cfp.english.upenn.edu

CFP for Proposed Panel

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference - March 6-10, 2013 - Chicago, IL

Panel Subject: Simultaneous Media: An Emerging Normality

This proposed panel interrogates the increasing importance of simultaneity in our current media landscape. Although film and media scholars have frequently debated the functions, effects, and implications of new, locative, digital, and convergent communication technologies, there is a curious lack of discussion about how these media are actually being used—more and more, not in sequence, but simultaneously with one another: texting at the movie theater, browsing Twitter while watching TV, reading a newspaper while listening to the radio, etc. In addition, as technologies become more central to work and education, media multitasking has become the new norm: workers constantly juggle between email, texts, and other tasks; laptop-using students now toggle their classroom attentions between the lecture and their Facebook page; etc.

Popular critics (Carr 2010; Jackson 2009; Turkle 2011), advertisers (Pilotta and Schultz 2005), and social scientists (Foehr 2006) are increasingly focusing on the implications and extent of media multitasking and simultaneous media use, but to date there has been almost no critical academic discussion of the practice. This panel seeks to investigate how simultaneity informs the ways media are now produced and consumed, and what the implications may be for us as media scholars.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

-the impact of simultaneous screens on narrative, textuality, or paratextuality
-the importance of simultaneity in convergence culture
-industrial studies of overlapping media and “second screens”
-the role of media multitasking in neoliberal work and learning environments
-textual analyses of how multitasking and simultaneous media are represented in film and TV
-audience studies of simultaneous media users
-gender and multitasking
-histories of multitasking and media
-philosophical considerations of distraction or simultaneity
-studies of spaces that enforce single-screen attention (i.e. movie theaters) and how simultaneous screens challenge or reconfigure those spaces

Please send a 250-300 word abstract and brief biographical note to Dan Hassoun (hass0265@umn.edu) by August 1, 2012. To contribute, you must be a member of SCMS and planning to attend the conference in March 2013. Please paste the text into the email rather than attaching a Word document. Selections will be announced no later than August 15, 2012. Contact me with any questions.