Converging Media

Digital media is changing the ways in which we communicate: we watch TV and movies online, call friends on computers, and read newspapers on cell phones. Placing convergence at the center of the discussion, Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication uses the technologies weemploy everyday to explain our current media environment - and to project where we might be headed. Rather than discussing each media industry in isolation, Converging Media shows how each branch of media (print, visual, and audio) relates to and influences the others. This enables students to seethe inextricable and dynamic relationship between converging media and traditional media formats.

What purpose does the news media serve in contemporary North American society? In this collection of essays, experts from both the United States and Canada investigate this question, exploring the effects of media concentration in democratic systems. Specifically, the scholars collected here consider, from a range of vantage points, how corporate and technological convergence in the news industry in the United States and Canada impacts journalism's expressed role as a medium of democratic communication. More generally, and by necessity, Converging Media, Diverging Politics speaks to larger questions about the role that the production and circulation of news and information does, can, and should serve. The editors have gathered an impressive array of critical essays, featuring interesting and well-documented case studies that will prove useful to both students and researchers of communications and media studies.

Converging Media,Third Edition, expertly covers today's rapidly changing landscape while preparing students for what comes tomorrow. Unlike any other book on the market, Converging Media's synthesis of industrial, cultural, and technological perspectives more accurately reflects today's world.This new approach demands a more balanced and nuanced understanding of the role that technology and digital media have played in our mass communication environment. This third edition has undergone several major changes to keep pace with the rapidly evolving world of media.

This edited volume explores different meanings of media convergence and deconvergence, and reconsiders them in critical and innovative ways. Its parts provide together a broad picture of opposing trends and tensions in media convergence, by underlining the relevance of this powerful idea and emphasizing the misconceptions that it has generated. Sergio Sparviero, Corinna Peil, Gabriele Balbi and the other authors look into practices and realities of users in convergent media environments, ambiguities in the production and distribution of content, changes to the organization of media industries, the re-configuration of media markets, and the influence of policy and regulations. Primarily addressed to scholars and students in different fields of media and communication studies, Media Convergence and Deconvergence deconstructs taken-for-granted concepts and provides alternative and fresh analyses on one of the most popular topics in contemporary media culture. Chapter 1 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Placing convergence at the center of the discussion, this text uses the technologies we employ every day to explain our current media environment, and to project where we might be headed. Rather than discussing each media industry in isolation, Converging Media shows how each branch of media- print, visual, and audio - relates to and influences the others.

Media Today uses convergence as a lens that puts students at the center of the profound changes in the 21st century media world. Through the convergence lens they learn to think critically about the role of media today and what these changes mean for their lives presently and in the future. The book’s media systems approach helps students to look carefully at how media content is created, distributed, and exhibited in the new world that the digital revolution has created. From newspapers to video games and social networking to mobile platforms, Media Today prepares students to live in the digital world of media.

Media convergence is often propounded as inevitable and ongoing. Yet much of the governance of the media sector’s key parts has developed along discrete evolutionary paths, mostly incremental in character. This volume breaks new ground through exploring a diverse range of topics at the heart of the media convergence governance debate, such as next generation networks, spectrum, copyright and media subsidies. It shows how reluctance to accommodate non-market based policy solutions creates conflicts and problems resulting in only shallow media convergence thus far.