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 José Luis Orihuela, PhD MMLab, University of Navarra Introduction 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. Orihuela, José Luis: "eCommunication: the 10 paradigms of media in the digital age", in Salaverría. R. & Sádaba, Ch. (eds.): Towards New Media Paradigms. Content, Producers, Organisations and Audiences. II COST A20 International Conference Proceedings, Ediciones EUNATE, Pamplona, 2004, pp. 129-135.