Comm unification

摘要: What is the relationship between ‘old’and ‘new’media? Are we facing the end of traditional media? How to define media in a changing context? What is the future of journalism and democracy and how to understand the increasingly complex structure of the media landscape? These are some of the questions posed by Karol Jakubowicz in the New Ecology of Media, a book published in Polish that starts with the situation in Poland, a post-communist state with a 20-year long history of internet use. But the book goes beyond the Polish context. Its goal is to summarize the existing debate and research that looks at the changing media landscape by looking mostly on the European level. Jakubowicz departs from the critical evaluation of the notion of ‘endism’advocated by scholars who suggest that the information age is synonymous with a radical transformation and disappearance of the existing media structures (cf. Seely Brown and Duguid, 2000). Jakubowicz does not believe in the forthcoming technological utopia and ‘the end of media’. However, he believes that the process of digitalization, as one of the main reasons of convergence, is steadily transforming all of the existing media (p. 16). He also argues that what we need first is to understand the complexity of the processes of convergence and mediamorphosis. In this way we will be able to see what happens to traditional media, what has really changed in the past three decades, and how much media can we actually find in the ‘new media’.The book consists of eight chapters. The first chapter looks at convergence defined as a mutual process of ‘internetization of media and mediatization of …