John Hartley in his Lament for a Lost Running Order? Obsolescence and Academic Journals in M/C Journal says:

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers.

I can attest to one aspect of these changes. I just scan the International Journal of Cultural Studies for articles that are of interest to me. I have no real interest in the Journal per se-- the cover, the running order of articles, or the ‘population-gathering’ aspects. Just the particular article.

Thus in the March 2000 issue I'm interested in a review of John Hartley's Television Truths because I want to understand how television has changed. This section is what I want:

John Hartley has been writing about television for many years, during which time he has witnessed radical shifts in media technology, programme content and the social and political roles of media. When he began, television was the main source and the locus of debates as to whether mass media had the potential for enhancing social cohesion around the idea of the nation state and engaging the public in democracy, or whether it was a powerful vehicle for ideological state control. Things have moved on, and television is now part of a global convergent media system apparently more focused on entertaining media consumers than on educating and informing citizens.

Hartley's argument is that now that television has escaped the box and the national framework, it has become the paradigm of a new model of global, digital consumer-citizen engagement. This conception trans-forms the couch potato of classical mass communication theory into a digitally enhanced content navigator-creator engaged in what Hartley terms “a process of redaction” or recombinant editing. Hartley goes on to say that in the knowledge economy the arts and humanities need to be repurposed for use by people who will spend their lives working in the converged “creative industries.”

The arts, computers, entertainment media, and telecommunications were no longer separate industries but aspects of the same emergent phenomenon in a post-broadcast era...It was no longer viable to think of infrastructure (IT), connectivity (telecoms), and content (media) as separate disciplines, and to keep all of these away from ‘culture’ and the creative and performing arts. Furthermore, if the new economy was to be based on consumer action not behaviour, and on innovation in the services sector, there was a need
to get beyond behaviourist models of the consumer and marketing models of society. Graduates needed capabilities that would enable them to act with confidence both as consumers and as citizens, and to create
affluence both economic and symbolic out of their own talents and actions.” (p. 250)