on User-Generated Content
Digital Cultures Research Centre,
University of the West of England
21st May 2010
http://www.dcrc.org.uk/
Not even the most utopian critics of 20th Century mass media could have predicted the explosion of human creativity and digital diversity at the start of the 21st Century. The continued expansion of the internet beyond the desktop offers participants possibilities to interact with media that are refashioning the whole enterprise of cultural production. The influence of the blogosphere, the mobility of citizen journalists, the expansion of peer-to-peer media distribution, and the continuing escalation of diverse forms of video and photo sharing have all shaken the foundations of the mass media industries. The development of the idea of ‘User Generated Content’ (UGC) in the first ten years of the 21st Century demands serious critical attention.
Access All Areas will focus on the first stage of this analysis by mapping the use of the term and its historical development. UGC has different inflections in the media fields of Television and Journalism and is different again in the discourses of games and Web 2.0. In this light, this symposium represents a timely reflection on the normalisation of the idea of User Generated Content and a genealogy of its development.
The day will be held at Watershed Media Centre Bristol and will feature presentations from different academic fields as they try to understand the potentials and problematics of user generated content. There will be panels on the history of UGC, journalism, video, interactivity and political economy. Speakers include Mandy Rose (UWE Creative Fellow), Tony Dowmunt (Goldmiths), Sandra Gaudenzi (LCC) and Jon Dovey (UWE).
The full programme will be available at: http://accessareas.wordpress.com/programme/
The Access All Areas blog is up and running at: http://accessareas.wordpress.com/
Access All Areas takes place on the 21st May 2010 from 9:30am and is located in Watershed Media Centre: Waterside 1 & 2.
This exciting event is open to 30 participants at a cost of £20, with postgraduate researchers and concessions at a cost of £10. Tickets are available from: [http://www.watershed.co.uk/exhibits/2344/]
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