ABSTRACT
For cultural studies theorist Henry Jenkins, the singularity—the birth of convergence culture—is defined by the clash of old and new, particularly in terms of media forms and media platforms. ‘Contradictions, confusions, and multiple perspectives should be anticipated at a moment of transition where one media paradigm is dying and another is being born,’ Jenkins argues. News organizations were among the first to embrace convergence, mainly for reasons of business economics, but as Australian journalism scholar Stephen Quinn observed, convergence highlights a series of contradictions between the commercial expectations of the news capitalists and the aspirations of working journalists. The digital divide highlights the fact that there is no linear progression from analogue to digital technologies, nor is convergence culture necessarily an improvement on the analogue past. The changes have been dramatic in just over a decade.
