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Watch it Sony Randall Park plays North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in The Interview. Photograph: Ed Araquel/AP

Who would have thought that 2014 would end with the North Korean government allegedly dumping (says the FBI, not so sure say others convinced it was an inside job) Sonys dirty cyber laundry and corporate communications onto the internet because it didnt like a James Franco film? We live in strange convergent times which will only get stranger in the year ahead.

That Sony either never saw the cyber hack coming, or did, but had no defence against it, is emblematic of a problem that one might usefully turn into a prediction. In general the media industry doesnt know enough about the communications infrastructure which it relies on, and the new communications world order is a bit at sea when it comes to non-technical issues such as societal impact, ethics and the like.

For many years now the media has been dancing around the problem of what it likes to call disruption, but might more practically be labelled the internet. Everyone who works in the businesses of shovelling atoms or bits and bytes around for the sake of communication and entertainment knows that the internet changes everything. Yet accepting exactly how it changes everything has been a slow process for most media organisations.

It is a reasonable assumption that in 2015 we will see a further convergence between social media platforms and media practice. As the owners of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram accept that they are not just neutral platforms, but actually shaping and controlling media, as well as owning and supporting a great deal of it, we can expect to see them become more active in this area. I always assumed that the arduous, financially risky business of creating media or employing journalists would be deeply unappealing to anyone sitting on top of a multibillion-dollar social platform. However, this might be about to change.

The Googles and Facebooks of this world could liberate a billion dollars from the glovebox of their Teslas and change the dynamics of media investment overnight. Will they do it? Not overnight, but maybe over time. Netflix has been a powerful exemplar of how to both be taken seriously by venture capitalists and get a seat at the Emmys. Jeff Bezos had so much money from founding Amazon, he actually bought a newspaper (the Washington Post). Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, is so earnestly serious about creating a new type of news organisation that his various setbacks with First Look Media will not stop him. There will be a lot more Silicon Valley money put into media in the future, although these investments are bound to create further disruption for the existing industry.

We are already at a point where what we think of as mainstream media brands simply cannot compete with the scale and funding of the new platforms. We will see more proof of this in 2015, as network television in the US and maybe even broadcast in the UK continues to come under pressure from changing media consumption habits. There is plenty of life in legacy media, like broadcast television, but it will only ever play an ancillary role now to social and distributed media. Facebook is valued at over $220bn, CBS at $27bn, this is not just a bubble or a rounding error but a reflection of how the world and advertisers behave. To remain relevant, existing media brands will have to understand technology and perpetual change in the context of cultural institutions.

Media companies will have to grasp how to work within this new world. We saw in 2014 the fetishisation of fragmentation, with many recent industry entrants, from BuzzFeed to Vice Media, lauded for their ability to address younger audiences by surfing the growth in social media. In media pundit corner, the pressure has always been to second guess the success or failure of these enterprises.

But somehow prediction of existing markets seems oddly inadequate for the time. Take, for instance, the perennial domestic issue of royal charter renewal. In the UK there will be a fierce debate about the funding of the BBC, but will it be conducted within a narrow UK political framework, or with an eye to what part Britain wishes to play in the global information economy? I havent seen much evidence to suggest that executives or regulators are ready for these questions, let alone in possession of the answers.

We are used to seeing a landscape which is divided between the big, global institutions and the small entrepreneurial start-ups. But we are still unused to the idea of true convergence: technology-driven markets that are fast-moving and fluid.

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Whos taking control this year? Google, BBC, Facebook, or even North Korea?