Media Convergence Handbook - Vol. 1

Within this chapter, we address convergence as matter of evolutionary process. Key terminology is introduced and discussed, and provide a critical overview of the phenomenon of convergence. This chapter presents several key-ideas existing in literature around the thematic area of convergence, and provides insights concerning the media convergence process. We contribute to the media study debate about causes and effects of the media evolution process by highlighting trends and gaps in research and in the overall field of media convergence. The chapter rounds up with a discussion of the different book chapters, and their contribution to the field. We see this chapter as an introduction chapter for readers that want to understand the phenomenon of convergence.

Convergence seems to be a new concept related to the field of communication. Nevertheless it is important to remark that the idea of convergence is a classic one in order to understand the relationship between humans and communication processes. The present chapter depicts the evolution of convergence as a theoretical framework, from philosophical perspectives such as Simondon’s idea of genesis and McLuhan’s laws of media to the contemporary approaches such as Jenkin’s convergence culture. Instead of thinking of convergence as a contemporary characteristic of communication environment, or merely a technological objectuality, we propose to rethink it as a reloaded term used as a word rather than as an abstract concept in current literature. Since words can develop many meanings, convergence has been used to a variety of aspects in recent years.

Public policy perspectives and convergence related laws seem to assume that convergent technology is predisposed towards convergent organizations, convergent content, convergent consumer behavior and convergent markets; such a cloud of ‘convergent’ thinking in constructing policy perspectives does seem to naturally create a necessity for countervailing or compensatory regulatory intervention from a Free Speech perspective that privileges public access, plurality and diversity.

However, convergence has lead to the emergence of diversified pockets of content. The inherently disaggregated, divergent structure of the Internet has spawned a ‘democratic culture’. Although concerns about control and power continue to exist in a digital world, it is unlikely that even media conglomerates will find it easy to dominate the media in a convergent world tempered by divergence.

The perspective of cross-media ownership, concentration of ownership and competition laws are historically ordained paradigms that need to be revisited to shape public policy responses with respect to convergence. We prefer a nuanced regulatory approach based on a ‘layered network regulatory model’ that differentially treats the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ network layers based on the realities of media concentration and the ‘convergence’ experience; and propose an alternative policy of ‘affirmative public ownership’ to articulate ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ on behalf of public values.

This paper investigates how far the print and online markets are characterized by market failure in order to examine whether sufficient journalistic quality will be produced in the online market. Although the often-claimed non-excludability from consumption in online and broadcasting markets does not exist from a market failure perspective, it is found that the online market still provides worse conditions than print markets regarding the provision of journalistic quality. This is why an increasing shift of recipients towards the Internet and away from television and newspapers is threatening the fulfillment of mass media’s functions in a democratic society. From a regulatory perspective, combining economic and normative arguments suggests that public service broadcasters should be allowed to expand their activities in the online market.

Journalism and technology are inextricably intertwined with each other (Harley 2009). Web 2.0 and its related technologies have profoundly disrupted modern journalism which is in the midst of tumultuous change, driven primarily by technological developments and economic uncertainty on a global scale (Picard, 2011). Scholars conceptualize journalism’s transformation and explain the changes occurring at different levels under the rubric of convergence (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2009). Convergence is commonly perceived as a multidimensional construct allowing for different conceptions and operationalizations (Domingo et al., 2007; Dupagne & Garrison, 2006). Inherent in the concept of convergence is the notion of integration and collaboration (Erdal, 2011).

Traditional media and blogs compete for the attention of the general audience and readership—thus addressing the expectations of end-consumers. This competition and the underlying convergence of content and technology imply new strategic challenges for media businesses. One obvious route would be to diverse content and target a selected audience. But did traditional took this route? To address this question we used a newly developed classification and clustering technique for the online presences of media and blogs. We applied the technique to empirical data gathered for the online presences of German-speaking media and to their respective RSS feeds. Blogs were chosen as new strategic challengers—in particular when it comes to redundancy with respect to content. We put the findings into the context of the current debate about blogs vs. traditional journalism and the respective intellectual property rights, as well as the implication for the above mentioned strategic challenges.

This chapter investigates technological issues that have arisen in implementing cross-media publishing. Specifically the various content types (text, pictures, audio, video, etc.) that are included in cross-media publishing require different management and prerequisites with respect to the media publishing channels and the involved terminals at both ends, production and consumer. A modular content documentation, selection and management model is proposed for intelligent cross-media publishing automation, taking advantage of contemporary semantic multimodal interaction, sophisticated meta-data processing and Web 2.0/3.0 trends.

