Media Conference Research Articles

The 2024 IEEE Gaming, Entertainment, and Media Conference in Turin, Italy

The 2024 IEEE Gaming, Entertainment, and Media Conference in Turin, Italy

Humanoid artificial intelligence, media conferences and natural responses to journalists’ questions: The end of (human-to-human) public relations?

In a world-first human-robot media conference (held in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 2023), highly life-like humanoid robots gave answers of unprecedented sophistication to journalists’ questions. The media conference highlighted the extent to which artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the dynamics of public relations with extraordinary speed and, in particular, now posing a very real threat to the jobs of (human) practitioners. It is also likely to lead to the devaluing of professional communication undertaken by human beings. This polemical essay not only contends that scholars and practitioners have moved too slowly to consider the impacts of rapidly evolving AI on the profession, but also calls for both practitioners and academics to safeguard interpersonal (human) communication by urgently considering the possibility that many human-held jobs and livelihoods will be lost to increasingly sophisticated – and now ultra-realistic humanoid – AI much sooner than had been anticipated. Indeed, AI is creating ever-greater job losses that only exacerbate existing social inequities.

Editorial

Welcome to the proceedings issue of the annual Interactive Film and Media Conference, where we celebrate the dynamic relationships between care, collaboration, and craft across new media platforms, practices, and theories. This issue showcases video presentations of the papers that delve into these interconnected themes, offering a diverse range of perspectives and insights.
 The nexus of care, collaboration, and craft is a fertile ground for exploring the crucial work of combatting polarization and embracing multiple voices, plural practices, and new ways of working together. In this fluid and adaptive landscape, the definitions and relationships of care, collaboration, and craft are not fixed but constantly evolving.
 At the onset of the conference, we shared some exciting editorial news that reflects the dynamic nature of the interactive film and media field. As this field rapidly evolves, outpacing the traditional academic publishing world, we are committed to ensuring our publication remains at the forefront of innovation and inclusivity. In light of this, we have significantly changed our publishing approach.

Reflections

This paper introduces my experimental game prototype titled Corridor which puts public transportation into conversation with survival struggle. As a performative role-playing game experience and experiment, Corridor is about a trip using public transportation, inspired by the Metrobus systems of Istanbul, Turkey. Metrobus in Istanbul is a rapid public transportation system that combines metro and bus implemented in a separate corridor on the highway (Berdiyorov 2020). Besides my own experiences in Metrobus, I utilize the interactions of a workshop that I co-operated at the Interactive Film and Media Conference (IFM22), titled “Listening to Passengers Listening to Stories: Interactive Storytelling” to contextualize Corridor. By building dialogical exchange of stories, participants of the workshop explored the experiences of public transportation users in relation to the survival of the body (Simsek and Andic 2022). Eventually, the conflicts that the participants shared in the workshop resonated with me to build intersections between survival struggles in the wilderness and a trip on public transportation. Survival is the oldest quest of living beings and is assumed as another term for being alive, and more importantly for being in the world. Survival of living beings is closely related to stability maintained in their bodies and for humans, this includes motivation and emotion (Evans 2015). At the same time, beyond simply a life and death matter, “survival invokes a complex bundle of existential struggles, political convictions, and cultural experiences” (Zeilinger 2018, 16). Reading survival from an ecological point of view, life on earth is collaborative survival (Tsing 2015). In metropolitan life, transportation is essential to the everyday commute of people, and this is part of survival. Although transportation systems manifest important aspects of our culture, they also sometimes present issues of conflict through the violation of personal space, privacy, and other harmful and abusive behavior. To overcome survival struggles, it is necessary to take meaningful actions, in games or real life. In the gameplay of Corridor, the participants need to maintain an Energy and Morale level Meter by collecting item cards and playing encounter cards strategically. Encounter cards present challenges such as social interactions between riders, protests about the economic situations, and seasons that are affected by climate crisis influencing the participants’ survival level. The matrix of the points ranging between 0 and 4 comes from nature writer Henry David Thoreau's “necessities of life” which are limited accessibility of food, shelter, fuel (modified as health), and clothing (1980). With Corridor, I intervene in the discussions of environmental humanities and game studies with the creative application of survival in an urban context, public transportation. In the experience of Corridor, the players can find a space to reflect on urban survival from the lenses of riders that include human experience, societal factors, and ecological thinking. Redressing the transportation game mechanics related to movement and mixing them with survival builds a critical reflection on human and nature relations in urban. Looking at and rethinking transportation as survival would light the way towards sustainable cities, and policies of living or moving together.

