Convergence: A Help or A Hinderance?

Media Convergence: bringing all needs to one place

Converging is defined as when several objects come together from different directions so as eventually to meet. Media convergence is the combination of old and new; it is newspaper meeting internet, hard news meeting satire, and public media meeting merchandise. The internet has played a huge part in media convergence, with newspapers converging towards being e-papers, and most television bulletins being published for free online as well as being televised. In the media realm, this form of content-based internet is called Web 1.0. 

While Web 1.0 covers the basics of news, information and other forms of content, Web 2.0 is what most youth of today are familiar with. This relatively new form of media is interactive, with social media bursting out of every corner of the web. Consumers of Web 2.0 have been labelled as ‘prod-users’, as they not only use the information presented to them on the internet, but also produce quite an extensive amount of content – whether the content is accurate, informing or otherwise is another matter entirely. This revolution in media has allowed consumers everywhere to not only take in the information that they’ve received, but project information that they obtain out into the World Wide Web, which has taken news from being a one-way affair to, in the matter of a decade, a two-way situation. Web designers and Internet moguls aren’t content with just that, however – they want news that’s specific to audiences, and they’re calling it Web 3.0. 

Web 3.0 has been dubbed as ‘hyper-local news’, as it feeds off information presented by the consumer to judge and arrange news stories, advertisements and entertainment that is specific to the customer. This in-production semantic web will have lots of advantages, the most obvious being that it will have precisely the information that clients will be after – if a customer wants to read about fashion and Arsenal FC, then they will be presented with copious amounts of information on those two topics. However, the draw back for this design is that it has the potential to create ignorance – if the customer is flying to New Delhi next week, and there has been a shooting in the city centre, the customer will not be aware of this, as the news on his computer is specified to fashion and Arsenal FC. This idea of oblivious audiences allows for many niche audiences being created, which can, in turn, result in job-losses for journalists. 

With old meeting new, news meeting the web and Web 3.0 meeting the personal interests of its consumers, the question that consumers have to ask is whether or not they are willing to jeopardise their knowledge of the world, for entertainment regarding their world.