Media conduction: Festivals, networks, and boundaried spaces

This article reports on extended qualitative fieldwork regarding media festivals, including those concerning both film and comic book culture. It is also an initial attempt to shape the trends and patterns suggested by this fieldwork into a theory of media conduction. My interest is in how the festival environment represents a kind of rift through which a normally hidden or out-of-reach area of meaningful activity becomes visible to those not already connected to the event, and how organizers use the value of this access to promote both their event(s) and the media persons and practices with which they stand in symbiotic relationship. The theory of media conduction attempts to account for the power discourses present in the space and time of the media festival, with particular reference to the era of synchronic, interactive, networked electronic communication technology, sometimes referred to as "Web 2.0."