The theme of the upcoming conference in San Francisco, Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique, deals with the tension between new opportunities and new limits of our present-day communications environment. Many are observing with excitement the emergence of new opportunities for the public to create content -through file sharing, message boards, blogs, wikis, webcams, mobile communication, and diverse forms of peer-to-peer communication. Others remain sceptical, regarding such claims for change as overstated -- questioning the supposed rise in interactive, alternative, or democratising communication.

The conference theme will include critical analyses of contemporary communication practices, processes, and structures, examining their relations to power and control. It will explore the conditions under which critical voices may be incorporated or facilitated. And it will raise questions about the constitutive and emergent properties of communication, mediated or not, new or established, in order to understand how the conditions for creating communications are changing and to pursue the wider implications of these changes across the field of communication and beyond.

The theme panels
In addition to the keynote panels, outlined in the last newsletter by Sonia Livingstone, 16 academic theme panels are included in the program. These were selected through the standard process of conference review, a difficult task since 35 panel proposals (including 2 round table proposals) and 21 individual paper proposals had been submitted for the conference theme. I'd like to thank the 86 colleagues who reviewed these submissions, resulting in the acceptance 13 panel proposals, 12 individual papers and 4 presentations for the interactive paper session.

Although these theme panels are (as always) characterised by their diversity, we can distinguish two main groups: the first focuses on the users, viewers, consumers, spectators, subjects and participants, in order to evaluate their media uses in relation to the social, the cultural and the political; the second group deals with the mediating role of different subsystems in this process.

In the first group, the panels (critically) zoom in on evaluating the politico-democratic, social ,and cultural potential of media. In Creating Communication: Media, Citizenship, and North American Young People, researchers examine how politics, citizenship, and identity emerge among young people both off- and online. The panel Creating Alternative Channels of Discourse on Iraq discusses the creation and impact of alternative media channels in depictions of the antiwar movement and debates over Iraq. A third panel, Youth and Digital Storytelling: Connecting Multimodal Composing and Multiliteracies, looks at participation in the creation of online content, bringing in some of the young people involved to talk about their stories. (Dis)connecting Communities considers the potential of diverse community structures, including Wikipedia, community radio, and fan communities. Finally, Is Reality a Scarce or Abundant Resource? takes a bird's-eye perspective on these issues, by linking them to our notions of reality.

A second set of panels is more explicitly critical. The Limits to Creating Critical Content Online panel challenges celebratory accounts and discourses about the blogosphere. Participants in Creating Communication Rights: Perspectives on the Emergence of a Global Social Movement examine the value of contemporary mobilizations around communication and information rights issues. In Surveillance, Consent, and Dissent, relations among communication technologies and alienation, exclusion, surveillance is charted. Creating the Neoliberal Subject in Health Communication explores how changing communication practices are involved in the emergence of new health subjects, understood as patient or citizen-consumers, stratified in various submarkets. Finally, the panel Resisting Control: Reality Television as Critique recognizes the processes of power and control, but deals with the possibilities of resisting them.

In the second group, the role of a variety of subsystems is scrutinized, including technology and industry, journalism, and law. In The Creative 'Affordances' of Communication Technologies and Content, Technology, and the Self, the role of technology becomes the focal point. In Channels of Creativity: "Industry Lore" and Cultural Production in a Post-Network Era focus is on the television system as an industry, while Creating Communication in the Journalistic Field: New Developments and New Ways of Thinking about Them looks at the transformations in the creation of content in the journalistic field. Finally, the panel on User Rights in the UGC Era: Media Literacy, Copyright and Fair Use analyzes the questions that are raised by user-generated content in relation to the concepts of copyright and fair use.

In addition, one roundtable transcends these debates and takes a self-reflexive stance on academia and communication studies. Defining Global Media Studies: Content, Control, and Critique features a debate about the meaning and implications of the emerging area of "global media studies" for various sub-fields of communication and media studies. It includes representatives from the Intercultural and Development, Communication Technology and Policy, Philosophy of Communication, Political Communication, and other ICA divisions.

Theme events: discussion panels
The conference theme has not only served its purpose as a structuring set of ideas for organising academic panels. Given the nature of the theme, and its emphasis on creation and participation, their potentialities and their weaknesses, it would be remiss not to invite into the conference those who seek to translate these concepts into practice on a daily basis. For this reason, three 'grassroots panels' will be held in the Hilton on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Here the organisational talents of Seeta Peña Gangadharan proved to be priceless.

