Media Convergence and Symbiosis

by: Roll Jervis T. Manahan / January 2, 2011, 2:05pm

Last Christmas Eve, my friend texted me that one of my tweets was read by an anchor in GMA Network’s flagship news program – 24 Oras. I immediately assumed that it was my response in the GMANews tweet regarding Paskong Pinoy that night:

It’s both funny and amazing, how my tweets reach national TV instantly. Eureka! That was #Convergence. (Complete with hashtag!)

Being the news-savvy person that I am, I'd want to focus in the fields of news gathering and news distribution as the prime ‘targets’ of media convergence. Undoubtedly, journalists have realigned their working zones and have reassessed their workplace values to adapt to the fast changing landscape of the media.

When news publishing houses established their first websites few years ago, the traditional and conservative journalists worried about the papers. But these were the same worries when television came into the landscape. Maybe media are just destined to co-exist. And the media behavior in this co-existing scheme is what, I think, triggers convergence.

The Internet obviously had its edges. It can cater to both print and broadcast; both text and videos can be published and streamed with extreme immediacy and efficiency. Not long afterwards, the Internet emerged to be a medium by itself, not just ancillaries to the print and broadcast industries.

In a private interview with GMANews.TV online journalist Andreo Calonzo, the multimedia nature of the online medium makes it the convergence point of all the three traditional media. The GMANews.TV website becomes the crossroad for all GMA News 'products'. They have the articles there, live stream for DZBB, and the videos they air for their TV programs. He further said that news websites becomes a one-stop shop. And in this way, online journalists can engage the readers more by putting multimedia elements such as pictures, embedded videos or even podcasts, and flash elements.

Web 3.0 furthered the reach of the Internet in news dissemination. News Websites started utilizing social networking sites in their news dissemination and news gathering, making the news processes and operations very interactive. People can like a page, comment on articles, or even submit articles while friend-ing virtual people. News became too friendly for people that headlines appear instantaneously at our facebook and twitter feeds.

Also, according to Calonzo, GMANews.tv utilize facebook and twitter to make their stories viral. They, he said, also follow the twitter accounts of several government offices and even celebrities to get news updates. In this way, the internet also becomes a venue not only for disseminating news, but also for farming for them.

But the entities who utilize the internet for news gathering and dissemination are the very institutions where we source our news traditionally. Media giants like locals ABS-CBN, GMA, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star and international agencies like the Associated Press, Reuters, etc have their own websites and social networking accounts where they post articles and videos. There are still a few professional independent online news sources in the country (which are not affiliated with bigger media institutions) except for some blogs like lampoon The Onion.

Our online news websites (and their social networking sites, particularly in Facebook and Twitter) are perhaps the epitome of convergence. It’s not a forced act, but rather a natural trend in the media landscape.

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Realizations, et al

Now, let us all pretend that the media atmosphere is like the normal ecological environment. (Yes, the one we study in biology!) We have many elements in this ecological setting - Online Media, Television, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, Optical Media, Other Forms of Telecommunication, and others. I am part of this ecological system as a (consumer) produser (See Produsage). The producer-consumer concept is blurred in this system. Like biology, the media is also a very complex system of interrelated elements and their political-economic, aesthetic, scientific, or whatever relationships. Convergence is the symbiotic relationship between these elements, because by experience, our society cannot exist with one element alone. And it’s dangerous for a democratic society to only have one media. Convergence takes on many forms, so I formulated three major theories of it. They are as follows.

The Theory of Collision

Here, the different media collide head-on, and the advance of one is at the expense of one. It’s like the predator-prey relationship, where the different media collide and somehow ‘kill’ each other. We have read many opinions on how the Internet has killed the future of newspapers, or of how television should have killed the future of newspapers before. They operate on the theory of collision.

The Theory of Competition

This theory states what is obvious. The different media compete with each other. For their survival, they compete for greater audience reach, profit, and whatnots - utilizing their potentials and strengths for their own good. Radio’s fast, newspapers are accurate and complete, television is somewhere in between, and Internet is up-to-date.

The Theory of Complementation

Whereas in the previous two theories, the different forms of media collide and compete with each other (meaning, the existence of other media becomes detrimental to their own existence and growth), here media becomes proactive because they complement each other. It’s like the biological mutualism, where different parties benefit each other. Media uses other media to complement their weaknesses. Traditional media complements the New Media, and vice-versa. What the newspapers and television can’t do, the internet does, and what the internet can’t, the television does.

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The writer does not say that only one of these theories exists. He even thinks that perhaps, all three theories exist, and on the other side, maybe, not one exists. After all, these are just his theories.

In the biological world, it’s an accepted fact that only organisms of the same species can mate. Here, the different media marries each other and mates with each other producing offspring of a totally different generation. In the advent of media convergence, the different forms slowly fuse up with each other, bringing in the new specie – a hybrid media.

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For further reading, visit the following:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/business/media/28circ.html?_r=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_newspapers

Disclaimer: The theories are mine. Haha. : )