In this research, the information design is explored in the context of technological changes, with the aim of determining does the application of converged media content affects on the evaluation of information credibility. Research hypothesis was: by using different levels of media convergence in the digital space, the assessment of the media messages can be changed. The empirical study was conducted using the web pages that were comprised of substantially same information but presented using different levels of media convergence. The research showed the impact of visual presentation technology on the process of decoding messages through two measured elements—number of eye fixations on the content and duration of content usage. Obtained eyetracking measurements gave objective data on the use of media and the data obtained by a questionnaire gave a subjective assessment of the information credibility expressed through four dimensions: objectivity, reliability, competence and stringency. Results obtained by using the system for measuring eye movements showed that there were statistically significant differences in the use of media content according to the used level of media convergence. Visual design of the site influenced on the subjective assessment of the credibility of the content. Results of measurements of fixation number and duration of visits to media content confirmed the hypothesis that the mode of graphic presentation of information affects on the perception of content. Questionnaire has confirmed that usage of convergent media content changes the subjective perception of information credibility.

Open access journals have developed new business processes and revenue models. Within our contribution we will describe and discuss a new service and revenue model for open access journals: the personal book printing service for the Open Journal System (OJS). To start with, we will give a short introduction to open access journals and their revenue models, new print-on-demand services, and the most often used open journal system. Building upon this state of the art, we will describe the technical prototype of our new “personal book printing service” for OJS and discuss our first experiences.

Digitalization of information has led publishers to contemplate how to innovate new business models for their media services. This article discusses the evolution of media business models by revealing their convergence and divergence. The study proposes and uses a framework for analyzing business model evolution in three publishing industries in Finland; books, newspapers, and magazines. The framework is based on two dimensions: the organizational goal for business model change and the strength of belief systems. It offers a tool that helps managers at publishers and other media companies develop their business models by focusing not only on material aspects of business model, such as the ecosystem and revenue logic, but also on belief systems. Publishers face competition by entrants from other industries and the emergence of practices that are reconfigured and shared across diverse publishing industries. We suggest that managers need to review their belief systems that either enable or prevent the development of novel media business models.

Media convergence presents a few noticeable dimensions, and requests an interdisciplinary research approach. We conduct a long-run analysis of the main initiatives of technological standardization carried out in the realm of “traditional” (cable, satellite and terrestrial) digital TV, focusing on Europe, to assess the technological determinants of its apparent trends to convergence. This analysis inevitably calls into question IPR strategies and policies. In particular, we investigate how private incentives and the public agenda for interoperability have shaped the on-going convergence of the TV sector toward an “IP-based” meta-platform. Despite the widespread usage of open standards and formats, the real potential for interoperability along the digital TV filière has been modest, and mostly limited to the transmission segment. This is mainly due to the strong proprietary features characterizing the TV sector, where viable content production and provision rests on effective control of content IPR. Further, patent portfolio strategies and control of crucial copyrights become increasingly central for competing in the converging TV sector, where former telecom companies, traditional TV operators and new OTT players strive to become gatekeepers of essential layers of the new IP-based delivery platforms. To sum up, while technological opportunities today do enable pervasive media interoperability and affordable convergence at the user-level, private incentives relentlessly push the industry toward standards fragmentation and the construction of walled gardens.

This work presents the development of iMediaTV, a low-cost Interactive Television service designed to adapt in order to cover varying converging content presentation and interaction requirements: from standard streamed content to new-media artwork. In this process, content, system and user complexities are introduced that need to be resolved before artwork with different requirements may be supported effectively for broadcasting. This chapter presents and examines those issues from the content-requirements perspective using a number of real-life case studies. Under this context it is shown that content with novel presentation/interaction requirements may act as a driver for convergence through the development of interactive television systems that feature advanced presentation and interaction methods. Another issue addressed in this work is the potential exploitation of the technology by those wishing to build and explore its capabilities in order to use it as a new converging communications medium. The proposed strategies may be deployed alongside traditional media-broadcasting structures enabling smooth user transition to interactive television.

The process of digitalization has detached television content from the television screen with a tendency of media convergence. In the twenty-first century social mobile media and the Internet with the help of different mobile devices have gained more and more ground in TV-production. In this chapter the media convergence(s) taken place around television, acting as a central cluster, is studied through the aspect of second screens. It concentrates on the convergence of twenty-first century’s television and mobile devices that are acting as second screens in facilitating TV watching experience.

This article examines the development of digital terrestrial broadcasting systems from the perspective of the political economy (Mosco, 1996). It studies the international and intermedial relations between radio and television technology development projects in Europe, the US, and Japan in the historical context of the European tradition of broadcast system standardization as well as the socio-political changes shaped by neo-liberalist policies over the last 30 years. It seeks to explain why both Europe and the US have developed separate, incompatible systems for digital TV as well as for digital radio broadcasting. It will also analyze the reasons why the Japanese were both willing and able to develop an integrated digital broadcasting system with a converged approach. ¹University lecturer in Radio and Adjunct Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Tampere, Finland.

