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 Sergio Sparviero · Corinna Peil
Gabriele Balbi
Editors

Media Convergence
and Deconvergence

[email protected]
Editors
Sergio Sparviero Gabriele Balbi
Department of Communication Institute of Media and Journalism
Studies USI Università della Svizzera italiana
University of Salzburg Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Salzburg, Austria

Corinna Peil
Department of Communication
Studies
University of Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research – A Palgrave

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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51289-1

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 CHAPTER 2

Deconstructing “Media Convergence”:

A Cultural History of the Buzzword,
1980s–2010s

Gabriele Balbi

Introduction to a Confusing Term

The term convergence originates from the Latin word convergentia
(gathering). Its use started in the 18th century in the field of the physics
of rays. Then, particularly during the 19th century, mathematics (as in
convergent series or fractions) and biology (as meaning “the tendency
in diverse or allied animals or plants to assume similar characteristics”)
adopted it. Finally, beginning in the early 20th century, the term was
used in meteorology, oceanography and, interestingly, in the social sci-
ences and humanities such as anthropology, psychology, political science,
economics and political economy (all these definitions were obtained
from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com/
view/Entry/40732?redirectedFrom=convergence#eid).
According to different authors, the idiom “media convergence” was
first employed in either the late 1960s (Szczepaniak, 2013, p. 7; Gordon,
2003, p. 58) or the 1970s (Lind, 2004, p. 6). Since that time, it has

G. Balbi (*) 
USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2017 31

S. Sparviero et al. (eds.), Media Convergence and Deconvergence, Global
Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and
IAMCR Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51289-1_2
[email protected]
32  G. Balbi

had a variety of meanings and diverse media scholars have described the
processes of media convergence using different terms. Convergence has
been described as a technical, regulatory, financial, symbolic, economic,
social, cultural, global, narrative, tactical, structural, static and evolving
phenomenon (see, for example, Levasseur & Musso, 1993, p. 9; Flynn,
2000; Jenkins, 2001, p. 93; Gordon, 2003; Dailey, Demo, & Spillman,
2005; Dennis, 2006; Zhang, 2008, pp. 21–22; Infotendencias Group,
2012). As a macro-level phenomenon, it may involve single products,
systems, apparatuses, networks, contents, services and markets (Flynn,
2000; Singer, 2004; Fagerjord & Sorsul, 2007; Infotendencias Group,
2012). The confusion in meanings has increased, even in the last dec-
ade, as explained in three books published in 2009 and 2010 containing
“media convergence” in the title, all of which consider this topic using
different perspectives (Staiger & Hake, 2009; Dwyer, 2010; Jensen,
2010). According to Espen Ytreberg (2011, p. 503 and 507), who
reviewed the books, they “provide [an] illustration of just how diverse
researchers’ approaches to ‘convergence’… seem almost to live in dif-
ferent worlds, each one seemingly unaware of the others’ approach and
traditions.”
Given all these possibilities, media convergence is now consid-
ered by scholars to be a term that should be used more carefully. It has
been described as “a dangerous word” (Silverstone, 1995, p. 11), an
“unclear” (Fagerjord & Storsul, 2007, p. 132) and “ambigous” term
(Latzer‚ 2013‚ p. 123), “one of those particularly hard-to-handle con-
cepts” (Ytreberg, 2011, p. 502), an “umbrella concept” with a high
degree of vagueness and intangibility (Marsden & Verhulst, 1999, pp.
3–5; Herkmann, 2012, p. 13), a “concept… so broad that it has multi-
ple meanings” (Wirth, 2006, p. 445), “too nebulous to be used to iden-
tify specific variables, processes and media-related phenomena” (Grant,
2009, p. 15), and even “a hyped illusion” simply because of its attempt
to encompass many concepts and to be “everything” (Noll, 2003, pp.
12–13).
This confusion does not mean that media convergence is a useless
term, especially because it has become a buzzword in (new) media and
communication studies in recent decades and it is often used as a rhe-
torical tool (Fagerjord & Storsul, 2007). Given its relevance, this chap-
ter aims to deconstruct the historical meanings of the term, focusing on
the emergence of different discourses and narratives regarding media

