25 July, 2020
The crossover in vulnerabilities between humans, technology, businesses and the economy is nothing new.
Indeed I have a book from university called Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The fact the book is now horrendously past its use-by date is aptly demonstrated by its cover, which prominently features an iPod - apparently the best visual symbol for how much humans, media, technology and messages are converging.
A few of the lines I have underlined in the book - the pencil lines so straight, I can only imagine I used a ruler - now seem laughably obvious or basic.
“In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms,” is one insight I thought worth returning to.
“Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations - and even individuals within corporate media - still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others,” is another, which if nothing else proved I wasn’t very good at selecting the most important bits, and was probably a bit too highlighter happy.
