<p>Recent development of the internet encompasses elements such as social networks, blogs and wikis. With the help of these elements, popularly gathered under the umbrella term web 2.0, the pirates supporting file sharing have made the file sharing debate a national concern in Sweden.</p><p>This thesis studies the pirates’ and anti-pirates’ use of PR by qualitative case studies of organizations representing the two different sides in the debate. The use of PR by the different organizations is compared, the differences and similarities are considered and characteristics of the new PR are brought to attention.</p><p>The study finds that PR is taking a new direction and that these new ways to use PR are important to achieve success in influencing opinion. The two sides use PR in very different ways where the anti-pirates use more traditional ways of PR while the pirates make use of new PR methods virtually exclusively.</p>

Recent development of the internet encompasses elements such as social networks, blogs and wikis. With the help of these elements, popularly gathered under the umbrella term web 2.0, the pirates supporting file sharing have made the file sharing debate a national concern in Sweden. This thesis studies the pirates’ and anti-pirates’ use of PR by qualitative case studies of organizations representing the two different sides in the debate. The use of PR by the different organizations is compared, the differences and similarities are considered and characteristics of the new PR are brought to attention. The study finds that PR is taking a new direction and that these new ways to use PR are important to achieve success in influencing opinion. The two sides use PR in very different ways where the anti-pirates use more traditional ways of PR while the pirates make use of new PR methods virtually exclusively.

Drawing from the theoretical foundations of the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School and the media ethnographic “cultural studies” approach of the british Birmingham School, this study attempts to sketch out a media theoretical overview of the contemporary state of media culture. Using the term convergence culture as the foundation, this study offers a theoretical background to the two contemporary streams that are the significant and distinct tendencies of convergence culture: intermedial convergence, its contemporary state and historical tendencies that can be traced back using the past media theoretical approach of the Frankfurt School, and cultural convergence, its contemporary state and historical tendencies, which lineage in a media theoretical context can be traced back to the british ethographic “cultural studies” field. Using contemporary drama serials to identify and pinpoint these two stream, this study shows how intermedial convergence expresses itself today through media conglomeration in terms of branding, product placement and marketing as the result of the “completed” convergence between screen culture and popular music as the current defining state of commodity culture. Using the contemporary british drama serial Doctor Who I examine the processes of meaning making among members of the television series fan culture on the popular video content page youtube.com as expressions of cultural convergence. This study argues how the skills and talents developed in the interaction with popular culture and in a process of interaction between fans and participants (collective intelligence and participatory culture), will have an impact on the institutionalized knowledge “from above” and in a collective process will seep over to other fields of expertise. The study also argues, as a consequence of convergence culture, that in the contemporary state of online practices, social networking and in our interactions with digital media content, a mandatory “presence” has been created where we today are defined more through our online selves and these practices, than the ones that used to define us in our “physical” lives: “The medium is no longer just the message, we are living in a state where there is only messages”.