Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera
AHRC workshop on ephemeral media,
University of Nottingham, 23-24 June 2009

http://www.ephemeralmedia.co.uk/

Key speakers: Professor Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths), Professor Barbara
Klinger (Indiana), Emily Renshaw-Smith (Current TV - to be confirmed)

The emergence of new media technologies in the 1990s and 2000s,
specifically the rise of digital and Internet technology, has been
linked to fundamental changes in the media environment, shaping newly
emerging circuits of production and consumption and propagating a
cultural landscape where media seem available everywhere and all the
time. This AHRC-sponsored workshop examines a particular feature of
our accelerated media world - the growth of the brief or 'ephemeral'
texts that exist beyond and between the films, television programmes,
and radio broadcasts more commonly isolated for analysis.
What does ephemeral mean? In the context of the workshop it connotes
short-form media (i.e. texts that are no more than a few minutes long)
but also media which are fleeting in the way they circulate, or that
are often overlooked within mainstream academic study. 'Ephemeral
media' offers a rubric to designate and explore some of the key
strategies, forms and practices that are helping producers and publics
alike to negotiate today's fast-changing mediascape. More generally,
it invites historical and theoretical reflection on the significance
of screen ephemera - on those forms of screen culture that, whilst
momentary, remain active components of media experience.

The first workshop in the series focuses on user-generated ephemera,
in particular the proliferation of online video. The emerging digital
media environment has created new opportunities for user-generated
content to achieve broad distribution and so create a public of users.
This has been typified, and enabled, by recent phenomena such as
YouTube. The fleeting and competing nature of user-generated content
has placed particular emphasis on the role of media performance - what
can be understood broadly as a display of communicative competence for
assessment by an audience. The workshop will examine the status and
significance of user-generated ephemera (in particular online video)
and the kinds of performance inscribed herein.

Questions under discussion might include: How is performance framed in
user-generated ephemera? How is user-generated ephemera assessed and
discussed by audiences? How does the temporality of circulation on the
Internet shape the kind of publics that are convened around
user-generated ephemera? How do ephemeral media performances represent
national, regional, ethnic identity? How are questions of authorship
understood in forms that frequently involve the reworking of existing
material? What role do "gatekeepers" play in filtering the
user-generated performances that are distributed to online audiences?

The workshop is interested in, but not limited to, the following media
forms and issues:

•	Production and genre – creative amateur practices, technologies,
genres involved in making online video; the relation between amateur
and professional media production
•	Performance and address – styles of online acting, dance, musical
performance; projections of gesture and voice within online video and
other user-generated ephemera (e.g. webcams, online pornography,
blogging)
•	Sensory communication – the use of sound and image: audiovisual
methods and strategies
•	media environments - the relation of user-generated ephemera to
continuities/changes in the media landscape; historical precursors to
online video and user-generated ephemera
•	Audiences – online communities and the construction of user
hierarchies; questions of authorship and negotiation in "bottom up"
forms of ephemeral media; dynamics of cultural borrowing and
authorship in online remakes, mashups, and machinima
•	Distribution and Intellectual Property - the role of gate keepers
and cultural intermediaries; questions of censorship, policy and
legislation relating to ephemeral media production, distribution and
consumption
•	critical methodologies – the means and possibilities of studying
user-generated ephemera

The ephemeral media workshop is part of the AHRC's 'Beyond Text'
research programme and is designed to facilitate discussion in a small
group environment. It can provide travel (up to £100), accommodation,
and subsistence costs to all accepted participants. To apply for the
workshop, please send a 250 word paper proposal and a short biography
highlighting relevant research interests or publications to
[log in to unmask] by 10th December 2008.



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Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD

Head of Communications,
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/

Articles Editor,
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies
website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/