This second issue of Communication Research and Practice brings together papers from across the spectrum of communication research. Jason Farman’s ‘Stories, space, and bodies: The production of embodied space through mobile storytelling’ is based on his keynote presentation to the 2014 ANZCA conference in Melbourne. It considers the spatiality of mobile media, and the critical possibilities of mobile storytelling. Related themes are also explored in Troy Innocent’s ‘The lost art of urban codemaking’, which was also a 2014 ANZCA keynote, where the author considers how tropes of play, code, and digital media enable a different mapping of urban spaces. Those who attended the 2014 ANZCA conference will remember that Innocent’s presentation would recall that it also constituted a pervasive game in which attendees could participate. The paper draws out the exciting possibilities for hybrid forms of research and scholarship at the interface of art, games, and digital media.
Trisha Lin’s ‘Online political participation and attitudes: Analysing election user-generated videos in Singapore’ considers the ways in which user-generated videos (UGVs) provided another means through which Singaporean citizens could participate in the nation’s political culture. Lin observes that these UGVs were often associated with opposition parties and a dissenting voice, in a Singaporean political environment typically associated with one-party dominance and control over the mass media. ‘Zynga’s Farmville, social games, and the ethics of big data mining’, by Michele Willson and Tama Leaver, explores what the authors refer to as a ‘social media contradiction’ between the participatory and communitarian promise of social media forms such as social games, and the corporate and commercial imperatives embedded within their Terms of Service. While the authors identify particular problems with how Zynga approached relations with its players in the Farmville game, they also draw out the wider resonances associated with these questions.
Alana Mann’s ‘Communication, organisation, and action: Theory-building for social movements’ draws attention to the communicative dimensions of organisation, with particular reference to campaigns for food sovereignty among farming communities in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. It captures the concrete social practices through which the La Vía Campesina movement uses digital technologies to maintain such a far-flung global network and to pursue social change and the reform of global trading relations and structures. In ‘Regulating ride-sharing in the peer economy’, Alice Witt, Nicolas Suzor, and Patrik Wikström consider a very different case study in the relationship between digital technologies and social change, which is the challenge presented to taxi licencing and regulation by ‘peer economy’ services such as Uber and Lyft. They argue that in order to understand and intervene in complex governance systems, there is a need to apprehend how such regulatory arrangements are constructed – and challenged – at the discursive as well as the institutional level. In particular, the rhetoric of sharing is critical to the rise of new peer economy players such as Uber and AirBnB.
Communication Research and Practice was launched internationally with a ‘Meet the Editor’ session at the International Communications Association (ICA) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico in May 2015. It was also launched at the ANZCA conference in Queenstown, New Zealand, in July 2015. With the Editorial Manager software now operational, we look forward to a diverse array of submissions, and to a renaissance of communication scholarship in Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Issue 1(3) will be a general issue, featuring papers on the future of academic publication and global communications research. Issue 1(4) will be a special issue based upon papers from the 2015 ANZCA conference held from 8–10 July in Queenstown, New Zealand, which had the theme of ‘Rethinking Communication, Space and Identity’. It will be guest edited by Donald Matheson (University of Canterbury) and Michael Bourk (University of Otago).