Convergence from the User's Perspective – the Concept of Communication Modes

With this in-house project, the Institute is extending earlier work on the future of television use. In the face of the anticipated difficulty researchers (as well as media providers) will confront in differentiating the tendencies of general media use from the use of the respective individual media, given an environment where circumstances in the media are further converging technically, the concept of the communication mode is being put forward. This merits particular attention because it will become increasingly difficult to recognise from the fact that a particular technical gadget is being used just what its users are actually doing. As they use gadgets, which – to put it simply – can “do it all”, only the users themselves know, in the last analysis, what they are doing in concrete terms, that is, in what communication mode they are operating at any time.

The thesis here is that the boundaries between technical media services are indeed blurring, but the boundaries between various communication modes and their psychic, social and cultural significance are preserved. Integrating old and new media does not mean a levelling of demarcations between the specific uses and everyday routines connected to the various media services and leading to some unspecific activity in general communication. On the contrary: empirical findings – in particular those that are deliberately seeking out patterns of individual media-use that cross the boundaries between the various media – point to the development of a very specific division of functions between the various media services.

In future, the Institute will systematically investigate these and the communication modes connected with them: in this way, this initiative presents a counterpart from the social sciences to work motivated by a jurisprudential approach on a service-specific and diversified information regime. A PhD project is currently identifying the particular communication modes, which can be observed in dealings with the Internet.

The concept is useful for the analysis of characteristics of linear and non-linear television; it currently forms the basis for the project on the reception of moving images.