227/08 Social challanges s the basis for foresight - Gaia

3 Media and ICT in everyday life
Professor Marko Turpeinen
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Panel chairman
Marko Turpeinen,
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan and
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Panel members
Timo Argillander, Digital Media Finland Oy
Kari Hjelt, Nokia Research Center
Helene Juhola, The Federation of
the Finnish Media Industry
Oskar Korkman, Vectia Foresight
Göte Nyman, University of Helsinki
Petteri Repo, Nordic Consumer Research Centre
Risto Setälä, Tekes
Pirjo Tiainen, MTV MEDIA
Janne Viemerö, Tekes
3.1 Introduction
Media takes an ever-growing share of our everyday
life. The media landscape is also rapidly
changing, mainly due to technical innovations
and to the accelerating adoption of new technology
by the consumer market. The latest examples
are the vast expansion of Internet-based media
and mobile technologies over the past 20 years.
In parallel, the media industry has grown in volume
and importance in the global economy. As
new media technologies are created, they challenge
and change the traditional mass media industries,
which need to adapt their strategies to
retain and extend their markets. Also, the use of
media communication in industries and activities
that lie outside the media industry proper is rapidly
expanding. Finally, the public sector is making
tremendous investments in applying modern
media technology to effectively provide mediated
services to citizens.
The title of this work refers to convergence,
which is frequently used to denote the ongoing
10
restructuring of media industry as well as to describe
the developments in media forms, distribution,
and consumption. The original “media convergence”
term from mid-1980s by Nicholas
Negroponte predicted that broadcasting, print
and computer industry would converge into a
much larger media industry. In the 1990s, this
transformed into convergence between media,
telecommunications, and computer industries.
On the other hand, we have seen technological
variability explode, and the amount of media offerings
increase rapidly. In many ways the consumer
is facing a diverging landscape of media
content, distribution channels and digital devices
to choose from, and the rate of this change is accelerating.
Our task in this foresight work was to first formulate
future scenarios of media use, primarily in
Finland. Based on these scenarios we defined a
vision for Finland’s media and communication
sector, and sketched roadmaps to complete that
vision. We decided to approach our work through
two different timeframes: year 2030 in defining
future scenarios, and 2020 in specifying Finland’s
vision and roadmaps.
It is therefore a humbling task to consider the scenarios
for the next 20 years of consumer media
use, as it is likely that new changes of scale similar
to the breakthroughs of the Internet and mobile
communications have already started, but
they are not yet identifiable. Equally, it is likely
that new developments totally unforeseen today
will emerge.
To put the task of our group work in context, we
did an exercise placing different media and communication
uses and technologies of the past 30
years on a timeline. The result (Figure 3.1) shows
that there has been a tremendous leap in technology
and change in media use during this time in