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  33

convergence from the 1980s to the early 2010s and, at the same time,
to understand how these discourses mutually reinforced each other and
even affected how media developed in recent decades. Specifically, I
intend to analyze the term using the following four historical and nar-
ratological dimensions: technological media convergence, which was the
first way of examining convergence that emerged in the early 1980s; eco-
nomic/market convergence, which characterizes firms’ approaches from
the late 1980s/early 1990s; political/regulatory media convergence,
which appeared simultaneously in different countries during the 1990s;
and, finally, cultural convergence, which was taken for granted in many
discourses about the role of digital media in everyday life starting in the
2000s. This four-stage model was also adopted fully by Miller (2011)
and partially by Grant (2009) and Dwyer (2010), but the different stages
should not be considered mutually subsequent: on the one hand‚ they
are interconnected and reinforce each other and‚ on the other‚ even if
they emerged in different decades, their narratives are still there and
influence the ways that we examine media convergence today. This chap-
ter is based primarily on a revision of the academic literature on media
convergence and partially on relevant political documents. In the conclu-
sion, media convergence is also deconstructed using a quantitative per-
spective thanks to a search of the Factiva and Google NGram databases.
These two tools are able to illustrate a type of diachronic evolution of
this term in the last decades and provide insight to promote understand-
ing of its peaks in popularity and unpopularity.

A Short Prehistory: Media Convergence

Before Digitization
Before addressing the four different perspectives of media convergence,
it is worth understanding if and how this idea emerged in media history
before the 1980s. Most historical approaches that have reconstructed the
term media convergence have considered digitization as a key prerequi-
site or the starting point of convergence. Nevertheless‚ even if the idea
of media convergence was certainly boosted by digitization‚ the concept
appeared much earlier in the analog world (Nieć, 2013, p. 19; Nguyen‚
2007) meaning the blurring of different technologies and the integration
of previously separated sectors.

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Editorial contents/mass media and telecommunications started to

converge in the 19th century when, for example, telegraph companies
and press companies, which were not provided with a rigid distinction
in the legislation at that time, found forms of synergies (Winsek, 1999).
The same is true of the so-called “circular telephone,” a new medium
that was developed in the late 19th century in different countries that
combined the point-to-point characteristics of the telephone and one-to-
many press (later, broadcasting). This “radio before radio” (Balbi, 2010)
brought entertainment into subscribers’ houses through a telephone net-
work and integrated editorial contents and telecommunication sectors
again.
The movie industry was shaped by constant convergence with other
media such as radio and TV and, subsequently, mobile phones and the
internet (see, for example, the case of Indian cinema in Punathambekar,
2008). At the same time, wide-screen televisions and home movies rep-
resent a form of television and cinema convergence that occurred before
digitization (Steward, 2014). More recently, informatics and telecom-
munications started to overlap during the second half of the 1970s,
and many researchers realized it at the time. In 1977, Farber and
Baran entitled one of their papers “The Convergence of Computing
and Telecommunications Systems.” A research project that was con-
ducted at Harvard in the mid 1970s (“Information Technologies and
Public Policy”) identified an emerging overlap between voice telecom-
munication networks and data networks, introducing the term “com-
punications” (Oettinger, Berman, & Read, 1977). A more attractive
and enduring neologism was coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc
(1978), who introduced the word “telematics” in a report addressed
to the French government, to describe the process of the long-distance
transmission of computer-based information (Richeri, 1982). This “con-
vergence” can be considered to be only partially digital because telecom-
munication networks at that time carried analog signals exclusively.
These examples of media convergence that occurred prior to digitiza-
tion can be viewed as initial attempts to deconstruct the term. Indeed,
media convergence should be considered a long-lasting phenomenon
that preceded digitization and was applicable to many media technolo-
gies and sectors, even in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  35

