II A20 COST Conference
Towards New Media Paradigms
Content, Producers, Organizations and Audiences
Pamplona, June 27 - 28, 2003

eCommunication:
The 10 Paradigms of Media in the Digital Age
Version: 26 june 2003

José Luis Orihuela, PhD
MMLab, University of Navarra

Email: jlori @ unav . es
Blog: http://www.ecuaderno.com

PDF text version (173 Kb): download
Spanish version: Los nuevos paradigmas de la comunicación

José Luis Orihuela PhD and MA, Professor at the School of Communication, University of Navarra, Vicechair of the Multimedia Communication Laboratory (MMLab). Editorial Board Member of the journal Comunicacion y Sociedad. Coauthor of Introducción al Diseño Digital (Anaya Multimedia, 1999) and La Television en España. Analisis Prospectivo 2000-2005 (Arthur Andersen, 2000). Consultant and Visiting Professor at Universities in Spain and Latin America. Main research areas: impact of technology on media and communication. Commited blogger, his blography includes: eCuaderno, INTERtainment, Blogzine, the site Web de Blogs and the column Blogonomia (PDF) .

Abstract

The arrival of the Net changed most of the paradigms that until now helped us to describe and understand the public communication dynamics in the traditional analogue mass media environment. The digital age arrives with a set of big communication challenges for traditional mainstream media: new relations with audiences (Interactivity), new languages (Multimedia) and a new grammar (Hypertext). But this media revolution not only changes the communication landscape for the usual players, most importantly, it opens the mass communication system to a wide range of new players.

As far as enterprises, institutions, administrations, organizations, groups, families and individuals starts their own online presence, they become "media" by their own, they also become "sources" for traditional media, and in many cases, they produce strong "media criticism": opinion about how issues are covered and delivering of alternative coverage.

The blogging phenomena represents the ultimate challenge for the old communication system because it integrates both: the new features of the digital world and a wide democratisation in the access to media with a universal scope.

Ten thesis about this new scenario are proposed, and the term eCommunication is coined to describe it in a single word. The global process could be understood as a big shift from the classical mass media models to the new media paradigms: the user becomes the axis of communication process, the content is the identity of media, multimedia is the new language, real time is the only time, hypertext is the grammar, and knowledge is the new name of information.

Text version: download PDF (173 Kb)
Spanish version: Los 10 Paradigmas de la e-Comunicación
Conference website: Towards New Media Paradigms