H E N R Y J E N K I N S Digital Renaissance
hat’s all this talk about
“media convergence,” this
dumb industry idea that all
media will meld into one, and
we’ll get all of our news and enter-
tainment through one box? Few con-
temporary terms generate more
buzz—and less honey. Consider this
column a primer on the real media
convergence, because it’s on the verge
of transforming our culture as pro-
foundly as the Renaissance did.
Media convergence is an ongoing
process, occurring at various intersec-
tions of media technologies, indus-
tries, content and audiences; it’s not an
end state. There will never be one black
box controlling all media. Rather,
thanks to the proliferation of channels
and the increasingly ubiquitous nature
of computing and communications,
we are entering an era where media
will be everywhere, and we will use all
kinds of media in relation to one
another. We will develop new skills
for managing information, new struc-
tures for transmitting information
across channels, and new creative
genres that exploit the potentials of
those emerging information structures.
History teaches us that old media
never die. And before you say, “What
about the eight-track,” let’s distinguish
among media, genres and delivery tech-
nologies. Recorded sound is a medium.
Radio drama is a genre. CDs, MP3 files
and eight-track cassettes are delivery
technologies. Genres and delivery tech-
nologies come and go, but media per-
sist as layers within an ever more com-
plicated information and entertainment
system. A medium’s content may shift,
its audience may change and its social
status may rise or fall, but once a
medium establishes itself it continues
to be part of the media ecosystem. No
one medium is going to “win” the
battle for our ears and eyeballs.
Part of the confusion about media
convergence stems from the fact that
when people talk about it, they’re actu-
ally describing at least five processes:
■ Technological Convergence: What
Nicholas Negroponte labeled the trans-
formation of “atoms to bits,” the digi-
tiz