Sites like MySpace, YouTube or Blogger have each in their own ways changed the ways users make use of the Internet and the World Wide Web. They are part of some broader transformations in the overall New Media landscape; transformations such as convergence and multi-platform intertextuality. We might say that the Internet and the World Wide Web have become ‘new-mediatized' - they have become a central part of a new way of ‘doing media' (and ‘thinking media', too); one that unsettles or refuses age-old differentiations, such as those between producer and consumer, amateur and professional, reality and fiction, as well as between ‘old media' platforms such as film, television, radio and the Internet. Convergence refers to bits of media becoming indistinguishable - whether those bits are bits of content, bits of the industry or whatever. Convergence happens when media hybridize and recombine, as when movies are distributed over the Internet to download, or podcasts of radio shows can be listened to on an MP3 player or via a PC. So, there is convergence in terms of delivery and devices, in terms of the tools and places we use to access content - such that watching a film on a computer screen is no longer considered weird. But there is convergence in the content itself, for example via the cross-platform intertextuality that binds a computer game to a movie to a soundtrack to a commercial. Like the hyperlinks connecting web pages, these intertexutal links form a complex web of associations of content.
A site like YouTube (founded in 2005) is a perfect illustration of this content convergence. Started as a site to share homemade video clips, YouTube's millions of clips now include user-generated content of virtually every imaginable type, perhaps most famously ‘leaked' clips of current television shows and homemade remakes of film scenes, but also including seemingly random bits of webcam tomfoolery, home video and found footage. So the site now offers clips of all kinds, with all sorts of origin, without distinguishing on the basis of genre, production values, platform, whatever. YouTube evidences new forms of content creation, novel ways of distribution, and changing patterns of media consumption.
Clips of television shows appear on YouTube, officially and unofficially, as well as countless parodies and remakes, but clips from YouTube also appear on television and regularly make the news. Searching earlier for catch-up information for a new television series that I have so far missed, Primeval, I clicked between the station's ‘official' website, various ‘unofficial' and fan sites, links to clips on YouTube, screenshots of key scenes, and off into the labyrinth of more or less connected sites and pages. I could watch clips of previous and future episodes, view interviews with the cast, watch spoofs and read earnest discussions of what's wrong with the science behind the science fiction. It didn't matter who had made what or whether sites were ‘official' or not; all that mattered was whether they grabbed my attention and answered my questions. And there were countless opportunities for me to have my say, to comment, to link up with other fans of the show or any of the actors in it. Mass media has become New Media or, to use another current term, ‘me media'.
Convergence and cross-platform interextuality is also changing our experience of media spaces, making a nonsense of any lingering distinction between the ‘real' and the ‘virtual'. Experiments in ambient or ubiquitous computing, for example, project the virtual onto the real, so that we encounter the Internet, say, not just on a computer screen but on a street corner. And as access to the Internet and the World Wide Web becomes more mobile, untied from the desktop, so we can begin to experience and encounter cyberspace literally all over the place. Charting the changing roles, meanings and experiences of what she refers to as ‘mobile digital devices', for example, one describes a key transformation to the ‘interfacing' capacity of such technologies: where the interface once mediated between the user and the machine - as in the graphic user interface that we see on a PC screen - mobile digital devices mediate a ‘social interface' between users, and also between users and the ‘hybrid' (at once ‘physical' and ‘virtual') spaces they move through. As she defines this new space, ‘hybrid spaces are mobile spaces, created by the constant movement of users who carry portable devices continuously connected to the Internet and to other users'. So, convergence in terms of devices (Web-linked phones) also brings divergence in terms of media (or cyber) spaces, and in terms of reconnecting users via the interface. As with arguments about other forms of social media, here we see a story of connectivity between users enabled by new technology.
Crucially, these new devices make it possible to be constantly connected both to networks such as the Internet and to other (human) users while moving through (hybrid) space, thereby enfolding remote and promixal contexts and contacts: rather than disembedding the user, as PCs have been thought to do when users enter cyberspace, users can now ‘carry' cyberspace through physical space. Moreover, emerging patterns of use suggest that ‘mobile interfaces are used primarily inside social public spaces' - yet, rather than privatizing those spaces, these devices ‘enfold' space, remixing public and private, physical and virtual. New gaming applications illustrate this enfolding especially vividly, layering physical and virtual landscapes for players. Ultimately these new technologies ‘recreate urban spaces as multi-user environments'.
Clearly, therefore, there are profound implications for the multiple users of these environments. As with earlier transformations brought about by digital technologies, such as the shift from one-to-many to many-to-many (as in peer-to-peer) broadcasting that characterizes the ‘me media' aspects of the Internet and which subverts the ‘old media' relationship between producer and consumer, this new hybrid space potentially rewrites forms and experiences of technologically mediated sociality. Such arguments demand new language to describe hybrid spaces and subject positions and new theories and methods to uncover what goes on in these cross-platform, convergent New Media cultures.
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1. The Internet and the World Wide Web as social phenomenons and the New Media
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