ABSTRACT
New technologies are driving changes in the media landscape on a scale and speed never envisaged before. They have impacted on the patterns and trajectories of media production and consumption, altered the spatio-temporal configuration of the media-audience relationship, and have coincided with rapid cross-cultural interactions across the globe. But new technologies have also helped intensify the commodification of audiences, allowed for the manipulation of communicative exchanges and enhanced ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean 2010). Media logic is always global and it is unsurprising that mainstream media leaders are appropriating new media to reach and influence the minds of more audiences (particularly in the case of the ideologically-driven media institutions) and to improve their revenues (for the commercially-oriented media institutions). Global broadcasters are turning themselves into multimedia corporations and user-audiences are engaging with them through multiple platforms (Cottle and Rai 2008; Price et al. 2008; Powell 2012). Digitization and convergence have influenced these changes to the extent that many researchers (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins and Deuze 2008; Sundet and Ytreberg 2009) are convinced that the boundaries between production and reception have become blurred. The scope and ‘opportunities for audience activity and participation’ have expanded ‘across platforms and on an international basis’ (Sundet and Ytreberg 2009: 383).
