Medium specificity arguments have had a long history in film theory. Forged primarily in studies seeking to locate the differences between cinema and theatre,1 or cinema and literature,2 such arguments have a much earlier history in the idea that art forms can be differentiated from one another on the basis of their means of imitation. Medium specificity theories generally concern themselves with the idea that different media have 'essential' and unique characteristics that form the basis of how they can and should be used. Within Film Studies, interest in both the idea of a 'cinematic apparatus' and the formative period of early cinema can be viewed as reactions emerging from a long period of engagement with medium specificity theories. Curiously, while it is common practice to use cinema as an analogy for multimedia, 3 there is little direct discussion of the relevance, or irrelevance, of medium specificity arguments in the broader space of 'new media' theory. 4 Our intent in this article is not to revive medium specificity arguments as these have already been problematised, but rather to establish them as a concern for new media theory, and also to extract from them a concept of specificity that can account for the different characteristics of established and emergent media.
An edited extract from a keynote address at the third Screenwriting Research Network conference, ‘Screenwriting Research: History, Theory and Practice’, at the University of Copenhagen in 2010,1 this piece focuses on what I have termed the ‘object problem’ in
screenwriting research. I pay specific attention to how we might address the object problem by thinking about different attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research.
In 2019, the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) celebrated its 25th anniversary. To commemorate this milestone, the organisers of the 2019 annual ANZCA conference in Canberra, Australia, convened a panel of past presidents involved in the transition of the Australian Communication Association (ACA), founded in 1980, into ANZCA. This article presents an edited transcript of that panel, with a pre-amble situating the panel in the context of current international research, with the dual purpose of marking an historical occasion, and also contributing to international research into the field.
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