Media Spaces, Cultural Narratives and Creative Industries: (Post) Pandemic Reconfigurations

The world we currently inhabit is in a state of flux. From post-pandemic sensibilities to rapidly datafying practices, and from newer forms of urbanisms to concerns of ecological dystopias, we witness a range of dehumanizing tendencies. Amidst these developments, we see technologies being upgraded and deployed in diverse ways, with varying degrees of uptake from society. The space of media is no exception – with pronouncements on deep mediatisation (Hepp, 2020), the resurgence of ideas around multiple temporalities (Jordheim, 2012), sound cultures of the anthropocene (Verea, 2017), visual codes of (re)presentation, dialogues across demographics, the infusion of augmented and virtual reality in changing industry dynamics – we see older forms of media and mediation being questioned, and newer configurations being discussed.

In the (post) pandemic era, media spaces have made themselves available to individuals and communities, and to the audiences and the industry, like never before. They have allowed for the redefinition of creative industries, reimagination of narratives and blurred the boundaries between media and audiences. How do we go beyond evolutionary and linear conceptualisations of this transformation? How have the virtual and physical transitioned from being binaries to being reconceptualised as a continuum? How are the technological shifts and changes being negotiated? How have these media assemblages reformulated the concepts of equity, inclusion and diversity in communities? How do cultural texts as creative commodities appropriate and reappropriate ideological discourses in the post-pandemic context? How have the participatory affordances of streaming media redefined cultures of creation and consumption? How has the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation, including platformization, in news gathering, news presentation and news consumption? How have media industry practices changed in the transformed ecology shaped by the creative economy?

ICMAC 2023, the International Conference on Media and Communication being organized by Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International University, seeks to place these important questions on the mantle, in convening Media Spaces, Cultural Narratives and Creative Industries: (Post) Pandemic Reconfigurations.