ABSTRACT
Fifty years ago, a very few wealthy Westerners watched a single channel of state television on a sole black-and-white set, possibly the only one on their street. Today, from Tokyo to New York to Bombay more and more people are watching hundreds of channels via digital satellite and transnationally accessing the Internet. Due to the incredible diffusion of digital technology, people live in an expansion of social interaction in their everyday lives. As well as choosing from a multitude of channels on the television or the Internet, we transnationally blog, organise and become parts of different communities in chat rooms and Social Networking Sites (SNS). Digital technology converges several media technologies into new forms and hence the media, and engagement with them, are becoming more and more embedded in everyday life. A mobile phone is no longer merely a phone but has become a convergence of a phone, a digital camera, a video camera, an e-book, an electric wallet, an e-train ticket, a television, a radio, a movie and music player, a gaming device, an Internet device and so on. We can watch television, listen to music, take photos and access the Internet all through our mobile phones. We can also create and upload our own videos via mobile phones at User-Generated Media (UGM) sites such as YouTube and SNS, which makes interaction with people and images all over the world commonplace and a part of daily life.
