Convergence and Fragmentation: Media Technology and the Information Society

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Convergence and Fragmentation: Media Technology and the Information Society", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 6, pp. 473-474. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011053986

European media have attracted many discussions and analyses in recent years, not only because of convergence and integration between the media themselves (television and radio, telephony, and the internet), a technological and industry‐based set of structural changes, but also because of the implications for such changes, and of such changes, for access and consumption, civic society and cultural diversity.

Since the 1980s neoliberal media and political policies have enabled liberalized media markets to evolve, even though the norm for European media policy has been heavily regulator‐based, above all for reasons of competition and universal service access and equality. The tensions arising from these factors penetrate into issues of equality (the digital divide and so forth) and ideas of the civil society and the public sphere. At the same time, the growth of media conglomerates on a global stage, and their power over platforms and content, has posed challenges for national governments and regulatory bodies. The EU itself has greatly expanded in recent years, incorporating central and eastern European states, adding to the complexity.

This study of convergence and fragmentation deliberately and rightly picks up on the dialectic between convergence (between technology, because of the power of large global players, in e‐policy‐making itself partly encouraged by the EU stance on the knowledge and information society) and fragmentation (those economic and political and cultural differences between the member states of the EU where media are concerned, and the associated concerns each one has about globalization and cultural homogenization). This forms the backcloth to this series of papers that arose out of a programme on changing media and changing Europe from the European Science Foundation, a body founded in 1974 to create a common European platform for cross‐border cooperation in all aspects of scientific research.

In this case the papers, arranged in four sections (dealing with culture and technology, computer games and museums, ICT and virtual learning, and policy‐making) and written by European academics (all the articles are in English), address the ways in which media (television, telephony, the internet) are shaping up in the early years of the twenty‐first century. There are the over‐arching themes – of convergence, regulation and competition, cultural identity, access, and ICTs in flexible learning – and within that a number of case studies dealing with specific national strategies and experience (such as the final essay on public service television in France) and with specific organizational strategies and experience (such as how two universities, one in Finland and the other in Norway, are developing virtual learning, itself an instance of convergence).

The editor Peter Ludes (of the University of Bremen) suggests in his introduction that it is all too easy for us to regard EU media governance policies as all the same, and to infer that the discontinuities presented by fast change are impacting on different cultures in similar ways. Later another polemic surfaces – that of the extent to which media governance models in Europe, which place strong reliance on regulation, are themselves deterministic, either constraining opportunities for individual change or suggesting that one approach fits all. These emerge from individual essays and could and should have been developed more explicitly to make the collection stronger than it is. Similarly, while media penetration and access emerge as quite well documented and discussed, individual essays throw these out but overall they remain unresolved. One essay, on computer games and corporate control of their development, poses some fascinating challenges.

In a sense this book is really two books: one on media governance (likely to interest students of media regulation and markets and telecommunications, and then by extension anyone interested in the information society) and another on virtual and flexible learning such as that developed worldwide by higher education. Joining the second of these is an interesting outlier essay on the use of online exhibition software in museum work.

Deeper at a critical level will be whether either of these strands really adds much to current debate: where the book is at its most original is where specific policy decisions and experience, in media governance and in university virtual learning systems, provide insights into the challenges people have met and faced. The bibliographical material, too, is helpful at this level. But overall, in a crowded field, this book, the fifth in Intellect's changing media/changing Europe series, is just another paperback, and it is more likely to appeal to readers wanting detail about European experience than to add to the wider knowledge‐economy and communication‐studies agenda.