This week, I am attending NMIC2010 in the lovely city of Istanbul. The 2nd International Conference of New Media and Interactivity brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and countries to discuss topics such as the theoretical and conceptual framework of new media, new media and visual culture, networks and web technologies, and everyday life and new media.

This morning, I had the opportunity to listen to Christine Ogan – one of the keynote speakers – who gave an interesting talk about the role played by mass communication theory in the process wherein new theory has been developed in the field of new media research in the last ten years.

In the afternoon, I attended a number of interesting paper presentations: M. Hank Hausler spoke of urban digital media displays and the development of a protocol for generating collaborative creative content generation on such screens. At the intersection of architecture, information and culture, there is a lot of work to be done to meet the needs emerging from new modes of communication, and new ways of appropriating and navigating urban space. The things that are being done by Hank’s research group (UrbanAid, University of Sydney) seem really promising and exciting as regards possibilities for turning urban environments into connected multi-media spaces.

Melda Öncü Yıldız had written a thought-provoking paper on how the use of 3D computer graphics in movies affect the narrative and mode of storytelling, using examples from Star Trek, Star Wars, Tron, Lord of the Rings etc. to discuss this.

My colleague Ragnar Lundström did very well with his presentation on Representations of Benefit Fraud: Comparing Newspaper and Blog Discourse in Sweden and the UK. The talk was well delivered and generated the most engaged discussion of all of the papers in his session. All of the papers from NMIC2010 are available in a phonebook sized proceedings volume that will hopefully be available online in the near future.