Converging Media – 6th Edition (Ebook PDF)

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Authors: by John V. Pavlik (Author), Shawn McIntosh (Author)

Converging Media – Industry. Culture. Technology. It’s time they came together. From reading news on tablets to video calling on smartphones, digital media has changed the ways in which we communicate. Placing convergence at the center of the discussion, Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication, Sixth Edition, uses the technologies we employ every day to explain our current media environment and to consider where we might be headed.

Preface Converging Media – 6th Edition (Ebook PDF)

Disruption is a one-word description for the state of contemporary journalism and mass communication (JMC). Changing economics, technology, and political forces are just some of the complex factors reshaping the contours of JMC. As online, mobile technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and social networks have come to dominate much of the communication landscape, the financial foundation for mainstream media has shifted in dramatic fashion. Advertising has declined in most media companies and flowed to platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter. Consumers access media through their smartphones and other networked devices. They participate in the journalism and mass communication process by posting their own photos, video, and other content online and sharing the online posts they encounter.
Political winds have swept over the JMC landscape as well, ushering in debates about so-called fake news, media ethics, and the role of journalism in democracy.
Globalization has become far more than a buzzword, as citizens consider the ramifications of an increasingly international media mix. Online subscription-based media entertainment such as the video services of companies like Netflix have found high levels of interest among millennials and others interested in on-demand media content.
Advances in technology are delivering new media content formats such as augmented reality and virtual reality. While the platforms for such content are still somewhat specialized and expensive, they in many ways may represent the future of journalism and mass communication: interactive, multisensory, and immersive.
Privacy may be little more than a memory in an age when ubiquitous high-definition cameras, big data analytics, and social media are generating massive databases encompassing nearly every man, woman, and child around the globe.
“Most of us have fully identified, high-definition frontal photos of ourselves online,” says Alessandro Acquista, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University (in a 60 Minute interview with Lesley Stahl, 2013). On Facebook alone, users have posted billions of photos of themselves, their friends, and their relatives. Facebook continues to refine its facial-recognition technology, which will make tagging friends easier, but which will also help others track you.
The existence of such vast repositories of data, valuable for security and commercial potential (such as individually targeted advertising), raises concerns for civil liberties, including freedom of speech and the right to privacy. An even bigger question is who has the right to own and control this information, especially with the telecommunications companies and Internet giants contributing to the NSA’s surveillance programs.

Meanwhile, the transformation of media into digital form and the convergence of media formats and industries have continued unabated. Research indicates that we now spend more time using digital devices than we do with any other medium, including television. Digital content is more likely to be viewed on a tablet or a smartphone than it is on a laptop or a desktop computer. Digital distribution is now the dominant format for music, television, and radio, whether delivered terrestrially, by satellite, or via the Internet. Thanks to tablets and e-readers, ebooks have seen a dramatic surge in popularity. Newspapers and magazines, which have experienced significant declines in print circulation, are nonetheless seeing growth in tablet, smartphone, and online distribution. Digital movies, television, and video-game distribution is now mainstream, with companies such as Netflix and Amazon producing and streaming their own original and highly acclaimed television shows. Tablets and other mobile devices are blurring the lines between Internet, movies, and television while allowing technology companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon to challenge traditional media distributors.