M2 Lesson 1 -Digital Culture

Media Studies 2.0: Media and Computing

          The concept of “media studies 2.0” was developed by some media scholars like David Gauntlet and
William Merrin.

          Merrin wrote his book with the same title that calls for a new way of thinking about the media
landscape today. According to Merrin (2014), our media today is totally different from the media we
know yesterday. Essentially, media studies 2.0 is a counter argument to the traditional approach of
studying the media which heavily focused on the old media like print, radio, and Television.

          For Merrin, digital media was made possible by the convergence of traditional media and
computing in the latter part of the 20th century. Without this convergence, digital media would not have
emerged. Read more here: https://tidsskrift.dk/mediekultur/article/view/23504/20859  (Links to an
external site.)

The Information Society

          The kind of society we live today is said to be an information society. According to this view, our
society’s defining feature is information unlike in previous societies like the industrial society
where steam engine and fossil fuels defined that age.

          If you observe the proliferation of mobile applications whether in commerce, gaming, and
entertainment for example, information sharing is vital in the process. Or, you can imagine internet or
mobile banking. All of these transactions are impossible without this new platform of technology. But
it’s not technology alone that leads the shift into the information age. It is the kind of information that
these technologies have that made it possible.

          The old media like print, radio, and Television emerged before the development of digital media
and the internet. This means that these old forms of media are still within the period of the Industrial
Age.

Read more here:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-
maps/information-society