Development: Group Meeting

Today in our group meeting we all read and edited eachothers sections of our essay that we have written up from our research. Also as a group we wrote an introduction to our essay using various quotes we had found. We now are all ready to edit the essay together completely for next week. Before our next meeting we are all going to edit our sections into 4 slides and research some videos for our presentation. Next week we plan to complete our essay, begin putting our slideshow together and start storyboarding our video now we have our final idea.

This is the introduction we wrote today, however aspects of this may be changed yet:

Media “Convergence refers to a process, not an end point”, it is where once separated divisions, such as television, the Internet, print and radio merge together. Through our investigation we have realised that “there is no single, agreed-upon definition of convergence”, as the term media convergence covers such a broad range of media related aspects which include social, technological and industrial factors.

“No one knows what it is but thinks that it must be great, everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it, those say they are doing it are probably lying, the few that are doing it aren’t doing it well, once they start doing it they realise it’s going to take them a long time to do it right, they’ll soon start realising there is no ’right’ way to do it” - (Jim Carroll’s off-quoted explanation of why it’s like teenage sex). This quote proves how media convergence is continuously developing and how both industry and society use it in a variety of ways to benefit themselves and others.

An example of media convergence in modern day can be seen through the transition from print e.g. the Guardian newspaper to their news app and website. These Internet services allow journalists to update the news feed in real time, oppose to the daily or weekly delivery of newspapers. Convergence has also improved the range of content available for audiences to consume, as on the website, videos, pictures and unreleased reports may also be published.

In this essay we will be investigating the challenges and opportunities media convergence creates for both creative industries and society.