This experience of an explosion of media products, distributed virally to our particular segment of the Long Tail often feels like a substantial fragmentation of the media landscape compared to its pattern of organisation in the twentieth century. Fragmentation seems in some way to be one of the important features of new media. Yet at the same time one of the buzzwords of the new media explosion has been ‘convergence’ the idea that at some point the technologies of media would all come together. Television, online video delivery, Internet communications and telecommunications combined in one ‘black box’ that will look something like a phone.
However, this vision has been widely challenged as devices and platforms have proliferated and instead content has converged (Jenkins 2006). Convergence however has at least two other meanings in this context. The first is the merger of media corporations in an attempt to provide a horizontal integration of different media products across a range of platforms.
Thus, the acquisition of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive in 2005 means not only that Fox have a foothold in the social networking market but that they can find new markets for the Fox back catalogue online as well as using the social network as a site for the development of new media products which may have a life in TV and cinema. ‘Win / win’ situations.
The final meaning of the idea of convergence is the one used by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 book of the same name in which he argues that the convergence is most importantly occurring not in the labs of technologists or the boardrooms of corporations but in the minds of the audience. It is we who are convergent moving freely across a range of media platforms making connections between storyworlds where the convergent activity has to do with the ways we make meaning of a fragmented media landscape, ‘convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’ (2006).
This is all very contradictory people seem to be living through a period where the conflicts and opportunistic alliances of business interests produce a very dynamic system in which we experience fragmentation and convergence occurring concurrently. It is as if we are experiencing centripetal and centrifugal forces as outcomes of the same rapidly spinning wheel of media business and innovation.
The challenges of rapid change and dynamic innovation will produce winners and losers. At the end of the last century Cornford and Robins (1999) showed how the major Internet service providers’ search for exclusive content led them into alliances with already existing producers of media content.
The net is free. Instead, the state and its agencies had reverted to the role of holding the ring for the competing commercial bodies involved in commercial production. The regulatory bodies do have real powers to control the structure of the media industry.
The only basis, therefore, for the regulation of the merger of AOL and TW is its overall impact on the general health of the economic system, as interpreted by the proponents of the free market. Ironically, the tendency of the free market is to foster monopoly, particularly where there are, as in the media industry, considerable advantages in concentrated ownership. Unfortunately, and this is an important lesson for those interested in the interaction between commerce and communication, the model of convergence envisioned by the owners and managers of Time Warner and America On-line was driven by the manoeuvres of the financial markets rather than by the actual demands of customers for the proposed services.
The dominance of the market in cultural commodities that was envisioned by TWOL and its merged successor did not allow it to escape from the particularities of cultural production. The difficulties in predicting aesthetic choices, the expense of prototyping and the need to create and maintain markets all remained important factors. Despite looking like the Holy Grail this particular example of corporate convergence became more of a poisoned chalice falling victim at least in part to the disillusion with digital media that followed the dotcom crash.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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