Abstract for Article 5

This article deals with the notion of young people’s facility with the new world of converged media as it talks about and demonstrates all of the ‘new’ ways that young people use it. “On the Internet you can play games, you can check your mail, you can talk to your friends, you can buy things, and you can look up things that you really like.” This quote demonstrates just how much young people have become accustomed to the new types of converged media.

It gives examples of ways that young people have transformed previous methods of how you do things, into new forms to make things easier. i.e. instead of standard face to face conversation we now send text messages with abbreviations.

The article discusses the likes of blogging being a phenomenon, “where once kids kept their feelings locked up in a book, today they (or at least many of them) prefer to post them online for all to see and share” and the fact that now camera phone photo’s are what young people use to transfer photos between them, “Cell phone cameras are now the primary means of sharing images among young people in many places, either sending the pictures, or even often, passing the cell phone around, as I often see school girls doing on the subway. Photo albums appear to be a thing of the past.”

This article gave many more examples, and is a very interesting read. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see clearly (it’s an easy read) just how much new technology has helped converge media forms.