Media Mindfulness

What does “convergence” mean?

Web exclusive: ‘Technology and frustration’ by John Browning | Prospect Magazine February 2007 issue 131:

Technically, the internet treats all information flows alike, as digital data which can be edited, linked, searched, displayed or whatever. More important, it provides a common means of transmitting all of that information. While every previous new media from vaudeville through VHS had to develop its own transmission infrastructure, new new media can simply use the internet….

Today, the message is the medium. Or at least it should be, if our collective imagination is up to it. So what will the new new media be like? The short answer is that nobody knows, because it really is hard to think outside of the categories of existing media. That said, there are tentative, early signs of a blurring of boundaries: newspaper websites show video, the iPhone organises voicemail messages as a browsable list, “mashups” combine different types of information via the web—restaurant reviews plus maps, say. None of these could seriously be called revolutionary. But the “collide-oscope,” as McLuhan called it, has been shaken. Soon we’ll see what new patterns start to emerge.