Unexpected Media

Convergence: a cultural as much as technological process

The Technology Strategy Board has identified ‘convergence’ as one of the key priority areas for investment within its Creative Industries strategy. But, ten years into the 21st Century, what does the word actually mean and what impact is it having for consumers and producers in the emerging media landscape? It used to mean something that had primarily to do with technology, referring to the black box that media would flow through. Technological convergence is a process that is certainly happening: from iPhone or Android smartphones to broadband enabled TVs, contemporary devices offer amateurs and professionals alike the capacity to produce, edit, publish, distribute and consume media content and services in multiple formats, at any time and in almost any location.  But increasingly convergence is used to describe cultural rather than technological evolution, a process of change affecting every aspect of the media business.

This is a nascent cultural ecology in which it is impossible to make confident assertions about the future. Five years ago the demise of conventional broadcast television and its replacement by new media was still being widely forecast but in practice, as the 2010 Ofcom Communications Market Report shows, television viewed in peak time remains by far the dominant medium in the UK. The power of the broadcast networks now co-exists with the power of the social networks. At the same time/ no-one foresaw the emergence of the most influential new media platforms: Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace just at the point it was about to be consigned to near insignificance; in a map of the ‘new media landscape’ drawn up by the BBC in 2005, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do not even appear.

Ask leading figures in the television and film industries today what the impact of convergence is on their business and you will not often get a coherent answer. Most are understandably preoccupied with shoring up old business models, attempting to retain respectable ratings or, where they do engage with new platforms, exploring the potential for digital distribution of traditional content.

So, in an environment where nothing is certain apart from continuing, disruptive change, what investment in R&D will help to prepare creative businesses to meet the challenges of convergence? There is certainly a need for further technological development to provide better tools for producers and consumers of media content and services – for ideation  and conception, production, distribution and adaptation. It should certainly be a priority for the TSB to ensure that the UK stays at the the leading edge in developing hardware and software that meet needs in these areas, but the key questions which research and development should now be addressing are as much cultural as technological.

R&D competitions should be framed in such a way that they encourage collaborations capable of exploring new formats, new relationships with narrative and storytelling, new ways of doing business and engagment with audiences, communities of interest, with users as much as they do new applications of technology.