Media convergence

Abstract

Convergence is an ambiguous term used by various disciplines to describe and analyse processes of change toward uniformity or union. Its application in the communications sector, often referred to as media convergence, also encompasses valuable approaches and insights to describe, characterize and understand the digital creative economy. A certain amount of fuzziness combined with the broad, multipurpose-character of convergence leads both to a general and a wide range of very specific understandings of the convergent communications sector. This sector substantially overlaps with the digital creative economy, which is also characterized by a degree of vagueness. Common sub-sectors and subjects between communications and digital creative industries such as broadcasting, publishing, advertising, music, film and games are even growing because of convergence. Beyond that, the consequences of media convergence are also discussed for other parts of creative industries, such as museums, libraries and design in particular. New digital media technology and services are considered as central drivers of creative industries. Altogether, this makes studies of media convergence, both its approaches and results, highly relevant for the understanding of the digital creative economy. * Parts of this chapter build on Latzer (2009; 2013b, c). I would like to thank Johannes M. Bauer and Natascha Just for their comments and Katharina Hollnbuchner for research assistance.

El publicista social en la convergencia del Buen Vivir y los ODS

“…Lo que cambia es el enfoque, los diferentes puntos de vista, los propó-sitos e intereses. Según señala Latzer (2013), los conceptos de convergencia han sido utilizados para describir y analizar múltiples procesos de cambio. Por otra parte, Curran (2013) menciona que la convergencia explica el concepto de al menos dos elementos que avanzan hacia la unión o la uniformidad.…”

The economics of the Internet: an overview

“…Jointly these developments have resulted in a rapid decline of the costs of transporting, processing and storing digitized information and the ability to pack increasing computing power into smaller and mobile devices. Digitization of information flows has contributed to two waves of convergence, first between computing and telecommunications ('telematics'; see Nora and Minc, 1978) and subsequently between telematics and media ('mediamatics'; see Latzer, 1998Latzer, , 2013. In parallel to the resulting integration or fusion of formerly separate communications activities, the sector has differentiated and diversified, even if information increasingly flows over an integrated network infrastructure.…”

Towards an Innovation-Co-Evolution-Complexity Perspective on Communications Policy

“…A co-evolutionary perspective highlights the mutual interplay of political change with economic, technological and socio-cultural changes, which can be briefly outlined using the example of convergence in the electronic communications sector (Latzer, 2013b). In simplified form this figure shows two convergence steps in the co-evolution of a transformed societal communications system.…”