Sergio Roncallo-Dow

Social Media and New Audiences as a New Challenge for Traditional and New Media Industries

Over the first decade of the twentieth century, the big revolution in information and communications technologies has resulted in many innovations that are having increasingly visible effects on the daily life of media users.

Rethinking Convergence: A New Word to Describe an Old Idea

Convergence seems to be a new concept related to the field of communication. Nevertheless it is important to remark that the idea of convergence is a classic one in order to understand the relationship between humans and communication processes. The present chapter depicts the evolution of convergence as a theoretical framework, from philosophical perspectives such as Simondon’s idea of genesis and McLuhan’s laws of media to the contemporary approaches such as Jenkin’s convergence culture. Instead of thinking of convergence as a contemporary characteristic of communication environment, or merely a technological objectuality, we propose to rethink it as a reloaded term used as a word rather than as an abstract concept in current literature. Since words can develop many meanings, convergence has been used to a variety of aspects in recent years.