Multimedia as a Communication Phenomenon: Analysis of Foreign Scholarly Research

Section: Theory of Journalism and Media

The article presents a review of foreign concepts and approaches to the multimedia phenomenon. The main method used is the meta-analysis of research papers published in leading English-language scholarly journals over the last 17 years. The sample included 106 papers dealing with multimedia. The author of the article carried out a classification and identified the main scholarly divisions in multimedia research. According to the results of content analysis, empirical articles outnumber theoretical ones. The main research division is represented by case studies of individual media outlets which use multimedia materials. The conclusion of the study is that despite clear evidence of growing interest in multimedia as a communication phenomenon, in foreign scholarly research there is no unified approach to the its definition. The difference between convergence and multimedia has not been fully studied so far.

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