Communication Theory: Media Convergence

Communication Theory

Name

Institution

Media Convergence

Media convergence provides new opportunities for media to serve individualized purposes while expanding people’s options for information and entertainment content. As an array of media expands, news are edited to suit the tastes of relatively small audiences (Baran & Davis, 2012). The resultant cultural convergence brings about deep changes even in the established media companies, as they have had to reconsider the prevailing cultural consumption of the media (Martínez & Alonso, 2015).

Considering the enabled ease to media multi-task, as Martínez & Alonso, (2015) argue, users find new forms of content consumption with an interactivity that facilitates media consumers to simultaneously

Another concern with media multitasking is based on the limited capacity model positing that people have finite information processing resources (Christensen et al., 2015). While seemingly desirable, the reality is that media multi-tasking brings about frequent interruptions as individual’s working memory has a limit to the information they can handle at a time. Furthermore, the emotional ‘arms race’ that the media is forced to adopt by focusing only on the intense emotional appeal lowers one’s ability to process media information critically as focus is mainly on the attention-grabbing information than cognitive content (Taslitz,

On numerous occasions, there are instances when one decodes the messages in the manner that the producer of the message intended it to be decoded, but courtesy of some societal beliefs, an unintended and contradicting meaning emerge within the messages. A common example of oppositional decoding from personal experience arise when making sense of a political media content from the side of political divide while opposing that side. Courtesy of the long-held personal political position, it becomes common to decode the media content in contrast to what the producer