Four (Historical) Dimensions that Promote an

Understanding of Convergence
Technological Convergence from the Early 1980s
As previously mentioned, it was only with the macro-phenomenon of
digitization that media convergence entered the academic discourse per-
manently. It is well known that media technologies have gone through a
phase of digitization from the 1980s onwards that has shaped the con-
temporary media landscape (Balbi & Magaudda‚ forthcoming). The
most significant feature of digitization is that text, fixed and moving
images and sound (therefore, the media forms at the basis of the edito-
rial contents sector) can be coded using the same language composed
of simple strings of 0 and 1. Before digitization, text, images and sound
were separate media forms. They were reproduced and transmitted by
different devices (for example, phonographs, paper, telephones, radio
and television). Furthermore, they had distinct markets that were regu-
lated by politics in different ways (Zhang, 2008, p. 1). With digitization,
the boundaries of different media forms have become blurred, as a single
form of technology can transmit all the previous media contents.
As mentioned above, most media scholars have considered digi-
tization to be the technological basis of media convergence. First,
translating all media contents into a single language was a natural pre-
condition of the introduction of a single and unique device that was
able to decode these messages and called an überbox, telecomputer, tel-
eputer, cellular phone, digital television or smartphone, depending on
the decade (Kopecka-Piech, 2011, pp. 7–8). In reality, the überbox nar-
rative was probably one of the most visible failed ideas of convergence.
Henry Jenkins (2006, p. 14) called it “the black box fallacy,” and Juha
Herkman (2012, pp. 370–371) described it as “the great utopia of con-
vergence” because “instead of coming together, as the term convergence
suggests, today there is more variety than ever before in communication
and media technologies, gadgets, devices, formats and standards.”
Second, digitization sped up the process of network integration that
started in the 1980s before networks were digitized. Thus far, communi-
cation networks historically have been designed to transmit a single type
of information (voice or signs or data) and have often been managed by
different organizations. Telegraph and telephone signals, for example,
were transmitted through diverse cables and networks. At the beginning

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36  G. Balbi

of the 1980s, a general phenomenon emerged in different European

countries: monopolist telecommunication industries started to cable
(parts of) nations, believing that new services would pass through these
networks, most likely editorial contents. These companies reconfigured
the networks to allow them to carry traditional television or traditional
telephony without any difference; they therefore made cable networks
naturally convergent (Pradié & Salaün, 1992, pp. 194–197). Then, when
these networks were digitized, this process of integration reached its
apex, and sound, text and images could flow and be transmitted in the
form of bytes without any differences across diverse networks.
The technological basis of convergence was the most durable way in
which convergence was imagined, not only because of digitization. Its
popularity was probably due to the two founding fathers of convergence,
both of whom imagined it in technological terms between the late 1970s
and the beginning of the 1980s. The first “prophet” (Jenkins, 2006,
p. 10) of media convergence was Ithiel de Sola Pool. In his famous book
Technologies of Freedom he described the following:

[C]onvergence of modes… blurring the lines between media, even

between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone, and
telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio and televi-
sion. A single physical means—be it wires, cables or airwaves—may carry
services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a ser-
vice that was provided in the past by any one medium—be it broadcasting,
the press or telephony—can now be provided in several different physical
ways. So the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium
and its use is eroding. (de Sola Pool, 1983, p. 23)

The second founding father was Nicolas Negroponte, who depicted

convergence at the MIT Media Lab using the famous figure of three
overlapping circles in 1978. He claimed that the overlap between the
“broadcast and motion picture industry,” the “computer industry” and
the “print and publishing industry” would become almost complete by
the year 2000 (Brand, 1987, pp. 10–11).
Even if Negroponte and de Sola Pool neglected, respectively, the
fundamental role of telecommunications and informatics in the pro-
cess, their reflections helped to popularize the term during the 1980s
and 1990s. Both generally understood media convergence as the “com-
ing together of all forms of mediated communication in digital forms”

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  37

(Burnett & Marshall, 2003, p. 1) or even more generally as the com-

ing together of different equipment, tools and media technologies. This
narrative of media convergence as a technological phenomenon monop-
olized discourses for many decades (see, for example, Dennis, 1992;
Baldwin, Stevens McVoy, & Steinfield, 1996; Watson & Hill, 1997, p.
65), and it is probably one of the most popular ways of examining con-
vergence today.

