Introduction

Abstract

Cultural intermediation is a central aspect of contemporary convergence culture, which enables audience participation with media organizations. This chapter will primarily serve to introduce the book’s conceptual parameters and provide an overall reflection on new trends for the scholarly study of convergence culture, participation, and online communities. The field has tended to move beyond the ubiquitous manifestation of convergence that sees users interacting through media on a variety of devices in numerous innovative and challenging ways, evolving new media careers, and impacting on democratic involvement from publics within a networked society. Indeed, the loudest critique on convergence, and the creative industries as a discipline that houses it, suggests that the convergence rhetoric is futuristic in its approach, is primarily constructed on speculation, reduces academic enquiry to mere market-driven activities and provides little contribution to knowledge. However, online communities and user participation continue to steadily grow through social network sites and online community platforms specifically built for the purpose of media convergence. This chapter introduces why the role of cultural intermediation is significant and how it can be employed as a framework that incorporates the theoretical debates within the media organization setting. The chapter also seeks to introduce why media organizations persist in engaging with user-created content and participatory culture. This chapter locates this scholarly debate of convergence culture alongside the empirical processes that occur between organizational hierarchy and culture to demonstrate the tension of institutional co-creative production methodologies, beyond the abstract and scholarly interpretation of convergence.