Lecture 1: Web 2.0 and Convergence

There’s an enormous shift in the media landscape which converges the field of Visual Design Communication which we call Web 2.0

The shift is in the thinking behind developing a website, going from a form of publishing to a form of enabling functionalities to allow users to use the web to form a community and provide content. It’s about participation.

Participation – Convergence Culture – Convergent media thinking. Interactive information sharing, interpretability, user-centered design and collaboration.

New forms of online media such as Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter etc are all part of the current generation of Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0.

This new way of online technology’s so big that television broadcasts are nervous about the death of television. Social media is being used both as an emergent and deliberate fashion to do everything. This means that as designers, we’ll need to understand the greater number of context for our work and be more flexible in engaging with those context. We’ll also need to think not only about publishing but developing and engagement for audiences to participate in that publication. This is the area of interaction design where it intersects with communication design.

Convergence is the crossover between Communication Networks, Computing Information Tech and Content (Media). Community is a key feature of convergent media applications; Community is Web 2.0.

Convergence cultures is based around the relationship between these three concepts: Media Convergence, Participatory Culture and Collective Intelligence. It understands media convergence as the flow of content across multiple media platforms. In terms of platforms, smartphone’s seeing a massive growth as a platform of choice for viewing and interacting.