Economic/Market Convergence from the Late 1980s/Early 1990s

A second and associated phenomenon of economic/market convergence
started to emerge in Western cultures between the late 1980s and the
early 1990s. Due to the rhetorical success of technological convergence
and the various promises of cost reductions, many mergers and strate-
gic acquisitions in telecommunications and media industries were tested
and implemented, bringing a slow redefinition of the media market. Lind
(2004) identified two waves of this type of economic/market conver-
gence. The first wave began in the 1980s, when several equipment ven-
dors in the IT and telecommunication sectors tried (and mostly failed) to
enter each other’s markets. The second and broader wave began at the
beginning of the 1990s and was partially motivated by forecasts regard-
ing the convergence of digital media and the IT/telecommunication
industry (see also OECD‚ 1992). Specifically, during the 1990s, mar-
ket convergence had two main surges. The first occurred in 1993–1994,
when the vision of convergence carried many promises for business exec-
utives, although few of them knew exactly how to exploit and implement
the new concept. Then, after a period of disillusion, the second wave
started in 1997 and was driven by the fact that the internet had gradu-
ally made convergence strategies possible (Lind, 2004, pp. 10–11). It
was during the 1990s, according to Lind, that the media convergence
debate transitioned from being mainly internal to information and com-
munication industries to “grab[bing] attention in the general media and
business community” (Lind, 2004, p. 7). This was due to the growing
dimensions of media industries and two other factors as follows: the eco-
nomic and social rhetoric of the information superhighway introduced
by US President Clinton’s administration in 1993 and, in the second half
of the 1990s, the rapid diffusion of the internet.
Furthermore, market convergence is often associated with the fol-
lowing two types of so-called integration: diagonal, which is when a

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38  G. Balbi

firm in one sector expands to other sectors, and vertical, which is when
a firm that is involved at one point in the production chain expands to
another point in the production chain within the same industry (Doyle,
2013). Both types of integration have had significant relevance in recent
decades. An example of diagonal integration is when telecommunica-
tion companies expanded into other sectors such as the editorial con-
tent industry: The merging of Viacom and CBS in 1999 or America
Online (AOL) and Time Warner in 2000 are two famous cases of diag-
onal integration. This can also be considered an example of economic
convergence because two media firms and, more generally, two market
fields that were previously separated overlapped, realizing the so-called
“economies of multiformity” or networks synergies (for instance, when
a telephone company moves into the cable television industry, it can use
its existing distribution infrastructure to sell two services instead of just
one). Vertical integration can stimulate convergence in terms of con-
tents. When, for example, a film production firm expands into film distri-
bution, it aims to make contents flow through different and convergent
channels that are owned by a single company. This occurred in 1994,
for example, when Viacom bought Paramount, a film production com-
pany. In this way, when a new movie was released, it could be distributed
through all the Viacom channels such as cinema chains, Blockbuster, and
television stations.
In sum, media companies believed (and partially still believe)
that they could exploit synergistic effects from their union, and pol-
itics encouraged them to follow this pattern. At the beginning of the
2000s, after having evaluated the real benefits and having discovered
that they were overestimated, a complementary and reverse phenom-
enon of deconvergence started to emerge, which had a strong impact
on media business and management. According to Albarran and Gormly
(2004), fewer than half of the mergers involving media companies in
the 1990s survived, and many of them ended in failure. Two relevant
examples are the previously mentioned mergers between Viacom and
CBS and America Online and Time Warner. Both mega groups started
to deconverge and return to their past (separating into radically diverse
companies) a few years after their integrations. These mega groups have
changed their business model because they failed to obtain the prom-
ised benefits and they have embraced a type of deconvergence that is the
basis of this book (see Jin, Chap. 10, and Peil & Sparviero, Chap. 1 in
this volume).

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  39

Nonetheless, why did economic/market convergence occur? Beyond

the desire to profit from the synergistic effects, there are other relevant
reasons. Pradié & Salaün (1992) claimed that it was a natural expan-
sion of the telecommunication industries that had cabled some nations
in the 1980s and that, in the 1990s, aimed to merge with mass media
companies to fill telecommunication networks with editorial contents and
justify expenses associated with networks one decade earlier. According
to Bernard Miège (1992, p. 23), one of the main motivators behind
economic convergence was the fact that, in the early 1980s, both tele-
communication and television industries experienced a moment of “sat-
uration” in their respective markets and started to converge to search
for new business opportunities and customers. Milton Mueller (1999)
believed that market convergence, a phenomenon that, according to him,
started long before the 1990s, was due to the declining cost of informa-
tion processing power and by the development of open standards. Finally,
the pervasive spirit of deregulation was crucial to enforcing media market
convergence. This is one of the topics covered in the next section.

