I never thought of media much before.
It’s described here as a medium between people, communities, organisations, and industries. In the classic view, a few media organisations act as the medium but this is now changing as we see the democratisation of the means of production of media content. These changes have brought about a hybrid media that is no longer creates a homogenising effect as did big, monolithic media organisations. These media outlets are everywhere and include individual, government, groups, etc.
This blog is an example of a component of this hybrid media.
The authors call this “socialised media”. Of course, the big media companies want a piece of this action and seek to regain control of this new social media through mergers and acquisitions (note the Murdoch purchase of MySpace and the WSJ).
The convergence of these media types is both bottom up and top down. Big media attempts to re-badge content and make it available on other sites and in other contexts as a way of earning further revenue, decrease costs, and improve brand awareness. On the other hand consumers attempt to control what media they do and don’t see and this can create conflict and negotiation between the players.
This negotiation plays itself out in a way that sees business claiming to harness collective intelligence where the business gets something for free by providing the means for participation. On the one hand, these platforms for participation can help a business build a brand – note the hyper-viral way applications spread on Facebook – but this same viral effect can also damage reputations and cause harm.
Some businesses boast about how cleverly they’ve harnessed this collective intelligence, only to find that they have ceded control of their brand to an environment that will never yield them control they once had – and of course this doesn’t always work out the way the business hoped.
In the one moment, businesses can gain and lose control of their brands.
Downloaded from http://con.sagepub.com by Peter Fletcher on January 21, 2008
Editorial: Convergence Culture
Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze
Convergence 2008; 14; 5
DOI: 10.1177/1354856507084415