Editorial

The Interactive Film and Media Journal advances scholarly and creative discourse on the intersection of interactivity and various media forms. This issue features contributions from the IV International Interactive Film and Media Conference (2022), coordinated by a diverse group of academics. The conference theme, Interactive Epistemology, Listening, and Ecomedia, facilitated an exploration of knowledge-building, listening, and ecological consciousness within interactivity. Emphasizing the importance of listening as a mode of knowledge production, the issue promotes a holistic understanding of interactivity across different research areas. The contributions address the role of interactivity in media, such as books, films, games, and real-time streaming, along with virtual and augmented reality. They provoke thought on interactivity's embodied and affective aspects and explore interactive technologies' influence on power relations and ecological concerns. The papers in this issue converge on themes like empathy and responsibility, illuminating the power of interactive digital media to reshape the understanding of social issues. For instance, interactive narratives, VR and games employ participatory elements to bring nuanced portrayals of migration experiences to the forefront. This approach encourages critical reflection and social responsibility. This issue also explores the transformative potential of interactive documentaries in varied contexts, highlighting their effectiveness in altering perceptions of history, socio-political phenomena, and power dynamics. These documentaries foster inclusivity and dialectical reflection, urging viewers to engage in complex narratives embedded in various landscapes. Some papers explore the impact of digital and artistic mediums on shaping space, narrative, and community engagement. The issue showcases how machine learning and public art can address mimetic trauma and discrimination and how digital comics and web-based artworks can redefine concepts of spatial interactions and narrative structures. A particular emphasis is placed on immersive technologies like VR and immersive journalism in civic engagement, underlining the power of these mediums in addressing social and environmental concerns. Exploring art and interactive documentary, specifically in the context of historical violence and colonial legacies, adds a significant dimension to the issue. This second set of papers from the 2022 Interactive Film and Media Conference highlights the transformative power of interactivity in reshaping narratives, promoting critical reflection, and fostering social responsibility. It emphasizes the crucial role of interactive media in fostering a more inclusive, empathetic, and informed society.

So witzig wie möglich, so ernst wie nötig:

This paper exposes the idea of humour as a strategy for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By focusing on the Swiss federal council’s media conferences, it aims at evaluating specific linguistic and thematic features which constitute humour. The analysis highlights the importance of everyday topics in dealing with the coronavirus and shows that the humorous potentiality in the press conferences’ oral communications is specified by laughing expressions and even more so that the humorous interactions occur at specific moments.

Editorial

This special issue of the Interactive Film and Media Journal constitutes the first of two issues dedicated to the IV International Interactive Film and Media Conference, held online in June 2022 and co-organized by Hudson Moura (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada), Heidi Rae Cooley (University of Texas at Dallas, USA), Anna Wiehl (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and Stefano Odorico (Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland / Leeds Trinity University, UK). As tangential as it may seem, the IFM conferences are an opportunity to reflect on the scholarly field of interactivity, offering a platform for academics and practitioners to broaden the field across disciplines. The conference titled: Interactive Epistemology, Listening, and Ecomedia clearly demonstrated that interactivity does not just have a newly rediscovered popularity in film and media, but it is also omnipresent in a multidisciplinary context, from cultural productions such as games, films and books to audience perception such as streaming, virtual reality and real-time; from intellectual publications such as news, hypertexts, social media to virtual world economy such as cryptocurrencies.

Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference

In this article, I explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. The AMC celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in Detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (Allied Media Projects 2022b). Beyond AMC’s commitment to Detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. Primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation Beware of the Dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective Complex Movements, this paper argues that AMC uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.

