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On the Co n ver gen ce of Medi a

QICHAO HU

Abstract: Following the invention of the World Wide Web by two physicists (Tim
Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research
(CERN) in the early 1990s, a combination of technological breakthroughs in computer
hardware, software, signal processing, and optical fibers, and skyrocketing growth in
information technology related industries has catalyzed the worldwide digital revolution
from traditional media to the new Internet Age. Recent research on the convergence of
media has been profuse, to the point where the term convergence, like globalization
and democracy, has become hackneyed and vague. This paper focuses on the
convergence of media in three areas: technology, contents, and its impact.

1. Convergence in Technology: Old Media vs. New Media

There is a common notion to divide the media that we have today into old and new.
The old is associated with analogue forms, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and
television, while the new corresponds to media available via digital technology, such as
the Internet, blogs, email, and instant messages. However, such dichotomy is heavily
biased, the term new media carries with it coolness and freshness, while the term old
media has a connotation of being obsolete and no longer relevant. On the one hand, I do
agree with the definition of new media as a generic term for the many different forms
of electronic communication made possible through the use of computer technology, on
the other hand, a more appropriate way than calling newspapers old media would be
established or institutionalized media.

Convergence in media would not have been possible without the corresponding
convergence in technology. As Bill Gates enthusiastically argued in one of his keynote
speeches that the Information Age is but an unfolding of a historical process which
began with the Iron Age. Convergence in technology implies that the tools that we use to
convey information, whether through established media or new media, need to be easily
switch-able. For example, the two pieces of electronic equipments that best embody
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established and new media are television and computer respectively, they are the media
through which we obtain information, but they are not the information itself, we do not
learn anything by staring at blank television or computer screens, instead we use
televisions to watch movies and computers to browse the World Wide Web, and if our
hypothesis is correct then switch-able means that we need to be able to watch movies
using computers and browse the web using televisions (Fidler, 1997). In reality the
convergence is a fairly good approximation to what we just hypothesized. With websites
such as Youtube and Google video, and the fact that many major news and television
networks such as BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and ABC have all uploaded their news videos
and prime-time television shows onto their websites, we see that the Internet is clearly
converging to traditional television, in a sense that we can now watch television shows
and movies on computers. Conversely, Sony Electronics and Philips Electronics, two
giants in consumer television appliances, recently introduced the worlds first high-
quality Internet solution for television, WebTV, which is televisions answer for
converging to the Internet. WebTV is a small plug-and-play box that sits on top of a TV
and is connected to the telephone line (thus the Internet). It also comes with a remote
control and an onscreen keyboard that allow users to surf the Internet using the remote
control. There is evidence for similar convergence in other areas such as radio, where
podcasting is serving as a converging medium and bringing together audio, the web, and
portable media devices like Apples phenomenally successful iPod.

With media convergence, we also see a gradual standardization in the media and the
associated devices. In the late 1990s, when the Internet Age was still very much in its
infancy, there were many different forms of media, both established and new, and each
required its own unique player to be played, one would need a CD player to play CDs, a
DVD player to play DVDs, a radio to listen to radio stations, an audio cassette player to
play tapes, a VCR to play video cassettes, and not to mention the hundreds of different
audio and video computer files and each had its own little media player, such as
Windows Media Player, Real-Time Player, Quick-Time Player, Real-One Player, etc.
Switching among these devices was cumbersome, chaotic, and painful. As the Internet
Age evolved and matured, many of the media devices were phased out in this natural
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selection. As a result of this, instead of carrying eleven different gadgets, the only thing
that one needs today to listen to radio, music, and even watch movies is an iPod, and
most media companies adapted their products into formats shareable and compatible to
iPod, such as mp3 (Jenkins, 2004).

One of the most fundamental features of media convergence is the unification of

electronic gadgets, in that these gadgets may vary in size and functionality, but all
gadgets are able to display various forms of media in standardized format. For example,
the television in the living room is no longer a television in the traditional sense, in that it
is only used for watching Simpsons, but it can read web pages and do everything that a
normal computer can. The fact that consumers demand all-in-one gadgets has driven
consumer electronics and computer companies to develop new products that capture not
only the type of media the consumers want to receive, but also the way that consumers
want to receive media. In the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas,
among the thousands of cool and futuristic gadgets, such as Sonys e-reader electronic
book, Samsungs Helix portable radio, and Toshibas Gigabeat, there are two things in
common; one is that they all look physically similar to Apples iPod, revealing their
intention to steal a piece of the portable music player industry from the giant; the other is
that they all feature more than one functions (CES 2006 report).

