Kickflipping Media Convergence

This week in class we’ll be talking about media convergence, but my mind keeps thinking back to the whole idea of infrastructure in social media.

One of the ideas behind media convergence is that we will be using “all kinds of media in relation to one another.” This is very easy to see happening with electronics. For example, many of us watch our TV shows on our computer. Things like torrents and streaming video sites like Hulu have allowed us to watch our favourite shows online rather than on the Television itself. Or take texting - you can send me an e-mail or Facebook message that will be sent to my phone. These examples lend us the appearance that media convergence is an upward progression, that new forms of communication are built upon the infrastructure of old forms.

Another result of media convergence is that information gathering is becoming increasingly personalized. In fact, personalization is essential to successful online information sources. Not only does the nature of the web (instant access and hyperlinks to an endless amount of information) allow us to easily jump to and from any topic of potential interest, but websites are now allowing increasing control of content. On sites like Digg and Facebook you can customize what information you see and on news-sites like New York Times you can subscribe to individual sections’ RSS feeds. You can even subscribe to Google News and aggregate individualized news into one simple and clean page.

Time magazine have realized that news-gathering is becoming increasingly more personalized and in doing so are flipping on its head the idea that media convergence is an upward progression. They’re taking an idea born out of the collision between information gathering and the nature of the web (RSS Feeds) and applying it to an older form of communication...nay, an older medium - the medium of print.

Thus far, personalized news has been limited to the Internet, but Time Inc. is bringing it to the printed word with mine, a five-issue, 10-week, experimental magazine that allows readers to select five Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines that Time editors will combine into a personalized magazine with 56 possible combinations.

I’m torn between thinking that the nature of old-mass media - the top down distribution of information - is essentially conducive to print, thus rendering Time’s experiment futile, and thinking that this idea of customizable information, since the “natives” of the digital age have adapted to it, will find its way into print communication. Traditional mass-media sources have already adapted to the personalization approach; maybe they’ll take their success with customization approaches and apply it back to the mediums of communication that predate the internet. Just look at the success of TiVO and it’s hard not to see how this won’t become the norm.