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Theories of Cybersociety 65
But these technological levels of convergence are only made possible by
industry convergence, resulting from collaboration between corporations
in telecommunications, media and IT, or by takeovers and mergers
between them. The relationship between corporate and technological con-
vergence is dynamic and two-way. Corporate convergence gives rise to
new combinations of mediums, technological innovation and content
delivery, whilst technological innovation creates the compulsion for new
kinds of corporate convergence. 19
But finally, we can speak of the convergence between broadcast and
networking as mediums, which Van Dijk (1999) calls ‘the second commu-
nications revolution’. This revolution is one in which older mediums are
redetermined, in two key ways – as interactive and as digital. It is digital-
ization which, according to Flew (2002: 10–11), is significant for the way
in which it makes platforms and their media inter-operable, and net-
workable. Moreover, digitalization delivers the cybernetic dream of sepa-
rating a channel of communication from content. Digital media can be
broken down to a common base of bits, which are universally transferable
and manipulable across media.
So what converges then, in terms of mediums, is not digital and ana-
logue technologies, but new digital technologies, with digitally remedi-
ated analogue technology, as Table 3.1 outlines.
Under the broadcast column, television, radio and newsprint are
each available in a digital form, as are many of the consumer items asso-
ciated with them, such as DVDs and personal computer portals for viewing
or listening to such media. Notable is a return to a wired infrastructure as
providing a wider bandwidth for broadcast media, and the decline of
electromagnetic transmission, which otherwise require an analogue-to-
digital conversion process for use by the end consumer in digital form.
In the network column, there are also older analogue network
technologies, most obviously the telephone, which was one of the first to
be digitalized, in landline exchanges, but also older analogue mobile net-
works. However, unlike the broadcast column, there is also an array of
‘born digital’ technologies, which have been made possible entirely
within a network infrastructure context. The Internet is at the frontier of
these technologies, but the digital telephone network is also the hub for
a proliferation of new P2P (person-to-person) networked bandwidth.
On the policy front, broadcasters are interested in the ‘free speech’
implications of a second media age, and exploit the way in which its his-
toricism has become an orthodoxy by lobbying government regulators to
slacken ownership concentration laws. Meanwhile key players in net-
work media who facilitate the de-commodification of broadcast products,
software, music and film-downloading web portals, are attacked by the
owners of such media products via civic-legal means or by relayed pres-
sure through telecommunications authorities. In this case, however, the
arguments are not political, concerned with freedom of speech, but exclu-
sively economic.