Sub-theme 03: (SWG) New Frontiers for the Creative Industries: Digitization, Mediation and Valuation
Call for Papers
This sub-theme is concerned with the digital challenge for enterprises operating within cultural-creative industries and its impact on mediation, consumption and valuation of cultural-creative products and experiences. Economic transformation, technology and globalization seem to continue to alter how organizations and individuals define and organize work. The development of the Internet plays an increasingly important role in such economic and socio-cultural change. An array of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools has allowed for increased digitization of information and social interactivity, and consumers are turning to computer-mediated communication in their decision-making. This has resulted in a boost of virtual media that shape the way we consume, produce and interact with each other.
Social media platforms grow by creating value from users’ contributions. This is made possible due to the digitization of for example texts, sounds and images. Users contribute with knowledge and creativity in a fast expanding global upload-download phenomenon and user-generated content (UGC) has become massively popular shaping and changing the public perception of products and organizations. Thus, ICT and social media change the traditional production function and co-create values across borders and re-define the role of intermediaries, gatekeepers and experts. The sub-theme focuses on these types of digital changes and challenges for cultural-creative organizations, its impact on the mediation of experiences and consumption of cultural-creative products following from these developments.
Sub-theme 03 thus invites contributions that challenge deeply seated definitions of creative individuals, organizations and industries and offer insights into how this creative aspect is argued and legitimized across contexts and audiences. In that, it places an emphasis on research that deals with the digital challenge, theorizing its significance for the nature and dynamics of creative industries, as well as its impact on the mediation of experiences and the creation and consumption of cultural-creative products. Further, it seeks to attract manuscripts that take stock of the domain, discussing its peculiarities, puzzles, paradoxes, and opportunities for convergence. We also hope to receive papers that compare and contrast a number of creative industries, as well as those that provide rich detail on empirical contexts from developing countries.