ABSTRACT
In addition, this book aims to make a wider theoretical contribution by developing a theory of polymedia and a theory of mediated relationships. The theory of polymedia emerged through our need to develop a framework for understanding the rapidly developing and proliferating media environment and its appropriation by users. Although our analysis of communication technologies begins by investigating the affordances (Hutchby, 2001) and limitations of each particular medium, technology or platform, our discussion of the emergence of a new environment of proliferating communicative opportunities that is polymedia shifts the attention from the individual technical propensities of any particular medium to an acknowledgement that most people use a constellation of different media as an integrated environment in which each medium finds its niche in relation to the others. We will also argue that, as media become affordable and once media literacy1 is established and continues to develop, the situation of polymedia amounts to a re-socialising of media itself, in which the responsibility for which medium is used is increasingly seen to depend on social and moral questions rather than technical or economic parameters.
