[EXTENDED DEADLINE] 2013 SCMS panel CFP on Simultaneous Media

From: Dan Hassoun <[email protected]>

Call for Papers for Proposed Panel -- *Extended Deadline Aug. 12*

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference - March 6-10, 2013 -
Chicago, IL

Panel Subject: Simultaneous Media: An Emerging Normality

This proposed panel interrogates the increasing importance of simultaneity
in our current media landscape. Although film and media scholars have
frequently debated the functions, effects, and implications of new,
locative, digital, and convergent communication technologies, there is a
curious lack of discussion about how these media are actually being
used—more and more, not in sequence, but simultaneously with one another:
texting at the movie theater, browsing Twitter while watching TV, reading a
newspaper while listening to the radio, etc. In addition, as technologies
become more central to work and education, media multitasking has become
the new norm: workers constantly juggle between email, texts, and other
tasks; laptop-using students now toggle their classroom attentions between
the lecture and their Facebook page; etc.

Popular critics (Carr 2010; Jackson 2009; Turkle 2011), advertisers
(Pilotta and Schultz 2005), and social scientists (Foehr 2006) are
increasingly focusing on the implications and extent of media multitasking
and simultaneous media use, but to date there has been almost no critical
academic discussion of the practice. This panel seeks to investigate how
simultaneity informs the ways media are now produced and consumed, and what
the implications may be for us as media scholars.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

-the impact of simultaneous screens on narrative, textuality, or
paratextuality
-the importance of simultaneity in convergence culture
-industrial studies of overlapping media and “second screens”
-the role of media multitasking in neoliberal work and learning environments
-textual analyses of how multitasking and simultaneous media are
represented in film and TV
-audience studies of simultaneous media users
-gender and multitasking
-histories of multitasking and media
-philosophical considerations of distraction or simultaneity
-studies of spaces that enforce single-screen attention (i.e. movie
theaters) and how simultaneous screens challenge or reconfigure those spaces

Please send a 250-300 word abstract and brief biographical note to Dan
Hassoun ([email protected]) by *August 12, 2012*. To contribute, you must be
a member of SCMS and planning to attend the conference. Please paste the
text into the email rather than attaching a Word document. Selections will
be announced no later than August 15, 2012. Contact me with any questions.