CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Media Convergence: Cultural Effects of Mediatisation and Digitization (informationalisation)

Session organisers: Mikko Lehtonen and Yvonne Spielmann

Fornäs, Johan (National Institute for Working Life and Linköping University, Sweden) INTERMEDIAL PASSAGES THROUGH THE BORDERLANDS OF MEDIATION
Concepts of intermediality, intertextuality and multimodality are here put in a wider cultural context of boundaries and transgressions, inspired by how earlier concepts of passages and thresholds resonate with recent ideas of mixtures and flows across borders within contemporary media culture. A trace from Walter Benjamin is followed through the borderlands of a contemporary shopping centre and into convergent digital networks, in order to approach the flows across borders in late modern media and cultural studies. The paper will outline main kinds of media passages through real and virtual spaces, and differentiate between some types and levels of intermedial relations.

van Kranenburg, Rob (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) DISAPPEARING COMPUTERS AND NEW MEDIA SPACES
In this paper I will read this move from mixed media to mediatizing the environment as one in which open source thinking is vital to ensuring that meta-information on information archictecture is widely and publicly available. The decisive new beginning of the 21st century is the exchangeability of time and space in places that are mediated with computational processes that generate not data (linked to other data) but information (linked to human beings). In these places where computational processes have disappeared into the background, into everyday objects - the environment becomes the interface. In a mediated environment it no longer is clear what is being mediated, and what mediates. Such environments - your kitchen, living-room, our shopping malls, streets of old villages, are new beginnings as they reformulate our sense of ourselves in places in spaces in time. As new beginnings they begin new media. In order to reflect upon what is generated by new media, and what is of vital importance to 21st century policy and politics, it is necessary to simplify our current practice into four major building blocks that make up our current view of what new media constitutes: code, node, link, network.

Lehtonen, Mikko (University of Tampere, Finland) TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL MULTIMODALITY
The media landscape is changing rapidly. The printed word is not any longer the self-evident sovereign of the field. The visualization of culture, increasing number of multimodal texts as well as the increase of intermedial relations between different media forms all contribute to the formation of a new landscape. The paper examines multimodality and its consequences in late modern culture. From cultural studies point of view multimodality challenges the existing disciplinary and other borders in media and other textual studies and calls for interdisciplinary work.

Rojola, Sanna (Åbo Akademi, Finland and University of Lancaster,United Kingdom) MUSIC MAKING WITH MACHINES MAKING MUSIC
Techno music is music made solely with machines. This makes the idea of "music composing genius" quite alien to techno and brings the artistic process closer to something that we might rather call craftsmanship. In my paper I will look at the (inter)relationship between the producers of techno music and the machines used in its production. What are the cultural effects of machines that make music? I will look at the human-machine interaction and the way both human and non-human actors play a role in the music making process. I will show that the relationship of the 'user' and the machine is a very complex one, each producing the other. I will also connect the different articulations of machines and music makers to gender and look at the ways these constructions are gendered and also gendering.

Spielmann, Yvonne (Braunschweig School of Art, Germany) INTERMEDIA, HYPERMEDIA, AND HYBRIDIZATION: SOME IDEAS ON CONCEPTS OF CONVERGENCE
With the increase of today's media convergence - as it results from the use of computers and is carried out with digital tools - older concepts such as intermediality are newly discussed in the light of a wider cultural shift. The paper will argue that the understanding of underlying concepts of interplay that are specific to different media is crucial when we want to discuss and determine more complex phenomena of mediatization and digitization that blur the distinctions. As hybrid cultures develop within an already highly advanced technological, aesthetic and cultural fusion the merger gets to a degree where density and complexity are building blocks for new cultural forms but at the same time veil the construction of re-combinatory and re-mediated systems of information and visualization. The scrutiny of these structural shifts may also shed light on the production of knowledge and the traffic of representational values that are communicated in the 'endless dataspace' where access becomes a question of power.