Panel Statement

Panel: Pervasive Media: Practice, Value, Culture

Dig­i­tal media has cre­ated an age of media plenty from the era of ana­logue scarcity the ex­ist­ing pat­terns of po­lit­i­cal econ­omy are being grad­u­ally desta­bilised. This pro­ject again brings aca­d­e­mic re­search meth­ods to bear on cul­tural in­dus­try case stud­ies to pro­duce knowl­edge about how the new gen­er­a­tion of web na­tive cre­atives will cre­ate sus­tain­able value net­works. New start-ups in dig­i­tal media are de­vel­op­ing new busi­ness mod­els rang­ing from tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing, spon­sor­ship, prod­uct place­ment, sub­scrip­tion, re­tail, and ‘pay per play’ ap­pli­ca­tion mar­kets. These mod­els cross com­mer­cial and pub­lic sec­tors; some con­tinue ex­ist­ing pat­terns of media econ­omy, some are dis­tinc­tively new. How­ever the new con­di­tions of the dig­i­tal mar­ket char­ac­ter­ized by plenty as op­posed to ana­logue scarcity re­quire new ways of de­vel­op­ing sus­tain­able busi­nesses. This ex­per­tise is as yet very un­der­de­vel­oped es­pe­cially within the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties that hold the keys to suc­cess­ful ap­pli­ca­tions and com­pelling con­tent. Per­va­sive Media can be thought of as a new field; com­mis­sion­ers, brands, clients, fund­ing bod­ies often have dif­fi­culty grasp­ing its po­ten­tial. Very few media pro­fes­sion­als, let alone mem­bers of the pub­lic, un­der­stand what Per­va­sive Media is, or could be­come. We are at a new fron­tier. The work of the Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio is un­der­pinned by the work of de­f­i­n­i­tion and tax­on­omy through a se­ries of ex­per­i­men­tal pro­duc­tions that begin to de­ter­mine what this new form of media de­liv­ery can be. At this pe­riod of de­vel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers from art, de­sign, and tech­nol­ogy find lit­tle time or com­mon ground to re­flect on their prac­tice. Aca­d­e­mic ex­per­tise in a knowl­edge ex­change con­text can fa­cil­i­tate this re­flec­tion out­side of the day to day con­straints of the mar­ket.

• Jon Dovey has re­cently been ap­pointed to the new Fac­ulty of Cre­ative Arts at Uni­ver­sity of the West of Eng­land, UK, with a view to rais­ing the pro­file of media re­search there. Since join­ing UWE he has es­tab­lished the Dig­i­tal Cul­tures Re­search Cen­tre; in­ter­fac­ing in­dus­try and acad­e­mia and based at the Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio. Jon is a lead­ing re­searcher in the field of in­ter­ac­tive media and gam­ing and spent the first 15 years of his work­ing life in video pro­duc­tion, work­ing through the early years of Chan­nel Four as a re­searcher, ed­i­tor and even­tu­ally as Pro­ducer. He worked prin­ci­pally in doc­u­men­tary and ex­per­i­men­tal video, co found­ing orig­i­nal scratch artists Go­rilla Tapes in 1984. His video pro­jects gained in­ter­na­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion and recog­ni­tion and have now taken their place in the doc­u­mented his­to­ries of UK Video Art. After mov­ing to Bris­tol in 1990 he worked at the Wa­ter­shed Media Cen­tre for two years be­fore teach­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth in 1992 and then at both the Uni­ver­sity of the West of Eng­land School of Cul­tural Stud­ies and the Uni­ver­sity of Bris­tol. As Head of the De­part­ment of Drama at Bris­tol Uni­ver­sity he pi­loted a £13m re­de­vel­op­ment through Uni­ver­sity plan­ning stages. He is Knowl­edge Trans­fer Fel­low at the the Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio 2010-2011 and is re­search­ing the the Aes­thet­ics and Value of Per­va­sive Media in­no­va­tions.