The rapid development and the diverse features and contexts of digitisation of media have led digital media studies into a widespread, interdisciplinary and complex field of study. The diversity of digital media and ensuing complexity of digital media studies is however accompanied by, and in a basic technological sense a consequence of, digital “simplicity”: Digitalisation is the capability of encoding information (image, video, audio, text, animations) into figures (1 and 0 hence “digit”), in order to store, transform, generate and distribute or present this information in a number of contexts unconstrained by the technology or conventions of prior media. Digital media studies is the heterogeneous and loosely defined discipline examining the emerging impact of digitisation, that is examining “digitalisation”. The discipline covers text construction, genre building, text-analysis and user-related studies of digital “texts” in the broadest sense.

The widely used term "convergence" is central to digital media studies. Convergence is the explanatory counterpart of digitisation, often used to describe digitalisation, i.e the cutural side of the technological process of digitisation [1. different types of convergence]. Processes of convergence are characterised as both “coming together” and “merging”. The conceptual difference may represent a challenge of terminological precision when related theory applies this term in slightly different ways [2. convergence as primitive term]. Here, convergence means both the coming together of multiple information modes and how they influence each other, that is the multimodal merge of these [see following definition of "multimodal" (on mouse over) section 2.4.2 (on click)]

A helpful conceptual tool to get at the dynamic of simplicity and complexity of digitalisation - the “unconstrained” multimodal expressions and number of contexts, is the awareness of another side of convergence, a consequence; divergence (e.g. Liestøl & Morrison 2001, Fagerjord 2003, Bolter & Grusin 1999). Digital encoded image, video, animations and text alike may be generated by mobile phones, adjusted on computers and presented in diverging contexts such as web-sites, sms-/mms-based chats, television broadcasts or three dimensional multimedia performance spaces [3. on “sms-based”]. Digital technology has become a key part of all forms of cultural production, to such an extent that one might say, however roughly, that hardware, context and modality in a technological sense is irrelevant [4. context of this assertion], or rather increasingly a matter of choice.

How choices of the author and in some sense the reader of digital media may be less constrained technologically compared to prior media is evident in Extended - the media-practice and performance work partly developed for this thesis. In the multimedia performance series Extended, digital media enabled us to choose mode - whether we wanted static or dynamic, animated or recorded, or even live distributed visual media to interact with the performing dancers. Digital media enabled us to choose the context – to include live, dynamic and, compared to static scenography, arguably more performative and hence interacting visual media in a 3-dimensional performance-space and collaborative performance-context which in turn created new, creative and analytic challenges. What enabled these choices was a range of digital technologies. “Digital media” in the last passage refers to digital communication technology as both storage (e.g. DVD ), as distribution (e.g. image mixer), as creative and constructional tool (e.g. computer applications,) and as display (e.g. projector).

The medium of theory and the media of practice
The inclusive and wide-ranging scope of digital media, where digital display may be alike digital construction or storage, illustrates a significant challenge of contemporary media studies. Arising from the application and realisation of digital technology, the conventional distinction between the medium of theory and the media of practice may be inadequate to grasp the interplay of convergence and divergence of digital media.

The contradiction between the medium of theory and the media of practice is central to the academic discipline of media studies (e.g. McQuail on the process of mass communication vs. technology of mass media [1983] 1994:10) but may be said to demarcate the field unhelpfully (e.g. Liestøl et al. on digital media studies 2003, Guntlett on creative visual audience research 2004). As will be elaborated further in the forthcoming, the separation of the medium of theory and the media of practice may be accounted for as part of media studies´ historical claim for academic legitimacy, through which theory and critical analysis have been given primacy over vocational training or practice.

Digital media might be said to question the separation of the medium of theory and the media of practice in particular. Though comparable in cultural and historical importance to the inventions of the book, the photograph and the moving image, there is a progressive awareness in the development of digital media studies of how “reading” digital media in some sense is rather like “writing” or “constructing” as the object of analysis is not a fixed and stable entity (e.g. non-linear hyper-textual newspapers or narratives, multiple distributed and displayed videos in a non-frontal performance-space, or varieties of generative art). Even the appropriatedness of the term “media” is questioned in some digital communication contexts (e.g. Penny argues how ´artifact´ may be a more suitable term on real time computation). The boundaries between critical analysis and practical production - practice and theory, are increasingly blurred (Buckingham et al.1995: 10) and may perhaps even collapse to some extent within the university community (e.g. Bolter in Hocks & Kendrik 2003:35).

When digital media become artifacts of research, methodological dilemmas rise within media studies that inevitably implicate a reflexive consideration of the methods of the discipline [5. on “reflexive”]. How may digital media studies approach the convergence and divergence of digital modes, contexts and technology? How may digital media studies, and other fields of humanities where digitisation has an increasing impact [6. examples], approach a field where the relationships between the medium of theory and the media of practice are being questioned? Are established methods of inquiry and interpretation adequate for these tasks? A suggested response to these challenges of digital media studies is interdisciplinarity.