Micro-studios Meet Convergence Culture: Crossmedia, Clustering, Dialogues, Auto-communication

Abstract

The chapter builds on evolutionary approaches to media change to interpret recent Northern European examples of how the audio visual (AV) industry’s micro-companies are confronting the ‘convergence culture’ and have, therefore, innovated their output by applying some of the principles of “crossmedia strategies” or “transmedia storytelling”. Relying largely on Juri Lotman’s ‘semiotics of culture’, the chapter discusses the processes of dialogic communications and auto-communication as facilitating both the convergence and divergence phenomena in media and culture. Related to this, it conceptualizes ‘convergence’ as a metaphor which denotes a complex set of non-linear, multi-dimensional and often incompatible evolutionary processes that could still be considered as mutually conditioning and organically evolving. Focusing on several case studies of the film industry’s convergence with the ICT sector, it analyses what rationales or dynamics may motivate ‘convergence’ and what may occasionally motivate the resistance to it by some of the industry fractions or media domains. It also points to the crossmedia phenomena as a potential concern for the political economy of media; the contemporary emergence of crossmedia strategies is often perceived as conditioning certain homogenizations in culture and understood as a synonym for media concentration. If so, such ‘emergence’ may constrain the degrees of freedom for smaller enterprises in which case policy means may be justified to support the various ‘divergence’ processes in culture.

The preparation of the article was supported by the European Union through its European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory) as well as by research grant ERMOS79 financed by the Estonian Science Foundation and co-funded by Marie Curie Actions.