Socio-Spatial Studies

Socio-Spatial Studies

New media: A history of convergence

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Mujeeb Rahman Ziarmal 1
Shekufe Ranjbar 2
1 Department of Public Relation Faculty of Communication and Journalism Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan
2 Journalism, Media and Globalisation (Joint MA Degree), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), Munich, Germany
10.22034/soc.2026.256633
Abstract
This article traces the history of media convergence, arguing that it is best understood as a long-term, processual evolution rather than a recent technological rupture. It establishes that convergence has a deep prehistory rooted in earlier media novelties and rests on a technical foundation in the digital conversion of diverse media forms, and it emphasises that convergence is equally a cultural, economic and political process, shaped continuously by social and commercial forces rather than by technology alone. The article organises this history into eight phases, each with its own object of convergence and its own characteristic tension, and sets them out in a periodisation that runs from the reception of nineteenth-century electrical communication through the conceptual origin of the convergence idea in 1983, the digitisation of media in the 1990s, the networked and cultural phases of the 2000s, the platform phase inaugurated by datafication, and the automated phase now emerging as media production and circulation are integrated with machine learning. Attention is given throughout to the counter-currents of divergence and fragmentation that have accompanied convergence at every stage, to the unevenness of convergence across the world, and to the persistent gap between what each technology made possible and what societies actually did with it. By examining past media revolutions, the article corrects the tendency to view the present as unprecedented, revealing that the rhetoric of epochal transformation is itself a recurring historical feature.
Keywords
media convergence
digital media
technological determinism
media history
platformisation
new media theory
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Socio-Spatial Studies
Volume 10, Issue 2
Spring 2026
Pages 1-13