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40 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
With the Web 2.0 turn, platforms such as blogs, social media, and content¬
sharing portals became available with simple IT tools that enabled anyone
to express themselves. On the Internet, ordinary people did not use online
platforms to share databases, but began to communicate with each other
through visual and verbal narratives that took advantage of the hyperlinked,
indexed nature of new media.
Communication over networks has created a new language for storytelling,
described by Szécsi (2016) as a metaphorical language based on the combined
use of pictorial and conceptual categories. These narratives are the cultural
products of the human mind, which can be stored and disseminated on the
Internet using external memory technologies. In Donald’s terminology, the
construction and interpretation of the narratives of networked communication
activate all layers of human cognitive architecture. Communication over
networks contains information compressed into a narrative, which is
complemented by visual representation.
In examining media use and everyday storytelling in the 21“ century,
we cannot ignore the phenomenon of media convergence. The term refers
to the co-existence of different technologies and tools for interpersonal
communication and content delivery. On the other hand, the term media
convergence also refers to the new situation that has emerged as a result of
digitalization and the spread of the Internet, through which all the media
in human history as well as new media coexist and are interconnected. In
addition to digitized databases and books, narratives edited by journalists are
also available in print and online media, radio and television alongside Web 2.0
content produced by ordinary people. Convergent broadcasting, according to
Csigó (2009), means the synergistic linking of television content delivery with
web communities through which the edited content of traditional television
is combined with the content quality of the online environment and the active
behavior of users. Television has also seen the emergence of time shifting
with the advent of recordable television content as well as multitasking, or
parallel and simultaneous media consumption (of TV and Internet). At the
same time, the fragmentation of content, or modularity (e.g., series) and the
professionalization of amateur content production (e.g., bloggers in TV cooking
shows or vlogs on online news portals) are new phenomena (Csigö, 2009).
The first two decades of the new millennium have been a period of media
convergence. By the 2010s, the proliferation of mobile devices and Web 2.0
culture meant that media convergence no longer meant just the coexistence
of different media, but also the interactivity of users and the interconnection
of media.‘
+ A live stream of a demonstration can be followed on social media, and parents can even watch their
child’s graduation streamed online via YouTube, so that anyone who could not attend because of the
COVID-19 pandemic could also take part. As predicted by Csigé (2009), Web 2.0 applications have
not driven television out of the market, although video streaming services with quality content are