Presidential actions at ICA take their time to unfold. Under Ron Rice's presidency, the idea of publishing a theme book to accompany the annual conference theme - which is proposed each year by the incoming President-Elect and Conference Chair - was first approved. This year, following the San Francisco conference, with its theme of "Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique", the first theme book has been published - indeed, it is out this very month, and will be on sale in the Montreal conference in May.

As announced on the ICA website (see https://www.icahdq.org/publications/themesessions.asp), the idea was for a volume in which chapters selected from the theme panels and sessions are "written in an engaging style so that members of other disciplines would be interested in reading this series. As such, these collections are not conference proceedings but are a unique set of essays that capture insights and agendas of our top scholars."

ICA's first theme book is entitled "Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation," and has been edited by Theme Chair for the 2007 conference, Nico Carpentier, with his colleague Benjamin De Cleen and published by Cambridge Scholars Press. As I noted in my preface to this volume, this is a very topical theme - as was evidenced by submissions to the conference theme last year, by attendance at the plenary theme sessions and, indeed, by submissions to the theme book.

Topicality is not sufficient for scholarly scrutiny, of course - the theme must also be significant. Every decade or so, it seems, the academy is gripped by a fascination with, an imperative to understand, a particular theory, epistemology or change in the world. Following the initial flurry of activity and debate, the legacy of the research that results generally outlasts the early excitement, spawning further waves of elaboration and critique before a new fascination emerges. This is not to say that we are the mere pawns of fashion, but rather that research is social, shaped by human communication processes and subject to highs and low in intensity, convergence and significance.

Currently, our field is fascinated by the social and technological transformations in the conditions by which communication can be created - as evidenced in the public's enthusiastic appropriation of social networking, file sharing, message services, blogs and wikis. Though more obvious in wealthy countries, parallel shifts are occurring also in developing countries, pointing up how the affordances of these networked, hybrid and convergent information and communication technologies are themselves shaped by processes of globalisation, democratisation and privatisation.

As the public rushes to become practitioners, experimenting with and enjoying the new opportunities to communicate in potentially vast networks, the academy is, for once, keeping pace - thinking about, researching and deliberating over these opportunities, while also engaging with and advising designers, activists, policy-makers and governments. All this seems to demand new concepts, new methods and ever more multidisciplinary research.

Yet until recently, our field has been comfortably bifurcated into the highly contrasted modes of one-to-one communication (predominantly conducted face-to-face throughout most of human history), and one-to-many communication (this potential for mass communication arising only through the particular historical conjunction of the rise of mass society and the development of mass media technologies in the late industrial age).

Though new developments may have a short history, they also have a long past. Communication historians have been charting the blurring and shifting relations among diverse forms of communication (mass vs. interpersonal, mainstream vs. alternative, national vs. transnational, etc.) for some decades. But only recently have the changing conditions for creating communication achieved sufficient recognition (and a sufficient critical mass of users) to generate the intensity of discussion required to divert established research agendas, stimulate debate across theoretical boundaries and so facilitate new arguments and findings - as reflected in the theme volume from the conference.

The annual conference theme, "Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique", invited examination of the ways in which people participate in complex information and communication environments. Who, today, is communicating with whom and how? And who is listening to this explosion of communication? How shall we understand, and research, the transformative potential of amateur producers, citizen journalists or 'user-generated' content? Are the subaltern gaining 'voice' and subverting established authorities? What cultural, expert or institutional framings shape the creation of content across political, professional and interpersonal spheres, and with what consequences?

In seeking answers to such questions, critique is vital in at least three ways. First, our current fascination with the changing conditions for creating communication renews our critical gaze on the hierarchical authority structures and commercialised institutions of communication that dominated the last century. Only now, perhaps, can we believe - hope - that things could be otherwise. Witness the reinvigoration of the media reform movement and the communication rights movement, among other radical initiatives.

Less exciting but just as vital is a second form of critique, that of reflexive self critique: in the face of optimism on all sides, the academy must scrutinise the claims made, insist on their grounding in rigorous evidence and ensure the debates do not rush ahead so fast that lessons from past new media or earlier social change are forgotten. With diverse communication subfields engaged in parallel discussions - from health communication to journalism studies, from organisational to popular communication, from feminist to communication and technology studies - we must not reinvent the wheel, forget to learn from earlier mistakes or perpetuate rather than challenge popular myths of change.

But third and most important, the academy must be critical of the optimistic hyperbole accompanying technologically-mediated social change, proffering a counterbalancing pessimism in contemporary debates. As communication possibilities are reconfigured, some are further excluded or newly marginalised, with rather few among even the world's wealthy populations actually engaging in creative or emancipatory forms of participation.

Critique is required to chart the fast footwork of established power (both state and private sector) as it re-establishes, even extends, traditional forms of political and market dominance, co-opting alternative forms and practices as fast as their innovators can invent them. Specialist expertise in ethical, technological and legal domains is required to track the interests at stake as innovations, policies and practices are shaped and disseminated. Sceptics rightly ask whether, in the grand scheme of things, it really threatens established institutions that people can form their online health support groups or that citizen journalists make their own news? Indeed, the public is not necessarily the hero of our new narrative, for much content created by the public is offensive, intolerant or banal, serving to exclude rather than include.

"Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation" showcases some of the best work addressing these and other questions, analysing the conditions, the complexities and the significance of contemporary forms of technologically-mediated communication and participation for ordinary members of public and for society more widely.

It asserts that critique is needed more than ever, as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. Only with a critical lens can we hope to recognise both the diversification of political expression, the exuberant irreverence of youth and the quieter flowering of digital storytelling among hitherto marginalised voices as well as the anti-democratic responses of repressive governments and the legal, regulatory or economic barriers that restrict the potential of the contemporary communication environment.

Since, in addressing such questions, the very standpoints from which we as researchers draw our strength are also challenged in the context of globalisation, all this adds up to an agenda that, I believe, will stimulate communication scholars in the years ahead. This volume sets the scene most ably, and I look forward to the debate as it unfolds.