Relationship Between Mass Media And Digital Media

Convergence is defined as the process or state of converging. In media, this term is used to describe a relationship between mass media and digital media. With the arrival and success of the technological age, mass media started to merge with digital media. From this, media content, technology, regulations and even organisations in the media industry began to converge. This essay will look into how convergence contributes to the relationship that mass media and digital media have, and whether the term ‘convergence’ is adequate in describing this relationship.

There are many different parts of convergence in the media and all of them are related. The main part of convergence discussed is about how old media is beginning to merge with new media,

Media content that was originally distributed using traditional forms of media technologies is now being integrated into new technologies like Smart phones, tablets, and even smart televisions. These devices are now seen as having multimedia functionality. There is nothing new with the content of new media. Content is just being repurposed from other formats, like print, photograph, film, and recorded music, to a digital format (Bolter and Grusin, as cited in Flew, 2005). As technology advances, the Internet became the most-used type of digital media for traditional mass media. Flew (2005) describes the Internet as an electronic network that enable people and information to be connected and exchanged through devices, likes computers. With the use of the Internet, digital media has made it possible to communicate interpersonally through digital means. Flew (2005) further explains that the Internet covers all the elements of a convergent media. From his diagram, the Internet covers: Communication networks, which is basically communication; Content, meaning the ability to hold traditional media; and finally Computing/Information technology, which is the digital aspect of a media. An example of how mass media and digital media converges using the Internet is the new innovation of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) (Dwyer, 2010). Digital media takes the old of television broadcasts and distributes them through the

Besides giving audience more control, they are also enabled to use the Internet as a form of mass communication, which is the purpose of media. Chaffee and Metzger (2001) argue that with the arrival of media convergence mass media is now able to focus on its communicative aspect. They highlight that before mass media was only a one-way form of communication, but then digitalisation has made it possible for two-way communication, even on a mass scale. A type of media where producers and users have a feedback loop (Dwyer, 2010). Besides that the Internet also provides social networking sites, which can be used to access multimedia forms (Dwyer, 2010). Social media sites like Facebook allows audience to interpersonally communicate. YouTube and blogging sites, gives audiences the ability to create and publish their own content. The old use of mass media is beginning to converge into the digital