Implementing new technologies doesn’t mean the old ones vanish into dusty museums. Today’s media consumers still watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers, and become immersed in movies. The difference is that it’s now possible to do all those things through one device—a personal computer or smartphone, for example—using the Internet. Such actions are enabled by media convergence, the process by which previously distinct analog technologies come to share tasks and resources. A smartphone demonstrates the convergence of digital photography, digital video, and cellular telephone (among others) technologies.

Kinds of Convergence

Convergence isn’t just limited to technology. Media theorist Henry Jenkins argues that convergence isn’t a result but a process that changes the consumption and production of media messages. Jenkins breaks convergence down into five categories:

1. Economic convergence occurs when a company controls several products or services within the same industry. For example, in the entertainment industry, a single company may have interests across many kinds of media. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns companies involved in book publishing (HarperCollins), newspapers (New York Post, The Wall Street Journal), sports (FOX Sports), broadcast television (Fox), and cable television (FOX News). They also used to own the film studio 21st Century Fox until they sold it to Disney.
2. Organic convergence occurs when an individual interacts with multiple stimuli simultaneously. For example, someone may watch a video on YouTube while exchanging text messages with a friend and listening to music in the background.
3. Cultural convergence has several aspects. Stories flowing across several kinds of media platforms are one component—for example, novels that become streaming television series (The Sandman); radio dramas that become comic strips (The Shadow); even amusement park rides that become film franchises (Pirates of the Caribbean). The character Harry Potter exists in books, films, toys, and amusement park rides. Another aspect of cultural convergence involves participatory culture—the power media consumers have to annotate, comment on, remix, and otherwise influence culture in unprecedented ways. The video-sharing website YouTube provides anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection the opportunity to communicate with a global audience and create and shape cultural trends.
4. Global convergence is the process of geographically distant cultures influencing one another despite the distance physically separating them. Nigeria’s cinema industry, nicknamed Nollywood, takes its cues from India’s Bollywood, which found inspiration from Hollywood. Tom and Jerry cartoons are popular on Arab satellite television channels. Successful American horror movies The Ring and The Grudge are remakes of Japanese hits. K-Pop has become one of the world’s most popular musical genres. The advantage of global convergence is access to a wealth of cultural influence; its downside, some critics posit, is the threat of cultural imperialism, defined by Herbert Schiller as the way developing countries are “attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system (White, 2001).” Cultural imperialism can manifest via a formal policy or occur more subtly, as with the spread of outside influence through television, movies, and other cultural artifacts.
5. Technological convergence describes the merging of technologies, such as the ability to watch television programming on sites like Hulu or to play video games on devices like the Apple iPhone. As more and more different kinds of analog media become transformed into digital content, Jenkins notes, “we expand the potential relationships between them and enable them to flow across platforms (Jenkins, 2001).”

Effects of Convergence

Jenkins’s concept of organic convergence is perhaps the most telling. To many people, especially those who grew up in a world dominated by so-called legacy media (all mass media that existed before the Internet), there is nothing organic about today’s media-dominated world. As a New York Times editorial opined, “Few objects on the planet are farther removed from nature—less, say, like a rock or an insect—than a glass and stainless-steel smartphone (New York Times, 2010).” But modern American culture is plugged in as never before, and today’s high school students have never known a world where the Internet didn’t exist. Such a cultural sea change causes a significant generation gap between those who grew up with new media and those who didn’t.

A 2021 study conducted by Common Sense found from 2019 to 2021 alone, media use grew by 17% for tweens and teens. On average, 8- to 12-year-olds interact with screen media for about five hours and 33 minutes daily, while 13- to 18-year-olds use about eight hours and 39 minutes (Common Sense Media, 2021). These statistics highlight aspects of the new digital model of media consumption: participation and multitasking.

Convergence has also made multitasking much easier, as many devices allow users to surf the Internet, listen to music, watch videos, play games, and reply to messages on the same machine.

However, it’s still difficult to predict how media convergence and immersion are affecting culture, society, and individual brains. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that today’s television and video games are mentally stimulating in that they pose a cognitive challenge and invite active engagement and problem-solving. Poking fun at alarmists who see every new technology as making children stupider, Johnson jokingly cautions readers against the dangers of book reading: It “chronically understimulates the senses” and is “tragically isolating.” Even worse, books “follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you…. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one (Johnson, 2005).”

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is more pessimistic. Carr worries that the vast array of interlinked information available through the Internet has eroded attention spans and made contemporary minds distracted and less capable of deep, thoughtful engagement with complex ideas and arguments. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words,” Carr reflects ruefully. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski (Carr, 2010).” Carr cites neuroscience studies showing that when people try to do two things at once, they give less attention to each activity and perform the tasks less carefully. In other words, multitasking makes people do more things poorly. Whatever the ultimate cognitive, social, or technological results, convergence is changing how people relate to media today.