Part 1

Digital Media and Convergence

Think about the main media technologies in your life when you were growing up. How did you watch TV shows, listen to music, or read books? How did you communicate with friends?

Now consider this: Apple began selling music through iTunes in 2003; Facebook was born in 2004, but was only opened to the full public in 2006; smartphones debuted in 2007; Hulu and Netflix launched their streaming video services in 2008; the iPad was introduced in 2010; and Apple’s Siri first spoke in 2011. In less than fifteen years, we have moved from a world in which each type of media was consumed separately and in its own distinct format to a world in which we can experience every form of mass media content—books, music, newspapers, television, video games—on almost any Internet-connected device.

As you can see on the infographic below, media didn’t always develop this quickly; an early medium like radio could take decades to fully emerge, while today a Web site or an app can reach similar audience thresholds in a matter of years or even days. With these changes, the history of mass media has moved from emergence to convergence. While electronic media have been around for a long time, it was the development of the Web and the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium in the early 1990s that allowed an array of media—text, photos, audio, video, and interactive games—to converge in one space and be easily shared. This convergence has been happening since the early 1990s, but more recently we have experienced the digital turn. Ever-growing download speeds and the development of more portable devices have fundamentally changed the ways in which we access and consume media.

The digital turn has made us more fragmented—but also more connected. We might not be able to count on our friends all watching the same television show, but Facebook and Twitter have made it easier for us to connect with friends—and strangers—and tell them what we watched, read, and listened to. Mass media are more integrated into our lives than ever before.

FROM MEDIUM TO MASS MEDIA