[Air-L] New Media Theory conference

[Johnson, T]

New Media Theory:  How Far Have we Traveled?
 
Nearly 15 years ago Merrill Morris and Christine Ogan, in their seminal work
³The Internet as Mass Medium,² chastised researchers for not taking the
Internet seriously as a mass medium, noting that the introduction of any new
medium must make us rethink basic theoretical assumptions in our field. They
argued that the Internet threw some of our basic assumptions into question:
What is an audience? What is a communication medium?  How are messages
mediated?  
 
Clearly the mass communication field has taken up the researchers¹ charge to
conduct research on the Internet as well as other computer-mediated media
and other communication devices such as the cell phone.  But to what degree
have we reconceptualized our theories or developed new ones to take into
account unique properties of the Internet and other new communication
technologies? 
 
This conference: ³New Media Theory:  How Far Have we Traveled?² invites
scholars to examine what influence computer-mediated communication and new
communication media have on traditional theories in the field such as
agenda-setting, framing, uses and gratifications and gatekeeping (to name a
few) as well as explore how existing theories such as networking theory,
social presence and differential gains have been applied to the Internet.
 
The conference is co-sponsored by The Texas Tech Convergent Media Resource
Center and the Communication Technology Division of AEJMC and will be held
April 15th and 16th at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.  Please submit an
abstract of no more than 500 words by January 19th, 2010 to
Techconvergence10 at gmail.com. You will be informed of acceptance by February
19th.  The top three papers will be published in the Web Journal of Mass
Communication Research http://wjmcr.org/.  To be considered for a top three
paper, papers must be submitted to techconvergence10 at gmail.com by March 19,
2010.