Introduction: the state of convergence in media and communication research

Nevertheless, Giddens has paid surprisingly little attention to the media as a condition of modernity. ‘Signification,’ including its technologically mediated forms, is one of his three dimensions of social systems, the other two being domination, namely the exercise of power through political and economic institutions, and legitimation as exercised typically by legal institutions (Giddens 1984: 29). But the pervasive communicative aspects of each of these, and of practically any type of social action, have remained a blindspot in Giddens’ work (see Jensen 1995; Silverstone 1999; Thompson 1995).