Rethinking convergence/culture an introduction

Over the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a growing perception that we live in an era of media 'convergence'. There are at least four ways that the expression 'convergence' has been deployed and its meaning solidified - as a description of new synergy (a 'horizontal' realignment) among media companies and industries, as the multiplication of 'platforms' for news and information, as a technological hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another (e.g. watching a television broadcast on a cell phone), and as a new media aesthetic involving the mixing of documentary and nondocumentary forms. This special issue, 'Rethinking Convergence/Culture', acknowledges the usefulness of these accounts of convergence but is skeptical not only about the overuse of the term but also about its limited conceptualization.