ABSTRACT
Nothing exemplifies contemporary challenges to media research more than does the web, creating as it does a new virtual geographical landscape, one that has connecting spaces that are not too far removed in effect from the wardrobe leading to Narnia (Lewis, 1950). The web, with its ‘mingling of media’ or ‘multi-mediacy’, and its immediacy – instantly linking between media and cultural, economic, political and social domains – provides an expedient frame for internationalizing media. Web media forms and content are shaped by multi-mediacy and immediacy. And web users must surely, under a constructivist logic, interact with web media to shape this character. The web is a plexus of venues. It is important to understand the web venues as ‘storied places’, with architectural hierarchies (Sundén, 2006: 287). The first part of this chapter provides a discussion of the nature of the web as venue. Seven propositions are made in this regard, the seventh unfolding into a matrix of immediacy. Websites of an organization that operates across the immediacy matrix, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), are subjected to a sociographical and iconographical analysis in the second part. The aim is to find out how the UNDP-constructed storied venues promote organizational identity while providing avenues for ‘grassrooting’ or interaction with local places (Castells, 2005: 627-36).
