Media Convergence / Medienkonvergenz

Search engines enable access to information on the Internet and transform it into a limitless information portal. Content that cannot be located with search engines ceases to exist for Internet users – and this poses a risk to the individual user and to society. This book examines the phenomenon from the perspectives of communication science, law, education, and technology.

Due to rapid developments in the communication sector, the right to privacy faces new challenges. The increasing digitization and internationalization of communication processes have raised a number of issues, and lead to conflicts wherever national legal systems and moral concepts collide. Particularly in the areas of data protection and liability of online service providers, universal approaches are required. This title presents positions of specialists in Europe, Australia, the US and Canada which contribute to the international dialogue and thereby offer a starting point for a sustainable policy for the protection of privacy rights

Computer technologies continue to develop at breakneck speed, with a rapid flow of new innovations to the market. The survey of journalists undertaken in this work addresses four key questions: How do IT journalists view their professional role? How do they assess their impact on consumers and manufacturers? What sort of ties do they have to industry and the public? How will information technology change our society in the future?

At a number of moments in history, political communication has undergone radical changes. Today, the Internet is the latest and most conspicuous change in the media landscape. However, it is shortsighted to imagine that the processes of media change and media convergence have fully run their course after the hectic ascendance of the Internet. To better organize our thinking about the forms and implications of contemporary media change, the present compilation also explores the long-term history of political communication.

Journalism is under ever-increasing pressure, due in large part to the phenomenon of media convergence. Not only does media convergence redefine the tasks of journalists and newsrooms, it also re-shapes the business environments of media companies. In this book, international media practitioners and researchers describe and analyze the relationships between media convergence and advertising, public relations, social media and other areas of communication posing a challenge to journalism.

Ideas about human nature are forms of anthropological knowledge; they are woven from ideas about human characteristics that vary historically and culturally: about the body, the psyche, the social context, and transcendence - in other words, about the "nature" or "essence" of humanity. This interdisciplinary publication uses representative case studies to explore the particularities and evolution of ideas about human nature, as communicated by the media, and to draw conclusions about the fundamental relationship between mediality and ideas concerning what it is to be human.

The rapid change of the culture of communication constantly poses new threats for the right to privacy. These do not only emanate from States, but also from private actors. The global network of digital information has turned the protection of privacy since a long time into an international challenge. In this arena, national legal systems and their underlying common values collide. This collection convenes contributions from European, Australian and US experts. They take on the challenge of providing an intercontinental analysis of the issue and answer the question how the right to privacy could be defended in future.

Media convergence offers new opportunities to create and influence media content. This leads to numerous new forms of transmedia storytelling. They are the subject of this volume which contains contributions from experts of literary and cultural studies, of theatre and media studies, of ethnology and journalism.

In the first, programmatic volume of the series Medienkonvergenz/Media Convergence leading scholars present this field of transdisciplinary research in which, among other disciplines, journalism (Russ-Mohl) and media law (Kirchhof), book studies (Füssel/Mittler), narratology (Ryan), computer linguistics (Ngomo) and media art (Curran/Dombois) cooperate ‑in both the historical situation as well as in a future-based analysis of the present.