From a technological perspective, it has become important not to rigidly separate

different media since almost all media contents and devices are now produced and
distributed digitally, in other words, digitization has shrunk the gap between media
institutions and audiences. On the economic side, convergence of media has led to a
horizontal expansion of media industries, with the merging of different media sectors into
one holistic market. As a result of this, instead of seeing companies striving to build the
best music player, we see an influx of cross-media products, where everyone is trying to
develop the one portable player that combines music, video, game, radio, camera, and the
Internet. This is not only evident in the new gadgets themselves, but also in the
reorganization of several media companies. Perhaps the best example of this is the
merger between AOL and Time Warner in 2000. The new company, AOL Time Warner,
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combining AOLs online services with Time Warners vast media and cable assets, is
now the worlds largest media company with an estimated value of $350 billion.

Converged media and multi-function packed devices bring tremendous amount of

convenience. Last week I was in a conference with my research team, since I was the
fourth to present, I had some time while sitting in the audience to prepare my slides. It
was a pretty common and simple situation; I modified my slides using my laptop,
uploaded the file onto the local server, and then presented it to the entire conference room
on a big screen. It was until after the meeting that I realized that I had just witnessed the
convergence of media in action. The same presentation file, which contained both video
and audio contents, when played using different devices, in this case, a laptop and a
PowerPoint projector, allowed me to work on the presentation in both private and public
spaces. In a converged media, where the way people receive information is almost as
important as the information they receive, it is important to have media and devices to
easily accommodate each other.

2. Convergence in Content: Caveat Lector

One major difference between new media and established media is that new media, in
general, offer free access to their users, while established media tend to charge
subscription fees. As a result of this, people that contribute their opinions or ideas to
blogs are not paid, whereas professional journalists who write for newspapers are paid,
and there comes the debate of which media is more valuable. I generally have more
confidence in the articles of established media than the writings that other people posted
on some blogs. One reason is that paid professionals have the training and experience to
distinguish news from rumor, and can deliver their analysis with much more insights than
regular bloggers. The other reason is that the fact that the professionals are paid makes
them accountable, if they are incompetent, they would be fired by the organizations.
Thus, even though we live in a world where email has become so pervasive that almost
no one handwrites letters anymore, we still rely on BBC, CNN, and The New York
Times for news.
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Recently, many of the major newspapers and radio stations have made their contents
available online, but this move does not turn these established media into new media.
There is still a key difference between reading news from http://news.bbc.co.uk and some
blog website, and the difference is in the style at which the media carries information.
The former is like sitting in a huge lecture hall, where the readers are the audience, and
they learn about the news by taking dictations. Whereas the latter is like being in a small
comfortable classroom, where the readers are not only the audience but also participants,
and they learn news through discussion and debate. This is a major trend in the direction
that the media is moving toward, one in which the traditional passive acceptance on the
user end is fading, and the passion to create and ditch a spot on the World Wide Web is in
fashion (Gillmor, 2004). This is evident in many of the latest successful reality-TV
shows, where the casts are often not consisted of professional actors and actresses, but
rather ordinary citizens who either volunteer or get paid to be on the shows.

Despite the differences between the two types of media, recently there are signs that they
have started to move in a converging direction. Many newspaper journalists have learned
to embrace new kinds of material from citizen journalists, or bloggers and other
amateur content creators. For instance, in many places in the world where it is too
dangerous for foreign journalists to cover stories, the journalists rely on the online
discussions posted by native bloggers. Moreover, in certain totalitarian states, where the
government imposes tight control on its people and deny foreign journalists access to
sources of information other than the governments perspective, the journalists also turn
to online blogging to see the story from the ordinary bloggers perspectives (Luhmann,
2000).

Another fundamentally important and controversial issue in talking about the

convergence of contents in media is copyright, it seems that all these new technologies in
this media world have made it easier to steal things. Most of these controversies
surround software companies, especially the search engine giant Google. The Google
website does not contain much information of its own embedded within its site, instead it
provides an indexation of all of the information, or nearly all of the information
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embedded in the entire World Wide Web, by digitally imaging books to make their
content searchable and providing excerpts and links to those sites where they originated,
consequently, when we do a search in Google, the links that we find are not properties of
Google (Von Hippel, 2005). And this is exactly what prompted many publishers to sue
Google, accusing it for infringing their copyrights. According to many, Google is
becoming bigger and richer while sitting on other peoples copyright properties.
However, what these publishers failed to realize is that they and Google are mutual
beneficiaries. If we were to compare the World Wide Web to a library, then Google is
analogous to the librarian sorting through boxes of index cards. If users want to find all
the books in the library related to a certain topic, the librarian can be very helpful, on the
other hand, if there are no books in the library, then asking the librarian can be an empty
experience. The moral of this analogy is that search engines like Google help drive
Internet traffic to the linked sites. Given the vast volume of the web, it is unlikely that
users would accidentally stumble upon a book if Google did not tag it, and as a result
many books, however sacred or important they might be, would remain hidden. Hence
tagging a piece of copyright material and allow it to be freely searched help both Google
and the publishers gain popularity.

