A girl who sings in her bedroom, posts the video clips of this online and just a short time later is performing a duet with pop idol Justin Timberlake. A brand ... » 

A girl who sings in her bedroom, posts the video clips of this online and just a short time later is performing a duet with pop idol Justin Timberlake. A brand that creates a profile of an attractive but fictitious woman on a social network website and has her talk positively about the brand. Amateur films of laptops spontaneously bursting into flames that force the manufacturer to take measures. A global community of people who collect photos of chairs that no one is sitting on...The possibilities, manifestations and marketing ploys of the media are extending ever further into our lives. An increasing number of services and products are seeking to attract our attention and our money. This essay explores the pulsating relationship of global networks and local communities in the light of media development. It devotes specific attention to the development of crossmedia herein. A further focus of the book is the attitudes we take as individuals, with the same pulsating relationship between the urge to self-development and self-expression and the necessity of resilience towards a demanding world. The viewpoint presented is to analyse the current developments in the light of existing behaviours and patterns. It is precisely because these patterns are projected on the new environment that we unavoidably drag the past along into the future. The familiar generates the potential for the new. The zone into which I then venture is, to use the term of the developmental psychologist Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development. «