MEDIA CONVERGENCE &

DIGITIZATION

MEDIA INDUSTRY
BS 2
MASS COMMUNICATION
NUML LAHORE
 Defining Media Convergence

 Coming together of different equipment and tools for

producing and distributing news‟ (Grant and
Wilkinson, 2009)
 The combination of new media and old media
within a single piece of media work – the coming
together of different media products/technology.
E.g., video gaming , mobile phone -Henry Jenkins „
 Blending of the media, telecommunications and
computer industries
 Defining Media Convergence

 Media Convergence as a phenomenon involving the

interlocking of computing and information
technology companies, telecommunications
networks, and content providers from the publishing
worlds of newspapers, magazines, music, radio,
television, films, and entertainment software.
 Defining Media Convergence

 Media convergence brings together the “three Cs”

computing, communications, and contents.
 So the process of convergence that application is
built around the coming together of three things that
were previously separated
 Content-music, images, films, TV, radio,
magazines, newspapers, books and games
 Computer- hardware and software
 Communication specifically networked
telecommunication enabling connectivity downloads
and sharing as well as conversational interaction.
 The Development of the Internet & web
 From its humble origins as a military communication network
in the 1960’s the Internet became increasingly interactive by
the 1990s, allowing immediate two way communication and
one to many communication.
 By the 2000s the internet was a multimedia source for both
information & entertainment as it quickly became an integral
part of our daily lives.
 The Internet in Pakistan has been available since the early
1990s. Information and communications technology (ICT) is
one of the fastest growing industries in the country. In 2001
just 1.3% of the population used the Internet. By 2006 this
figure had grown to 6.5% and in 2012 to 10.0%. The
percentage on broad band internet users in Pakistan is now
18.8% which means now more than 32 Million people surf
internet
 The commercialization of Internet

 The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first

web browsers in the 1990s helped transform the internet
into a mass medium. Soon after these development the
Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to
battles between corporations trying to attract the most
users, and other who wished to preserve the original
public, non profit nature of the Net.
 Prior to the 1990s most of the internet’s traffic was for
email, file transfer and remote access of computer
databases. The World Wide Web changed all of that.
 The commercialization of Internet

 As the web became most popular part of the Internet,

many thought that the key to commercial success on the
Net would be through a Web browser. In 1995, Microsoft
released its own Web browser, Internet Explorer and
within few years it overtook Netscape as the most
popular Web browser. Today Firefox and Google chrome
are the top browser.
 People Embrace Digital Communication
 In digital communication an image, text, or sound is
converted into electronic signals represented as a series
of binary numbers, ones and zeros which are then
reassembled as a precise reproduction of an image, text,
or sound.
 Email was one of the earliest services of the internet and
people typically used the e-mail services connected to
their ISPs before major web corporations such as Google,
Yahoo and Hotmail began to offer free Web based email
accounts to draw users to their sites; each now has
million of users. Today, all of the top email services also
include ad in their users email messages, one of the costs
of the ‘free’ email accounts.
 The Web Goes Social

 The internet has become more than just an information

source in its second decade as a mass medium. The 2nd
generation of the internet is much more robust and social
environment, having moved toward being a fully
interactive medium with user-created content like blogs,
YouTube videos etc. In the words of law professor and
media scholar Lawrence Lessig, we have moved from
‘Read/Only’ culture on the Internet in which user can
read content, to a ‘Read/Write’ culture in which users
have power not only to read content but also to develop
their own.
 What are Social Media
 A venue for social interaction- a place where people can
share creations, tell stories and interact with others.
 Platforms that enable the interactive Web by engaging
users to participate in, comment on, and create content
as a means of communicating with their social graph,
other users, and the public.
 Social media have become a new distribution system for
media as well, challenging the one-to-many model of
traditional mass media with the many-to-many model of
social media.
 Types of Social Media

 Blogs (Years before there were status updates on

facebook, blogs enabled people to easily post their ideas
to a Website. Blogs contain articles or posts in
chronological, journal like form, often with reader
comments and links to other sites. Twitter, facebook lies
under the types of social media.
 Another internet development involves collaborative
projects in which users build something together. Wiki
Web Sites enable anyone to edit and contribute to the
content.
 Content communities

 Content communities are the best example of many-

to-many ethic of social media. Content communities
exist for sharing all types of content from text to
photos and videos. Youtube is the most well known
content community. Youtube gave rise to the viral
video- a video that becomes immediately popular by
millions sharing it through social media platforms.
 The most popular video of all time a fifty six second
home video title “charlie bit my finger-again” has
more than 457 million views.
 Social Media & Democracy
 In just a decade, social media have changed the way we
consume and relate to media and the way we
communicate with others. Social media have also proven
to be an effective tool for democracy, and for
undermining repressive regimes that thrive on serving up
propaganda and hiding their atrocities from view.
 In the united states social media have helped call
attention to issues that might not have received any
media attention otherwise. In 2011 and 2012 protestors
in the Occupy Wall Street Movement in New York at
hundreds of sites across the country took to Twitter,
Facebook, Youtube to protest against wealthy elite.
 Social Media & Democracy

 In China the communist party has tightly controlled

mass communication for decades. Today for every
social media site that gets block, a new one pops up,
making it difficult for Chinese government to have
some kind of control over mass communication that
they did just a decade ago.
 Media Convergence on our PCs and TVs

 By the early 2000s computers connected to the internet

allowed an array of digital media to converge in one
space and be easily shared. A user can now access
television shows for example Netflix, iTunes, Spotify,
Amazon and lots of other Web content on computer.
Other devices like iPods quickly capitalize on the Internet
ability to distribute such content and exhibit multiple
media content forms. In the early years of Web it seemed
that people would choose only one gateway to the
internet and media content, usually a computer or
television. With the recent technological development it
seems that consumers now regularly use more than one
avenue to access all types of media content.
 Mobile Devices Propel Convergence

 Mobile phone of the twenty first century are different

creatures smartphones that go beyond voice calls.
They can be used for texting, listening to music,
watching movie, connecting to the internet and using
hundreds of thousand of applications or apps as they
became quickly known.
 Our Changing Relationship with the Internet

 Mobile devices and social media have altered our

relationship with the internet.
 In the world in which the small screens of smartphones
are becoming the medium for linking to the Internet, we
typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one
represented by the vast searches brought to us by Google.
Instead we get a more managed Internet, brought to us
by apps or platforms that carry out specific function via
internet. Are you looking for a nearby resturant? Don’t
search on the internet use this app especially designed
for that purpose.
The changing Economics of Media & the Internet