The new media can be very useful and interesting; for one thing, nothing can beat the
Internet for finding things fast. However, since the contents on the web are not filtered or
proofread for correctness, one thing that readers need to keep in mind when surfing the
web is Caveat lector (readers beware).

3. Impact of Media Convergence: A Borderless and Frictionless Land

The most significant impact that media convergence has had is the warping and altering
of our perceptions of space, time, and social identity, or more commonly known as
Globalization (Castells, 2000). Our new media environment offers the exciting prospect
of a global village, which fundamentally threatens the traditional social and economic
structures. Two key features of globalization that are clearly direct consequences of the
spread of the Internet and media technologies are the dominance of the English language
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worldwide, and the popularity of the entertainment industries such as Hollywood and
MTV.

The traditional definition of community usually involves its members to be

geographically close to each other, or work and socialize together, or pledge allegiance to
the same nation. But along with the convergence of media caused by the development of
digital information and communication technologies, we see a convergence of
communities from the opposite sides of the planet, and a less well-defined boundary
between the old Western and Eastern camps. It is no overstatement to say that the
convergence of media is one of the driving forces that ended the Cold War, because
people are no longer consumed with socialist or capitalist ideologies, instead they are
brought together by a much more powerful force called common interests. Another
indirect consequence of the convergence of media is the convergence of economic
systems. If we look at all the major economies in the world today, none of them is purely
capitalism or purely socialism, but they are all hybrids. For example, the welfare systems
implemented in many industrialized and capitalist Western countries are characteristics of
socialism; on the other hand, the traditionally socialist economies in China and Russia
have all become market-based (Brenner, 1998).

One key feature in the convergence of communities, is the development of virtual

cyberspace communities (Rheingold, 1993), where people from various parts of the
world come together and engage in relationships of receiving, creating, and exchanging
certain kinds of information that are not confined by their geographical locations. A good
example of this is the Massively-Multiplayer Online (MMO) game World of Warcraft,
developed by Blizzard Entertainment based in Irvine California. Out of its seven million
subscribers worldwide, more than three million of them are in China, almost two million
are in the United States, and about one million are in Europe, and according to Blizzard,
less than two weeks after the launch of World of Warcraft in China, the peak-number
figures registered in China reached 500,000 players, roughly the same number for North
America, Europe, and Oceania combined (The9, 2004). Put it simply, the converged
media has created a fervent scenario, where thousands of players from different cultural
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backgrounds, speaking different languages, escaping their boring ordinary lives, and
simultaneously occupying one vast virtual 3D world.

Another interesting impact the new media has is a counter-balancing push-and-pull

phenomenon. On the one hand, the Internet and television, like their predecessors the
newspaper and the radio, are also powerful weapons for transmitting propaganda.
Because the new media is not subjected to the limitations of natural obstacles, it is able to
reach and manipulate the minds of defenseless readers and listeners on an unprecedented
scale. Ever since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there has been a widespread
conception that it was the media that got us into the war in the first place. Whether it is
the president of the United States, or an anchorman of some news network, what one
person says during prime-time television can sway people in any direction, from inciting
a small local protest to bringing down a foreign government. On the other hand, there is
also a growing sense of responsibility among ordinary citizens. The new converged
media creates a more informed public, and many people have found various channels
through the Internet, such as online chat-rooms and blogs, to voice and share their
opinions with their fellow countrymen and even foreigners. By engaging in this
twentieth-century style town meeting, people gain access to an intimate and first-hand
account of the big events that are happening around them, thus many major policies are
no longer decided by the social elites behind heavily guarded government complexes.

Whether the new converged media is seen as a new dawn for a utopian democracy,
where, to quote the 1976 movie Control Room, every necessity provided, every anxiety
tranquilized, and every boredom amused, or an instrument for propaganda and pervasive
mind-games, one thing clear is that whatever the message is, it will be received by
billions of viewers around the world. The new converged media has also turned our
understanding of communication from making a simple phone-call into one gigantic
central nervous system, reaching out to every eye and ear, and converging them to that
one spot two feet in front of their computers, in an amorphous society, where all national
boundaries are eradicated, and all cultural frictions are smoothed.
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References:
Brenner, R. (1998) The Economics of Global Turbulence, New Left Review No. 229
Castells, M. (2000) Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development,
Conference Paper on Information Technologies and Social Development, Geneva
Consumer Electronics Shows report (2006), URL: http://www.ces-show.com/
Fidler, R. (1997) Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Pine Forge Press
Gillmor, D. (2004) We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People,
Oreilly, URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture New York: NYU Press
Luhmann, N. (2000) The Reality of the Mass Media Oxford: Polity Press
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community, London: Secker and Warburg
The9 2004 Annual Report, URL: http://www.corp.the9.com/IR/the9-2004-20f.pdf
Von Hippel, E. (2005) Democratizing Innovation, Boston: MIT Press