Political/Regulatory Convergence from the 1990s

European media were involved in a process of market liberalization and
deregulation during the 1990s, which was one of the main effects of the
long downturn that affected much of the world beginning in the late
1960s (Hesmondhalgh, 2002). Up to the 1990s, in Europe telecommu-
nication companies have been regulated primarily as public monopolies
or with a system of grants that were strictly controlled by state govern-
ments because administrators wanted to guarantee equal rights to access
to their citizens (that is, “universal service”). Similarly, broadcasting was
in the public’s hands for a long time for civic reasons. Frequencies used
to transmit radio and television messages were limited, and the state had
to regulate them to prevent abuses of power and, again, to guarantee
equal access. These narratives of regulation were progressively dismantled
during the 1980s for many reasons. First, at the European level, there
was a shared belief in creating a common, dynamic and competitive mar-
ket to imitate the American model. Second, both telecommunications
and broadcasting were widespread everywhere and no longer needed to
be protected. Finally, especially in the case of broadcasting, new media
increased the capacity to transmit information progressively; therefore,
the argument relating to spectrum scarcity was no longer sustainable.

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Consequently, neoliberal ideology identified telecommunications and

broadcasting as the main sectors in which to intervene using a process of
deregulation, liberalization from government intervention, and marketi-
zation. This occurred via three interrelated processes. First‚ the broad-
casting monopoly was opened during the 1970s in Italy and the 1980s
in the majority of other European countries, while telecommunications
were gradually privatized in the first half of the 1980s in the UK and in
the 1990s in other countries. The second process was an expansion of
private ownership and company size, as partially described above. The
third process was the dismantling of historical regulatory walls that were
erected among telecommunications, broadcasting and new media com-
panies. Under these conditions, Europe experienced what had occurred
in the USA a decade earlier. In 1982, because of a decision by the Justice
Department, AT&T, the dominant telephone company in the USA, was
forced to divest in local business and engage in competition in the long-
distance market. In return for agreeing to this divestiture, AT&T was
allowed to enter the broadcasting and computer markets; consequently,
traditional barriers between these sectors disappeared (Baldwin et al.,
1996, p. 6). It was the first political and regulatory recognition of a phe-
nomenon called media convergence.
From the late 1980s, the European community started to favor either
privatization or the breaking up of regulatory walls among sectors. Early
examples of this policy were the Green Books on television without
borders and telecommunications in 1984 and 1987 as well as the direc-
tives on television and telecommunications in 1989–1990 (Levasseur &
Musso, 1993, pp. 12–13).
During the 1990s, this wave sped up and a symbolic document on regula-
tory convergence, the EU Green Paper of 1997, was published. In the paper,
the European Commission deeply discussed impacts, barriers, regulatory
implications and future options for media convergence. This paper was likely
influenced by another document released in 1996 by the US government
to increase competition in the telecommunications market and to address
the growth of the internet: “the Telecommunication Act”. The EU Green
Telecommunications ActPaper identified three stages of media convergence
that had already occurred (technology and network platforms, industry alli-
ances and mergers and services and markets) and the following three main
options to regulate it in the upcoming future: (1) developing new regula-
tions on current structures; (2) introducing a sector of new services that
were separate from broadcasting and telecommunications; and (3) progres-
sively introducing a new regulatory model to cover all services (European

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  41

Commission, 1997, pp. 34–35). Even if the Green Paper avoided taking
positions, the third option was considered “the one which will minimize reg-
ulatory discrimination and market distortion in the converged environment”
(Clements, 1998, p. 201). That is, in the second half of the 1990s, among
European regulators, there was a general belief that new convergent tech-
nologies, industry alliances and mergers as well as new services and markets
would bring major changes in policy and regulation (Latzer, 2014).
This change has not fully occurred, as an updated European
Commission document (2013, p. 3) shows. The imminent arrival of a
“fully converged … world” is still a common belief, including the belief
that “lines are blurring” and processes of “progressive merger of tradi-
tional broadcast services and the Internet” are being realized. In other
words, as is the case with economic/market convergence, political/reg-
ulatory convergence seems to be a never-ending process and somewhat
common and passpartout in the rhetorical language of media regulation.

Cultural Convergence from the 2000s

A third major figure in the area of media convergence added a “cultural
layer” to this term and helped to popularize it. Indeed, after the publica-
tion of Convergence Culture in 2006, “a veritable wave of publications,
conferences and debates over the issue” emerged (Szczepaniak, 2013,
p. 8). Somehow contributing to the confusion surrounding the term,
Henry Jenkins has viewed media convergence in many different ways,
but he put at the center of his reflections a cultural perspective with a
focus on users in particular.