Scott Morrison’s Political Discourse During Crisis: A Narrative-Semiotic Analysis

This study explores communication strategies and techniques in the political discourse of the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, during crisis. Twelve public speeches and statements made during media conferences, from April 2019 to May 2020, are analysed as sample data. These consist of three contexts, starting from the election campaign, followed by the bushfires that ravaged the nation and the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. The study identifies the prominent themes and most frequently occurring features in the data set. The election campaign communications and COVID-19 crisis communications are observed to have similar use of discourse features and emphasis of themes. Comparatively, the bushfire crisis communications showed low levels of technique usage and a low significance of themes. The speeches are grouped into four political discourse clusters for further analysis using actantial modelling. The models provide a visual representation of various actants to draw comparative insights. The study highlights that communication needs to be viewed as a discursive activity that can have variations to the contexts, and the need to attribute sufficient significance for public issues using discourse features is critical.

New Narratives and Social Engagement

These published proceedings draw from the various and impressive contributions to the III Interactive Film and Media Conference in August 2021. They are organized into five sections according to themes. In the first two sections, the papers concentrate on social engagement. The first set of papers focuses on racism in the time of COVID-19, indigenous identity and incarceration. The second involves interactive responses to social issues such as migration, sexual harassment, and refugees. Sections three and four foreground debates about the levels of interactivity experienced in films and games. In the third set of papers, the authors focus on the medium’s capacities to involve the player or the user in interactivity, while papers comprising the fourth set question the process of immersion and explore levels of interactivity more fully. Finally, in the fifth and final section, the papers focus on the environment of digital art, literature, and media, challenging our understanding of what is an “art” in a digital world. Here we invite you to explore the second set of the published papers in the proceedings of the #IFM2021 Virtual Conference.

Disinformation and Reflections From Usable Security

By 2019, a number of security professionals in my sphere were questioning whether combatting misinformation was part of security or if it was entirely outside of our core area. Perhaps it was best treated as a potential application domain for security when computers happened to be involved, much as politics, health, or finance are. I lean toward security as a big tent, where many disciplines form key parts of the expansive area of cybersecurity. This philosophy led me to define the area of human-centered security in 19961 as very much a part of the core of creating secure systems. Today, disinformation is moving beyond usability and social media conferences, like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), and starting to appear in security conferences such as the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy,2 signaling broader agreement that disinformation research is part of cybersecurity research.

Manajemen Produksi Siaran Berita Pojok Pantura Citra TV Selama Pandemi Covid-19


 
 Based on the background regarding the adaptation of broadcast media during the pandemic. The purpose of this research itself is to find out how the management of broadcast media production in this case Citra TV with the Pantura Corner program. The existence of social distancing regulations, of course, forces broadcast media to develop ways to continue to exist to present the latest and most accurate news. This research uses a case study method with data collection methods conducted through in-depth interviews, documents, archives, and several cases. Based on the results of the initial analysis in news coverage, journalists conducted direct interviews with sources. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, interviews were conducted using a media conference (zoom) intermediary. If the coverage activities are destroyed in the green zone area, then the coverage is carried out directly while still complying with the protocols recommended by the government.
 
 
 
 
 
 

ACM Hypertext 2021

The ACM Hypertext and Social Media Conference is a premium venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on hypertext theory, systems and applications. It is concerned with all aspects of modern hypertext research including social media, semantic web, dynamic and computed hypertext and hypermedia as well as narrative systems and applications. The 32nd edition was organized as a virtual event, hosted by the ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Pendampingan Guru SD Islam Assa’adah Dalam Penggunaan Media Conference Sebagai Sarana Media Pembelajaran Jarak Jauh

ASSISTANCE FOR ASSA’ADAH ISLAMIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN USING MEDIA CONFERENCES AS DISTANCE LEARNING MEDIA FACILITIES. The development of features in the media conference and various types of media conferences available further adds to the problems in the implementation of distance learning, especially in teachers who experience stuttering technology becomes its own problem in the implementation of distance learning in Assa’adah Islamic Elementary School of Jakarta. This we realize to be the basis of devotion to conduct training in optimizing various media conferences as a means of online learning to teachers with the target of participants able to master several media conferences (Zoom, google meet, Teams) that we teach as a solution to problems that exist in learning.

