Convergence Case Study

Convergence…

Because digital media technology treat text, graphics, photography and sounds int the same way, the differences between texts in different media have disappeared. The ‘essence’ of each separate medium has disappeared and with it many of the institutional aspects of the media production in that area. The consequence of this are not yet clear. Take the example of the ‘e-book’ – a portable device that can be loaded with text and image file and ‘read’ via the screen.

Traditional book purchases have scoffed at the possibility of reading a novel ‘on screen’ – an unappealing proposition? Yet the e-book has many advantages for kinds of text access. If you own this book for instance, you might be frustrated when a new edition comes out. What if you could simply ‘download’ the new bits from the Internet and update your copy? Did you curse your teacher when you had to lug a huge bag of books round school? What if all of them could fit on an e-book reader?

Sound editing technology now looks the same as video editing or photographic retouching technology: all data appears on a computer screen and is manipulated via mouse and keyboard. Multimedia programs are ‘authored’ by someone who writes a script comprising a set of instructions which in effect command the software to play a video sequence or sound sequence or to display a text of still images, all of which are just data files to be ‘called-up’.