The Great Merge: The Convergence of Text, Audio, and Video
by Philippe van Mastrigt
Throughout history, the media landscape has perpetually been shaped by the development of new media types. For example, printed media, which flourished at the end of the 18th century and especially in the 19th, was joined by cinema in the early 20th century, radio in the 1930s, and television from the 50s/60s onwards. Each new entrant disrupted the previous ones without phasing them out, and up until recently, text, audio and image all had their own niches that coexisted in a delicate balance.
When the internet was popularized in the early 2000s, it didn’t immediately create any new media types- internet media was typically a combination of online press, podcasts and videos (and occasionally a mix between the three). However, since I started following publishing trends, I've noticed the emergence of a new paradigm: the gradual abolition of the boundaries between these three universes of text, audio and video.
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