When older media find new functions because their earlier functions are taken…

Concept: In media ecology a new communication technology rarely wipes out an older medium. The newcomer absorbs some of the functions the older medium used to perform, and the older medium survives by re-specialising in the functions the newcomer serves less well. This adaptive re-allocation of roles across a media system is called functional displacement.

Application: The stem states that earlier functions are taken over by new technologies and that the older media consequently find new functions, which is precisely that re-allocation. Radio is the standard illustration: after television took over evening family drama and variety, radio re-specialised around music formats, talk shows, hourly news bulletins and mobile or in-car listening. Print followed the same path, moving from breaking news towards analysis, investigation and background once broadcast and later online media took over immediacy.

Cross-check — how the other terms in the set are used:

• Alternative journalism describes who produces news and on what value base: community, activist and citizen producers working outside mainstream commercial or state structures. It names a mode of news production, not a transfer of roles between media.

• Existentialism is a philosophical movement (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus) built around individual existence, freedom, choice and the personal making of meaning. It belongs to philosophy, not to media theory.

• Experimentalism is an outlook in art, science and education that treats trial and open-ended experiment as the route to knowledge or form. It names a method of enquiry, not a shift in media roles.

Result: the phenomenon described in the stem is functional displacement.