The first grassroots panel, Participatory Models and Alternative Content Production, examines attempts to develop, use, augment and promote structures for participation in production processes. Discussion will compare content creators' strategies for social inclusion, democratic involvement and technological literacy, by looking not only at technological or political imperatives but at institutional ones as well.

Alternative Journalisms will center on the practice of alternative journalism as it has existed in the past and in the present. Panelists will discuss alternative journalism's successes and failures, its critical capacities, and the challenges of working in a media- and information-saturated environment. The event will conclude by reflecting on ways to enhance alternative journalisms.

In the third grassroots panel, Civil Society and Regulation, a number of advocates attempting to implement changes in regulatory regimes will review current debates in order to illuminate the ways in which media, communications, and information policy intersects with citizens, communities, and constituencies at the grassroots level. They will discuss citizens' abilities to inform decision-making about government and governance of media, communications, and information as well as advocates' abilities to monitor and contribute to policy debates.

The fourth grassroots panel has a distinctly local nature combined with a clear translocal potential. As each host city always incorporates the promise of a treasure of local experiences, practices and discourses, it was deemed necessary to organise a discussion panel on San Francisco itself. This session, entitled A Dialogue About Mobility: Wi-Fi Rollout and the San Francisco Model, looks at our host city as a model for using Wi-Fi in creative ways in order to meet the needs of local communities, global business and education while promoting the city as a hub of technology. Organised by the Urban Communication Foundation, it will bring together representatives of local government, community and academic worlds to discuss the challenges and forward-thinking policies of Wi-Fi today.

Theme events: excursions
Participation should be playful. So, the theme organising team has added two events to the list of excursions. On Saturday, we will visit the ZEUM - San Francisco's nonprofit multimedia arts and technology museum. Its mission is to foster creativity and innovation in young people and their families, on the assumption that the creative tools and processes associated with the arts and technology are especially useful for cultivating the kind of critical thinking and imagination youth need. ZEUM provides hands-on learning and creative self-expression, using animation, sound and video production, theatre and live performance, and visual arts to encourage, build, and articulate the voice of children and youth. This event is an opportunity to get to know ZEUM, its way of working, and the vision of the people behind it. After a presentation and a debate on the museum as a tool for stimulating media literacy, there will be time for a hands-on guided tour.

On Sunday, we take playing to a different level, with a visit to San Francisco's Musee Mechanique, which is cosponsored by the Games Studies Division. The museum is one of the world's largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and 'antique' arcade machines. The collection of arcade games should prove an interesting step back into the past, where Centipede meets Asteroids and Pacman goes Spyhunting. The combination of these arcade games with older mechanical games shows their affiliation to a century-old culture of playing. After an introduction by John Sherry (Vice Chair of the Games Studies Special Interest Group), the owner, Dan Zelinsky, will take the participants on a journey from turn of the century hand cranked music boxes to modern video arcade games. This visit will again be highly participatory and hands-on, as all machines are still in working condition and can be used for they were meant to be used: to play.

The film program on Sunday
The Film Program will take place in connection with the 2007 ICA conference, focusing on films related to its theme. This 1-day event will showcase productions by local independent Bay Area filmmakers and film collectives. These films, all examples of alternative and democratizing communication, illustrate the diversification of content creation and distribution within diverse and complex communication environments. The program also highlights the relevance of film as a communication tool and how people, including marginalized voices, participate in the creative process.

Two of these films show a selection of the work of the Other Cinema project and the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. The third film is Mark Becker's Romantico, a documentary about Mexican musician Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez, who returns home to his beloved daughters after years spent playing San Francisco's taquerías and hipster joints. Straight Outta Hunters Point, directed by Kevin Epps, takes an insider tour of Hunter's Point, one of San Francisco's public housing projects. Maquilapolis, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, shows life, work, and resistance in the multinationally owned factories that came to Mexico for its cheap labor. Finally, The Weather Underground, a 2003 Academy Awards Nominee for best documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, interweaves extensive archival material with modern-day interviews to explore the incredible story of "The Weather Underground."

The film program is coordinated by Susana Kaiser and John Kim from the Department of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco.

The theme website For more information about of conference theme activities, please have a look at: http://www.vub.ac.be/icatheme07.

A final word of thanks
Constructing this theme programme was the joint effort of the so-called theme organisation team, which provided tremendous support to me. So I want to express my sincere gratitude to Benjamin De Cleen, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Susana Kaiser, and John Wonyup Kim. Further, Sonia Livingstone and Michael Haley have always been there to provide advice, support and help in putting (and keeping) the theme programme together, which is also very much appreciated.