Modern Italy (2001), 6(2), 129–139 Scenarios for the digital age: convergence, personalization, exclusion DAVID FORGACS Summary The new media system that has emerged worldwide since the early 1990s is characterized by increasing use of digital technologies in every area and convergence between once distinct media. In Italy there have been a number of national variations on this global pattern: relative weakness of state regulation, a move away from the dominance of the system by ‘generalist’ television, a high rate of cellular phone use and a slower than average growth of Internet use. As far as consumption is concerned, the most common categories used to describe the emergent system—personal- ization of media, increased individual choice and mobility—do manage to capture some important aspects, in Italy as elsewhere, but they obscure others, notably the structural constraints limiting individual choice, the formation of new media microcommunities and, conversely, the exclusion of particular groups of citizens from full participatio n in the new system. Convergence At the beginning of the 1990s a typical national media system still consisted of three discrete segments: print, lm and broadcasting. Even when two or more of these were integrated, in an economic sense, as parts of the same large corporation, they had different technical supports: respectively paper, celluloid and the electromagnetic spectrum. Moreover, the telephone network was separ- ate from the media system. Telephony was a technology used primarily for interpersonal voice communications and, secondarily, for fax messages. Now this is no longer true. Most national newspapers and magazines have online editions, which constitute the next generation in the electronic evolution of the press after the transformation of newsrooms and printing by computer technolo- gies in the 1980s. Most broadcasting organizations have websites; most now transmit digital television services and most will transmit only digital by 2010. Most feature lms are now edited using digital media, and although they are still for the most part then transferred back to 35mm or 70mm celluloid strip for theatrical distribution, this practice will be phased out, probably within the next 10 years, and replaced by a system of distribution of lms on disc or online and of projection in digital form in cinemas. Films are already becoming available David Forgacs, Department of Italian, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Telephone: 1 44 20 7679 3020, Fax: 1 44 20 7209 0638. E-mail: d.forgacs@ucl.ac.uk ISSN 1353-2944 print/ISSN 1469-9877 online/01/020129-1 1 Ó 2001 Association for the Study of Modern Italy DOI: 10.1080/1353294012008406 2 Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:04 25 November 2013