Digital convergence is creating a new media environment - the Mediaspace - that has significant qualitiative differences compared with the old analog one. In the Mediaspaces project we have envisioned this development, based on earlier work (for example in the Future Media Home project), attempted to describe it and define the characteristics of the resulting environment, and what the changes can mean for media and its uses.

Digitalization transforms electronic devices into digital computers, information used in/by them into digital bits and their communication channels into digital networks. Digitalization of media turns also the media environment into a space, the Mediaspace.

When the earlier media environment is based on distinct, rigid channels dedicated to certain media types and formats and controlled by channel owners and gatekeepers, the new one is a global, ubiquitous space, where all media, all actors and all applications can participate and be combined in infinite ways, and where boundaries are based on software and social and legal arrangements.

The key characteristics of this change can be summarized in four developments:

• Hard boundaries turn into soft boundaries
• One-to-many becomes many-to-many
• Consumers and receivers turn into creators and distributors
• Mass media becomes diverse media

While individuals think with their brains, the society negotiates what it is - its various beliefs and designs - socially. As a technological species, we rely on the media in this. To put it in other words, media is where society thinks.

The redesign of the media environment leads to redesign of the societal thinking process. New media forms are like new neural structures in the societal "brain", and their new functions are like new thought patterns in the societal "mind".

To influence the society, the old media environment offered the mass media. One could attempt to talk to many, even millions of people, through newspapers or television. Or then converse with individuals and smaller communities with letters or low cost printed materials.

In the Mediaspace, everyone who has access to the means to receive and consume, can use the same tools for also creating and distributing.

Media access has turned from a tool and technology issue to an issue of software and legal and economical boundaries. It is easy to get access, in terms of having the technology and receiving the bits, but it is increasingly a question of license.

The openness, reciprocity and democratic potential inherent in the Mediaspace is bearing fruit. The most influential new media forms are inherently social.

The Internet, computers and software based media offer various new ways for people to comment, rate or organize media and express their preferences, and even produce their own materials. People enrich the media with their own contributions, and these increase its value and make it more meaningful or interesting for other people.

Many of the new social media forms are tied to new and emerging social practices that evolve in a symbiosis with the media that support them. Their success is dependent on the ability of the media to be software powered and to be rapidly evolved and globally instantaneously deployed, as software, over the global network.

The analog media forms were tied to their specific production and delivery tools, and the role of the creator and designer was constrained by these rigid structures, to designing content into given structures.

The Mediaspace is an open and flexible design and distribution platform; designers can create not only content, but also the structures and functions of the new media forms. This makes the evolution of the new media forms extremely rapid.