The paper explores how the participatory audience disseminates the online content produced by news media. Here, user-distributed content (UDC) acts as a conceptual framework. The concept of UDC refers to the process by which the mass media converge with the online social networks through the intentional use of social media features and platforms in order to expand the number of content delivery channels and maximize visibility online. The focus of the paper is both on the news media’s internal use (social plugins) and external use (Facebook pages, Twitter accounts) of social media tools and platforms in content distribution. The study draws on the examination of fifteen news media in seven countries. The data consists of almost 50,000 news items and the communicative activity surrounding them. The three main findings of the study are: (1) the audience shares online news content actively by using social plugins, (2) the activity of the news media in social media (especially on Facebook and Twitter) impacts the activity of the audience, and (3) the news media are more active on Twitter than on Facebook, despite the fact that the audience is often more active on Facebook. The study suggests that practices related to UDC should be more strongly incorporated into the management strategies of news media as peer-communication among the audience has a growing significance in the consumption and distribution of online media content.

In the convergence culture we are witnessing the rise of social or consumer-generated media—social networks, social blogs, weblogs, podcasts, pictures and videos—that increase communication intensity between people. Key properties of social media, such as frequency, immediacy, permanence and interactivity, should also be the key properties of traditional media—television and newspapers. Unfortunately this is rarely the case.

This book chapter focuses on the possibility to use various social media and other informational and data channels for automatic generation of interactive social media news streams. We propose a network representation and the network model of spreadable media content serving as a basis of new application using the notion of persistent context and apply perpetual analytics on social media data streams, where every incoming observation is evaluated against all prior observations. We discuss our Guerrilla media application idea of tapping into collective intelligence and detecting messages from huge amount of social network accounts and spreading them through interactive social media news streams into the digital universe.

The main aim of this chapter is to define and explore the effects of the information spread and the actors who introduce fundamental changes in the information stream direction across the converging media channels. The actors in social networks and influence thresholds are important determinants that affect behaviour of the rest of the nodes in online social networks. Contrary to the popular notion it was proved during the study that the expression of opinion and high activity do not create influence. The most vocal nodes in the graphs were not the most influential or even next to the most influential.

The research presents evidence how technological convergence produces social divergence which is based on newly introduced “segregation” rules in the online social networks. The models of technology adoption and network structure are important and determine the effects of the information diffusion and the rate of contagion that affect the process of convergence, namely the shifts in cultural and social paradigms. While the quantity of information rises, the ability to process and the competence to operate with is bounded, this leads to the superiority of the most technologically and/or communicationally advanced individuals and organizations—the info traders. We define three categories (dimensions) of info traders and explain their role in the networks through the presented case studies.

Mobile phones’ sales are decreasing worldwide but smartphones sales show an exponential growth. This device results from the convergence between internet and mobile phones which support new uses other than voice communication. All these transformations have social consequences.

Our chapter deals with emerging adoption patterns of mobile internet use, the behaviors associated with it and the consequences thereof, focusing on the importance mobility has in shaping online activities and its relation with industrial stakeholders and individual users’ perspectives on the technology in it-self.

We argue that the social interactions allowed by mobile internet are key adoption drivers and that the type of access this technology offers influences the type of activities performed online. We also argue that M-internet access facilitates more interactive and participative activities that result in collective-based activities that, at the same time, depict a particular type of network based individualism. Such a process results in a tension between technological convergence and social divergence, namely if we consider how it reinforces strong ties within a close group while at the same time deteriorates the weak ties between society members as a whole.

Our research presents results from complementary qualitative and quantitative studies that encourage a discussion on the interdependencies between individual adoption patterns and market derived determinants in a socio-cultural environment where technology adoption and diffusion happens. Our study also contributes to a deeper understanding of mobile technology use, the value of mobility and the tension taking place between technological convergence and social divergence.

Social media has affected the production, dissemination and consumption of news, as well as the professional and cultural values of journalists working within the media. This contribution illustrates the dynamic and complex relationship professional journalists have with social media and the way this relationship plays out in the reporting of news. The methods used to collect the evidence included two content analyses of stories about the “Arab Spring”, and 30 interviews with journalists and other media workers who used social media to cover the Arab Spring. These analyses will show that social media has a number of advantages and disadvantages for both journalists and news reportage. Tracing the various aspects of the complex dynamics that shape social media, this study points out that the profession of journalism is still very much needed for our society. Professionally trained to decode what is produced on social media, journalists can act as moderators of news diffusion within those platforms; the role of journalists can be further extended to that of producers, mediators and curators of social media content. Therefore, the use of social media leads to the convergence of different functions in the single role of a journalist.