Digitalization and Media Change T

DIGITALIZATION AND MEDIA CHANGE DIGITALIZATION oncepts of convergence and converging processes have triggered considerable attention and activities in media research during recent years. This has been an inspiring context for the discussions and analyses presented in this book. The book elucidates a variety of understandings related to the concept of convergence, and at the same time re- flects on the analytical advantage of the concept. The contributions discuss the impact of media digitalization and the degree to which the prospects of convergence have been realized. The studies range from investigations DIGITALIZATION of institutional and regulatory change within media and cultural institutions, to analyses of communicative genres and social practices related to digital media. AND MEDIA CHANGE T. Storsul & D. Stuedahl (eds.) Stuedahl & D. Storsul T. EDITED BY TANJA STORSUL AND DAGNY STUEDAHL NordicNORDICOM Information Centre for Media and Communication Research Göteborg University Box 713, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden Telephone +46 31 786 00 00 (op.) Fax +46 31 786 46 55 E-mail: [email protected] www.nordicom.gu.se NORDICOM NORDICOM Ambivalence Towards Convergence Ambivalence Towards Convergence Digitalization and Media Change Tanja Storsul & Dagny Stuedahl (eds.) NORDICOM Ambivalence Towards Convergence Digitalization and Media Change Tanja Storsul & Dagny Stuedahl (eds.) © Editorial matters and selections, the editors; articles, individual contributors; Nordicom ISBN 978-91-89471-50-4 Published by: Nordicom Göteborg University Box 713 SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG Sweden Cover by: Daniel Zachrisson Printed by: Livréna AB, Kungälv, Sweden, 2007 Environmental certification according to ISO 14001 Contents Preface 7 Tanja Storsul & Dagny Stuedahl Introduction. Ambivalence Towards Convergence 9 Part One: Approaches to Convergence Anders Fagerjord & Tanja Storsul Questioning Convergence 19 Divina Frau-Meigs Convergence, Internet Governance and Cultural Diversity 33 Part Two: Convergence in Media Institutions Anja Bechmann Petersen Realizing Cross Media 57 Ivar John Erdal Negotiating Convergence in News Production 73 Vilde Schanke Sundet The Dream of Mobile Media 87 Part Three: Competencies and Institutional Practices Ilpo Koskinen The Design Professions in Convergence 117 Dagny Stuedahl Convergence, Museums and Digital Cultural Heritage 129 Knut Lundby Mediation Between Competence and Convergence 145 Part Four: Genre and Social Practices Gunnar Liestøl The Dynamics of Convergence & Divergence in Digital Domains 165 Marika Lüders Converging Forms of Communication? 179 Lin Prøitz Mobile Media and Genres of the Self 199 Andrew Morrison & Synne Skjulstad Talking Cleanly about Convergence 217 Göran Bolin Media Technologies, Transmedia Storytelling and Commodification 237 The Authors 249 Preface Convergence and converging processes has triggered much attention and activities in media research the last years. This has worked as an inspiring context for the discussion and analyses that this book reports. It has been a goal for the book to show a variety of understandings related to the concept of convergence, while at the same time to reflect on the analytical advantage of the concept. The book is a collaborative project between researchers that have been related to the field of convergence in various ways. Some of the relations are connected to research in the field of digital media – and some have ap- proached the concept on a theoretical and conceptual level. An important aspect of the book is the reflections on convergence from multidisciplinary viewpoints. Within social sciences, and literature studies, social semiotics, linguistics, cultural studies, and history of ideas, the use of the concept is employed differently. Collected like this in a book, the analyses based on the concept of convergence illustrates the value of multidisciplinarity. In some contributions the concept is used as an analytical concept to understand ongoing media processes – in other contributions it is used to understand media use or even design. Some analyses underscores the superficial character of the concept – whereas others underlines its usefulness as a communicational tool. Together they bring a more in-depth understanding of current processes of change (and stability) in media and communication landscapes. The publication of this book has been supported by the strategic research programme Competence and Media Convergence (CMC), that was run at the University of Oslo from 2004 to 2007. CMC has financed the work with this book and made it possible to get a rather big group of researchers to reflect upon the concept convergence. The editors extend warm thanks and best regards to the authors for their contributions to this volume. We are