It’s all Cross-platform to me - Children and their Media Worlds
Authors: Woodfall
Conference: MeCCSA PGN Conference
Dates: 17-20 September 2012
Abstract:Drawing on current industry practices and the findings of an on-going study in to children’s desires within cross-platform media, this presentation questions the ways in which we theorise media, and goes on to ask if we are capable of ‘unseeing’ our own ‘siloed’ interpretations and disciplinary affiliations?
As a practitioner within children’s media production myself, I instinctively acknowledge media from an industrial perspective, yet within my research I am drawn to see media (as do many) through the prism of text, genre, ideology, and so forth. Recent changes in the way we vision the interconnectivity of media events however suggest that we should perhaps consider researching (and teaching) media from a ‘beyond the medium’ perspective.
Adopting Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, in which media that would once have been seen as distinct are more intimately interconnected than previously acknowledged, leads us to ask if it is time to call for a new conceptualisation, (and in turn, a new pedagogy) of media, in which cross-platform events are not seen as a loose agglomeration of meshing texts, but as a ‘digital heteroglossia’ (Berger & Woodfall, 2012) of multiple media ‘utterances’. Each of which feeds in to each other, and no one utterance stands as sacrosanct or strictly canonical.
Source: Manual