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64 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
contexts’ (141). In other words, communication in CMC depends on the
sharing of a common culture which antedates interlocutors exchanging
meaning on the Internet. Secondly, like Marc Smith, Baym points out that
interactions may be synchronous or asynchronous. The time-world of the
exchange is in turn influenced by the sub-variables of the computer system
infrastructure, the speed, number and adaptability of computer interfaces.
Finally the number of interlocutors forming a group and the intensity of
purpose of their interaction will significantly determine what is commu-
nicated and how. Baym’s analysis is an important advance in overcoming
the legacy of much information theory, which takes as its ideal-type dyadic
reciprocity as well as transport notions of communication. These departure
points are instructive up to a point, but have difficulty accommodating
the complexity of CMC.

The convergence perspective

An important sub-variant of the second media age thesis, and one more
encompassing than the relatively narrow concerns of on-line CMC per-
spectives, is found in the literature on media convergence (see Fidler,
1997; Flew, 2002; Van Dijk, 1999). The convergence paradigm can rest on
an architectural distinction between broadcast and network, but some-
times also on an historical (second media age) distinction, as in the case of
Van Dijk. 18
Convergence perspectives range from looking at ‘industry conver-
gence’, to medium convergence, to convergence of individual media
technologies.
Technological convergence is the usual starting point for this per-
spective, and can take place at the level of infrastructure (transmission
links – optical fibre, microwave, satellite) or transportation (content
being transported in a new way such as Internet on TV, or webcasting).
Services such as weather on phones, entertainment on the Internet, but
also types of data, and the way sound, text, data and images can be
combined, are all included under the umbrella of convergence. What
underlies such convergence are various forms of the integration of
telecommunications, data communications and mass communications
(Van Dijk, 1999: 9).
There is also the ‘functional convergence’ that occurs in individual
media products, such as mobile phones converging with digital cameras.
This sense of convergence is perhaps the most commonplace, and mostly
takes the form of pointing out how older ‘analogue technologies’ have
been re-created in the image of digital technologies. There are also
very crude attempts to suggest that television and the Internet exhibit
some kind of essential process of merging because TV can be viewed
on computers, and CMC is readily advertised on television (see Seiter,
1999: 115).