"'Contemporary Media Are Characterised By Increasing Convergence.' Discuss."
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Essay Title – “’Contemporary Media Are Characterised By Increasing Convergence.’ Discuss.”
In today’s modern society, the collective media are increasingly combining their resources to enable their content to be consumed through various means. This constantly increasing convergence has provoked limitless discussion, which has brought to light numerous benefits and drawbacks, and has become the essential characteristic of today’s “New Media”.
This term, "New Media" can be quite indistinct. As more and more technologies are developed, that which was once new media subsequently becomes outdated and is no longer considered to be a contemporary form of communication. But, generally, when referring to new media, we refer primarily to the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web, and to developing digital technology.
Digitalisation has become the basis of almost every form of contemporary media. This is a major transformation from traditional media, which used various analogue systems and were therefore, for the most part, incompatible. Now, the majority of media operates using the binary code of the digital system, and so the content of television, radio, the Internet, etc., can be easily amalgamated into larger, closely linked services.
The reality television programme, “Big Brother”, has been running for four years and is a useful example of the ever-increasing inclusion of convergence in modern media. Every year the programme’s producers have become more and more dependent upon audience participation in deciding the direction of the series. In its first series, the show had a very basic format; viewers that watched the hour-long weekly shows could then telephone to vote out the most unpopular contestants. This telephone voting was, essentially, audience interactivity at its most primitive level and has developed to voting by text messaging, due to the ever increasing popularity of the mobile phone. Also, from series one onwards, a twenty-four-hour live video stream was broadcast over the Internet, so viewers could carry on watching when the television programme ended. There was also the opportunity for viewers to opt for the particular camera shot they wished to see, choosing the room of the house and any particular contestants they preferred to watch. In a later series, with the increasingly wide spread consumption of digital television, E4 (Channel 4’s digital counterpart) was showing almost continuous live coverage of the show. The “red button” facility also became available through digital television, which gave the audience almost the same opportunities as those using the Internet – choice of camera shot viewed, interactive polls, quizzes and games, and the ability to vote through their television set. Eventually, interactivity proved to be so popular that almost everything which happened was decided by the viewing public, down to the most trivial factors - what the contestants ate, what activity was supplied to occupy their day, what music was played into the house, etc. Digital television has, and is evolving so rapidly, that new facilities are being developed and supplied to the audience almost daily. This is made possible by the convergence of media, combining previously distinct services. One of the newest developments in television is the viewer being able to create their own channel schedule, selecting from a catalogue of available broadcasts, which could, in theory, result in the same show playing continuously back to back. This could potentially lead to the demise of certain broadcasts that fall out with the mainstream. However, this is a rather recent development in digital television and may not become a wide spread occurrence, as the current general public still, to a certain extent, appears to have an interest in traditional mixed programming.