grateful for your patience, engagement and support. We will also thank our editorial assistant Siv Hege Blickfeldt, for her encouragement and thoughtful help along the editorial process. Last but not least we will thank NORDICOM and Ulla Carlsson for her support from the very start of this project – to the finished product. Oslo in October 2007 Tanja Storsul Dagny Stuedahl 7 Introduction Ambivalence Towards Convergence Tanja Storsul & Dagny Stuedahl1 In the 1990s, convergence became a buzzword in media circles. Suddenly everybody talked about convergence. Technologists had talked about convergence for a while. Now, policy makers started to use the term and green papers and white papers were written on how to approach convergence. Media and telecom companies talked about convergence. Analysts at stock markets forecast the economic consequences of convergence. Designers and producers talked about convergence. And – researchers studied and analysed convergence processes. For example, on the European arena, the research programme Changing Media – Changing Europe focused on ‘convergence’ as one of four thematic areas (Bondebjerg 2001). Other initiatives were taken in other universities to approach the new developments, and at the Univer- sity of Oslo, CMC (Competence and Media Convergence) was established as a multidisciplinary research initiative that would address ‘convergence’.2 Thus, convergence rapidly became one of the key concepts in new media discourse, and it was used together with other new concepts. Concepts such as the information society and interactivity had their heydays with the dif- fusion of the Internet in the 1990s. In the new millennium the Internet is no longer a novelty, and the focus has now shifted towards ubiquitous com- puting and user generated content i.e. that we use computers in all situa- tions and produce content ourselves. The launching of new concepts, and the reformulation of old ones, is a necessary part of describing and understanding new media developments. Often the concepts themselves become powerful rhetorical tools. They pro- mote specific understandings of challenges and media developments, and of how individuals and societies, institutions and policy should adapt. Con- vergence has become a powerful rhetorical tool that has stimulated change in a number of areas. The concept therefore deserves a closer scrutiny. 9 TANJA STORSUL & DAGNY STUEDAHL Visions about technology One of the reasons why concepts like convergence become so influential is that although the concepts are new, they convey long-term vision. In the concept of convergence, visions about technological progress are combined with visions of how technological innovations may enable unified media systems. In fiction, we find several examples of such visions, long before the ad- vent of digital technology. In his utopian science fiction novel from 1888, Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy described a city in the year 2000. Here he envisioned the ’Music-telephone’. In the city, there were several music halls in which different sorts of music were played. These halls were connected by telephone with all the houses of the city so that all could listen to what they wanted, when they wanted. This book was published in the very early days of the telephone, before the radio, and certainly long before iTunes. H.G Wells’ novel The Time Machine from 1895 was also concerned with convergence. Wells suggested that time is a fourth dimension, and that hu- mans can design suitable apparatuses that can converge these dimensions and move people, time travellers, back and forth between them. The novel serves as reference for the design of virtual worlds that manipulates time. Digital environments and technologies of today enable us to explore the past very much alike Wells’ novel dramatises. After World War II, an anti-utopian vision of technological developments was described in George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell 1949). This novel gave a dramatic description of a totalitarian surveillance society in which telescreens, which functioned both as televisions and as very sensitive secu- rity cameras, enabled the dictator Big Brother to control his subjects. Written long before the video-phone (and long before the television reality show), the novel provided metaphors for serious concerns about protection of pri- vacy many decades later when information systems become integrated. In the optimistic space-age of the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968) introduced the error-free supercomputer HAL. HAL could not only calculate and talk, he had feelings and could think. Being an early representation of artificial intelligence, the computer, however, became so powerful that it tried to take command of the space

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