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media plat-

forms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, the search for
new structures of media financing which fell at the interstices between
old and new media, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who
would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment expe-
riences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe
technological, industrial, cultural and social changes, depending on who’s
speaking and what they think they are talking about. (Jenkins, 2005, p. 2)

Again, he wrote the following: “[Convergence is] more than simply a

technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing
technologies, industries, markets, genres and audience” (Jenkins, 2004,
p. 34).

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42  G. Balbi

Cultural convergence can be observed as the fourth narrative of media

convergence and involves numerous elements, especially media produc-
tion and consumption. These two phases are not completely separated,
but they are often self-reinforcing because audiences and media indus-
tries in the new environment can talk to each other and influence their
behaviors just as cats and mice do (a metaphor provided by Barra and
Scaglioni, 2013). Since the early 2000s, the rhetoric of cultural conver-
gence has influenced the ways in which traditional media commodities
are imagined and produced. Media products have become increasingly
more “transmedial” (and therefore adaptable to different communica-
tion technologies). Then, they are often no longer singular products, but
parts of series, flows and ideas that move from the media to reality and
vice versa. This obviously changes the role and ‘culture’ of television pro-
duction (Askwith, 2007) and mass media in general.
Consumption has been changed by convergence to a greater extent.
Hynes (2003) argues that discourses on media convergence have often
been surrounded by deterministic assumptions, including the fact that
consumption has been irrevocably transformed by technological and
economic convergence. In contrast, “consumption convergence,” as she
calls it, has occurred because of “the simultaneous use and consumption
of media technologies” (Hynes, 2003, p. 3) in the home, as people have
started to integrate and reuse previously separate devices and ideas, pass-
ing easily from one medium to another. In other words, both Hynes and
Jenkins, despite holding different perspectives, focus on the role of users
as relevant actors in stimulating media convergence.
First, in a convergent environment, “consumers are encouraged to
seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media
content” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 3), remixing pieces of culture taken from
different media. This creates a new media experience, which is sometimes
encouraged by media industries, in which the same story can cross differ-
ent media platforms (Jenkins & Deuze, 2008).
A second narrative of cultural convergence is that media production
and consumption are no longer separate and the line between amateurs
and professionals is blurring (Deuze, 2007). Users enjoy participating in
the co-construction of the message and even aim to become producers of
media contents. This is the logic behind the so-called prosumer (a neol-
ogism indicating that the same person is the media producer and con-
sumer), creating user-generated contents and spreading them through
the convergent environment of the Web 2.0. This is the so-called partici-
patory culture.

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  43

A third and related element of the convergence culture involves the

increase in what Pierre Levy (1997) calls “collective intelligence,” which
refers to the fact that people in online environments can share informa-
tion and resources and help each other to solve problems collectively.
This would not be achievable through individual efforts. It is only pos-
sible because knowledge resides in the network and is collective.
These visions of the impact of media convergence are all optimis-
tic and perhaps too simplistic. For this reason, in recent years, scholars
have criticized them using at least three perspectives. Instead of being
a widespread and commonsense phenomenon, user participation is lim-
ited (Nielsen, 2006). Rather than bringing about forms of collective
intelligence, a great majority of users and consequently user generated
contents are poor in quality; therefore, amateurization has a reverse and
negative side (Keen, 2007; Fuchs, 2011, especially Chap. 7). Finally‚
instead of liberalizing and pluralizing media properties through multiple
participation from below, digital and convergent media have undergone
a progressive phenomenon of the concentration of power in the hands
of a few large companies (Noam, 2015). Buzz terms such as “rich get
richer” or “winner takes all” represent new metaphorical ways to express
this prevalent narrative. The debate is ongoing, but the popular and uto-
pian narratives of cultural convergence in the early 2000s are leaving
space for negative and sometimes apocalyptic visions in which globali-
zation, cultural homogenization and scarce interest in participation are
emerging.

A Very Short Quantitative History of the Term

Media convergence increased in popularity during the 1990s and
reached a peak at the beginning of the 2000s, as scholars focusing on
technological, economic and regulatory convergence achieved the
maturity of their reflections. Then, the term had a type of deflation, as
shown in Figs. 2.1 and 2.2. Figure 2.1 resulted from a search among
Factiva databases for the term “media convergence” from 1990 to 2015.
Factiva provides access to a variety of media outlets. It contains thou-
sands of articles in 22 different languages and provides full-text versions
of products published by Reuters, Dow Jones and the Associated Press,
as well as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Consequently,
it represents a gateway to international economic and financial informa-
tion and is crucial to understanding the evolution of the term in political,
economic and business senses. The second graph resulted from a search

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44  G. Balbi

Fig. 2.1  Occurrences of the term “media convergence” in Factiva, 1990–2015.