New Narratives, Racialization, Global Crises, and Social Engagement

These published proceedings draw from the various and impressive contributions to the III Interactive Film and Media Conference in August 2021. They are organized into five sections according to theme. In the first two sections, the papers concentrate on social engagement. The first set of papers focuses on racism in the time of COVID-19, indigenous identity and incarceration. The second involves interactive responses to social issues such as migration, sexual harassment, and refugees. Sections three and four foreground debates about the levels of interactivity experienced in films and games. In the third set of papers, the authors focus on the medium’s capacities to involve the player or the user in interactivity, while papers comprising the fourth set question the process of immersion and explore levels of interactivity more fully. Finally, in the fifth and final section, the papers focus on the environment of digital art, literature, and media, challenging our understanding of what is an “art” and “literature,” and what is “human” in a digital world. Here we invite you to explore the published papers in the proceedings from the #IFM2021 Virtual Conference.

Editorial

Film and media practitioners and educators have been expanding the use of digital through new experiences with unusual and innovative technical and artistic “approaches.” Likewise, researchers and academics are questioning and analyzing these new practices that increasingly dominate global society, as seen in the past months with the advent of the worldwide pandemic. In 2013, we created the IFM-Interactive Film and Media Conference to provide an inclusive educational space within the digital theory and interactive studies where researchers and practitioners could discuss and present their research and work in film and media. With this purpose, the IFM has partnered with universities worldwide and established a space for a global integration between academia and the audiovisual production community that aims to forge a valuable exchange between researchers, faculty, students, practitioners, and the community. The goal is to generate a broad debate, emphasizing the need to evaluate the increasing use of digital screens in contemporary society and how people respond artistically, socially, and politically to the challenges of the digital cultural space. The work of professors, researchers, and practitioners (artists, filmmakers, and videomakers) from various areas and several countries, including Italy, Brazil, England, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Germany, and the United States, constitutes this special issue with selected articles and audiovisuals from the #IFM2014. The aim is to launch IFM Journal first issues while archiving our preliminary works.

Editorial

Film and media practitioners and educators have been expanding the use of digital through new experiences with unusual and innovative technical and artistic “approaches.” Likewise, researchers and academics are questioning and analyzing these new practices that increasingly dominate global society, as seen in the past months with the advent of the worldwide pandemic. In 2013, we created the IFM-Interactive Film and Media Conference to provide an inclusive educational space within the digital theory and interactive studies where researchers and practitioners could discuss and present their research and work in film and media. With this purpose, the IFM has partnered with universities worldwide and established a space for a global integration between academia and the audiovisual production community that aims to forge a valuable exchange between researchers, faculty, students, practitioners, and the community. The goal is to generate a broad debate, emphasizing the need to evaluate the increasing use of digital screens in contemporary society and how people respond artistically, socially, and politically to the challenges of the digital cultural space. The work of professors, researchers, and practitioners (artists, filmmakers, and videomakers) from various areas and several countries, including Italy, Brazil, England, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Germany, and the United States, constitutes this special issue with selected articles and audiovisuals from the #IFM2014. The aim is to launch IFM Journal first issues while archiving our preliminary works.

Kindness and Control: The Political Leadership of Jacinda Ardern in the Aotearoa New Zealand COVID-19 Media Conferences

Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s management of COVID-19 media conferences demonstrated a complex negotiation of expressions of ‘kindness’ and political ‘control’ as Ardern sought to unify the national public and implement a national emergency that closed the border and suspended civil liberties and freedom of movement. This article considers the distinctive positive leadership style of Ardern while also demonstrating the ways it is grounded in the exigencies of the political field. A critical reading of Ardern’s media conference answers reveals four nominated categories: positive assertions, management of conflict/disagreement, delineation of politician role/responsibility, and political evasion. The four categories map the terrain of agreement and disagreement and they locate the subject position of the politician on that terrain.

"Writing New Worlds," Allied Media Conference 2020 Plenary

"Writing New Worlds," Allied Media Conference 2020 Plenary

Declaration of the Media Conference of the Non-Aligned (NAMEDIA)

Declaration of the Media Conference of the Non-Aligned (NAMEDIA)