Abstract

This article takes the second screen – television-related use of smart phones and tablet computers – as a starting point to discuss how current culture is shaped by the ever more heterogeneous connections between multiple devices, texts and platforms. They form unstable assemblages that simultaneously highlight and undermine the specific affordances of their elements. Focusing first on technical and industrial and then on practical and domestic procedures of creating connections, the current media landscape will be described as >convergence as crisis<: While media indeed become increasingly more interconnected, the connections themselves and the shape of the assemblage in its entirety are ephemeral, unstable and vague. Convergence mainly exists and is generated through being in crisis.