Source http://global.factiva.com/sb/default.aspx?lnep=hp

Fig. 2.2  Occurrences of the term “media convergence” in Google Books.

Source The author, produced with Google Books Ngram Viewer: https://books.
google.com/ngrams

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  45

of the same topic in Google NGram based on 30 million scanned books

in the Google Books database from 1986 to 2008. Google NGram rep-
resents a valuable tool to understanding if and how a term has entered
contemporary mentality though the frequency of its use in books
scanned by Google.
Neither database is completely accurate, but I used them to show the
quantitative frequency of the term without any reflection on its seman-
tics, the ways in which it was used, or possible alternative terms that have
emerged. Nevertheless, these figures can provide a historical overview
of the rise and stagnation of the concept. Both tools show, for exam-
ple, that its peak in popularity occurred in approximately 2000 and, since
then, without disappearing, the term has become less relevant in contem-
porary culture (and probably contemporary media studies as well). This
decline might have been caused by several factors, including disillusion
after the explosion of the internet bubble at the turn of the century, the
fact that it entered into the common mentality and therefore in some
ways is taken for granted, or, again, the effect of all the criticisms, failures
and doubts about convergence that have been raised during recent dec-
ades and that have brought about new (and apparently conflicting) terms
such as media deconvergence. This is the one of the key questions in the
book that you are reading.

Conclusion: A History of Change and Continuity

The term “media convergence” started to be used in the 1960s and
1970s, boomed in the 1980s, became widespread in 1990s and 2000s,
and might be in crisis today. It has been conceived, theorized and ana-
lyzed by scholars using many perspectives over the years. This chapter
wanted to reduce the confusion surrounding this topic, attempting to
analyze the four key narratives that have been used to imagine and dis-
cuss media convergence in the scientific literature over time: media con-
vergence as a technological, economic/market, political/regulatory and
cultural phenomenon.
Each of these forms has shaped the approaches of media experts,
businesspersons, politicians and, increasingly more, common people in
different stages. Technological convergence was the first to appear and
dominated the general discourse at least from the 1980s. Economic/
market convergence became relevant owing to integrations among
different media industries and reached its peak during the 1990s.

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46  G. Balbi

Consequently, politicians started to think about new ways to regulate

convergent environments during the second half of the 1990s both in
the USA and in Europe. Finally, starting from the 2000s, the phenom-
enon of cultural convergence seemed to be one of the most relevant
trends in contemporary media.
The respective histories of these four layers of significance interrelate,
and different meanings have overlapped during recent decades without
deleting the previous one. Thus, media convergence currently conveys
all these ideas together. It is likely that additional connotations will be
added in the future and this perpetual change and instability, which is
typical of any term‚ is the main reason why some scholars have proposed
examining media convergence as a continuous process instead of a static
terminus ad quem that is reversible, resistible and not necessarily moving
from the past to the present. For example, Thorburn and Jenkins (2004,
p. 3) claimed that

[I]f we understand media convergence as a process instead of a static ter-

mination, then we can recognize that such convergences occur regularly in
the history of communications and that they are especially likely to occur
when an emerging technology has temporarily destabilized the relations
among existing media. In this view, convergence can be understood as a
way to bridge or join old and new technologies, formats and audiences.
(Thorburn & Jenkins, 2004, p. 3)

In other words, this concept needs to be contextualized in history, which

is why reconstructing and deconstructing the history of a term and the
ways in which it is imagined and narrated can aid in its full comprehen-
sion and, in particular, in the understanding that partly it will remain sta-
ble and partly it will change again in the future. After all, doing (media)
history often involves analyzing the relationship between change and
continuity.

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 2  DECONSTRUCTING “MEDIA CONVERGENCE”: A CULTURAL HISTORY …  51

Author Biography
Gabriele Balbi is Senior Assistant Professor at the Institute of Media and
Journalism, Faculty of Communication Sciences, USI Università della Svizzera
italiana, Switzerland. He is director of the China Media Observatory. His main
areas of research are media history and history of telecommunications, with a
focus on the relationships between analogue and digital media.

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