Migrations was the title of my 2002 RCA MA dissertation.

It can be downloaded here.

Below is an exerpt from the introduction:

Introduction

At the time of writing the global markets are in a worldwide recession. There is nervous talk of a new kind of slow down – a double dip that drops, peaks briefly and then tumbles again. It would be naïve to put this down to the collapse of the dot-com bubble alone, but it would be more naïve to ignore the huge amounts of cash and investment that simply disappeared when boo.com and the other brave pioneers of the Internet crashed and burned.

For a brief period in the late nineties and early noughties, it certainly felt to me that the Internet was going to save the world. A job for all, and everything you could possibly desire within reach. A new era of co-operation worldwide that could solve anything – cure cancer, find proof of the existence of extra terrestrial life or crack any code. These efforts are still continuing post dot com crash, but something has definitely changed.

With this reconsideration of what the Internet can do,(and what it should do) in mind, I have chosen a small section to concentrate my investigations on. I have chosen the UK’s contemporary culture magazine market, as it is where I have been employed for the past three years. I believe that the concepts and principals involved and discussed within could be applied to many other domains of the Internet, the final section of this piece with be partly concerned with some possibilities and examples.

The question with which this paper is concerned with is:

Can digital technology change the way that the UK contemporary media industry communicates with itself, its consumers, and the wider world?

I will argue that it can and already has to a certain extent.