SXSWi has quickly turned into a must-see conference for me, while I can’t say the same for SCMS. There’s an assumption here that much of the interactive media discourse could benefit from being put into a historical context — and I buy that, definitely — but I also fear that interactive media will be shoehorned into forms of discourse and analysis that have been predominant in the ways people have studied film and TV over the years. Interactive media aren’t “texts,” for instance, and the people who use them aren’t “audiences” per se; there comes a certain degree of baggage with the film/TV scholarship that doesn’t fit terribly well in the interactive world. Or, at least, doesn’t accurately describe the ways that the creators and proponents of these media think about what they do?