Media convergence and the transformed media environment

Convergence has been defined as:

The interlinking of computing and ICTs, communication networks, and media content that has occurred with the development and popularization of the Internet, and the convergent products, services and activities that have emerged in the digital media space. Many see this as simply the tip of the iceberg, since all aspects of institutional activity and social life from art to business, government to journalism, health and education, and beyond are increasingly conducted in this interactive digital media environment, across a plethora of networked ICT devices.

The ACMA defines media convergence as ‘the phenomenon where digitization of content, as well as standards and technologies for the carriage and display of digital content, are blurring the traditional distinctions between broadcasting and other media across all elements of the supply chain, for content generation, aggregation, distribution and audiences’.

The ACMA identifies a key consequence of convergence for consumers as being a substantial increase in ‘the availability of media content online from broadcasters, news organizations, social media sites, iTunes and YouTube, to name a few of the main media sources on an increasing array of connected devices and screens. The choice of devices for accessing the internet and 3G and wireless broadband networks is also giving users flexibility in how and where they consume media’. In their book Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, Graham Meikle and Sherman Young observe that convergence can be understood in four dimensions:

• technological—the combination of computing, communications and content around networked digital media platforms;
• industrial—the engagement of established media institutions in the digital media space, and the rise of digitally-based companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others as significant media content providers;
• social—the rise of social network media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and the growth of user-created content; and
• textual—the re-use and remixing of media into what has been termed a ‘trans media’ model, where stories and media content (for example, sounds, images, written text) are dispersed across multiple media platforms.

While technological change is a constant feature of modern economies, the changes associated with convergence, digitization and networking have been seen as providing the basis for a new ‘techno-economic paradigm’. This is a term developed by innovation economists to refer to 50-year cycles of changes to the technological and knowledge base of societies. A techno-economic paradigm is defined as:

A cluster of inter-related technical, organizational, and managerial innovations whose advantages are to be found not only in a new range of products and systems, but most of all in the dynamics of the relative cost structure of all possible inputs to production.

Historically, the major techno-economic paradigms have been: the Industrial Revolution (1780s–1830s); the Age of Steam and Railways (1840s–1870s); the Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering (1880s–1920s); the Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production (1930s–1980s); and the Age of Information and Telecommunications (1990s–present).

The rise of a new techno-economic paradigm is invariably disruptive, as it challenges established business models, industry structures, organizational frameworks and public policy settings. As it generates losers as well as winners, and disrupts the institutional status quo associated with established institutional and social arrangements, there is invariably conflict and disagreement in the process of social adaptation to technological and economic change.

    BY Mbogo Tausi

      BAPRM 42611