Introduction: The media and communications and today

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the students to understand the contemporary media and communications environment. It provides ways of thinking a range of new platforms of delivery, modes of consumption and industrial structures, as well as the structure and function of traditional print and broadcast media and communications. One of the two most protean forces driving reassessment of the nature of media and communications today is ‘convergence’. Media and communications have only been studied formally at a tertiary level in Australia since the 1970s. Convergence is customarily used to describe the dissolving distinctions between media systems, media content and the resulting trade between systems. The imprecision of mass media ratings measurement methods comes under even greater scrutiny as the relative precision of internet and mobile media metrics of use begin to attract the attention of advertisers and marketers.