Media Convergence: Creating Content, Questioning Relationships

The development, dissemination, and proliferation of multimedia and media convergent texts raise a number of pressing questions for literacy scholars in general and compositionists in particular. What kinds of literacy practices are students developing through their use and composition of multimodal and new media texts? What genres are used in the creation of such texts, and why? Are there particular genres that are favored? How are older genres remediated or recast through media convergence? What research methodology challenges are posed when attempting to study multimodal and new media texts? How might compositionists use media convergence to teach students about academic literacies, about research, about the changing nature of “writing?” What might media convergence look like in the future? Perhaps most immediately, the phrase itself—“media convergence”—begs a question: what, exactly, is converging? This special issue of Computers and Composition on “Media Convergence” poses answers—sometimes tentative, sometimes provocative—to these questions.