Overview

A few years ago I was at a technology conference and I was approached by three different people in turn, one from music, one from publishing and one from broadcasting, and they each asked me, rather nervously, how the coming of the computer was going to affect their industries . . . I knew from the mere way they asked the question that they weren t ready for the answer. It would be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Congo, asking how the Atlantic might affect them. And the answer of course is that they won t be rivers any more, just currents in the ocean.
Douglas Adams (2000)

It is not yet possible to conceive of the sum total of ways in which our public media will be changed by digital communications technology in general and the Internet in particular. In these early days there are almost as many predictions about their power to transform our lives or some say not as there are media analysts. Time will tell which among them have read today s evidence correctly. What we can say for certain is that digitalization does dissolve the boundaries between our traditional media of print, radio and television in terms of their transmission. It is at either end of the transmission pipe that the uncertainty lies: how much will people choose, or be persuaded, to make use of this technological convergence, as practitioners and as audiences? This chapter surveys in brief where...