Adam Rappa
Final Research Paper
Media and Technology Convergence
Convergence has been at the forefront of almost all cultural developments for many years, as far back as the 1930s. Everywhere in the West, cultural advancement depends on convergence today, particularly in technology and media. Depending on the amount of specificity that someone chooses to use, convergence can be linked, through the word processor all the way back to technologies such as writing itself to the present day computer. Then, word processors have revolutionized the way we use written language. As such, convergence has been incredibly important to not only the technological world, but also the entire culture of the users engaging with their converging technology, particularly in recent years from the 1980s with the advent of the Internet. Today, technology, anywhere from the radio to the smartphone, has become such a ubiquitous and influential aspect of culture and economy that it is almost impossible to find anything else that changes how we live at such a level.
Convergence can be difficult to define, as it manifests itself slightly differently in different contexts. If we look at technology specifically, convergence can be seen as a trend where two or more concepts, ideas, or items combine to form a new entity with the capabilities of both converged things. Often times, the end result of convergence becomes entirely separate, thus creating new technology or one simply assimilating the other. In the context of media, Henry Jenkins, a forefront analyst of media convergence, wrote in his book Convergence Culture that convergence is “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted” (Jenkins 2). In other words, “every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms” (Jenkins 3). We are in an age where media flow everywhere, at all times, and from all people. All of these things are signs of a convergent culture.
Clearly, convergence is a broad concept, so the focus here will be on technology and media and how they impact our lives culturally and economically. I analyze convergence through the past, present, and future and discuss real and potential impacts during each time period. Throughout, I focus on various sources from the pioneers Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, along with their companies. This will range primarily from about the 1930s through about a decade from today, in 2017. This analysis will show not only how technology itself has became the primary driving force of how cultures are developing, especially involving media and communications, but also how convergence has been at the heart of that force. And as with most things in today’s world, economic factors are unavoidable in this analysis. I will also use both discourse analysis I and II to interpret the topic. While the ideas behind discourse analysis from Visual Methodologies focused on images, their key points can still be applied to these concepts. In terms of media and technology convergence, some questions to answer include: How do we think about our technology and culture? How do technology and our culture structure how we think about them? And how does the way we think about technology and culture influence them reflexively? In addition, I will use a semiological analysis. As technology has become so influential and widespread in our culture, brands have become an important factor. Even brands themselves are converging, as well as the brands people use, such as a technology user only “sticking with” a certain brand. How do we represent ourselves with the brands, or how do the brands represent us?
Convergence in the past
Technology in every sense has largely existed to make life easier for its user. This has been an important factor for convergence because things often tend to converge in order to combine two into one and make it easier, such as a GPS and a smartphone; they converged, so now we only need one item to do both tasks. Most commonly, when looking to the past of technological convergence, newly emerging technologies come up the most frequently. Radio, television, cell phones, all of these technologies were created for their own era, but they have laid much of the foundation of convergence that we see today. But even the technology that was the foundation for today’s convergence can be seen as a result of convergence as well, though they are more basic. The cell phone, for example, is a convergence between landlines and pagers. These emerging technologies are particularly important because this is where convergence as we see it today started. These emerging technologies are what created the various markets and industries that we see converging further today.
Communication as a whole expanded drastically in the 20th century. Looking at media and media technology, it used to be that a reader would have to wait for the next issue of the newspaper in order to keep up with only last week’s news. Worse yet, before the newspaper, word of mouth was the closest thing to “news” at all. In the 20th century, we got the radio. This allowed for nearly instantaneous media, where probably at worst the reader would hear about what happened yesterday, and at best he or she would hear about what has just happened. Then we got the television, which added picture and video to the radio. This is another example of converging technology, between the radio and photography. Writing a letter to send across the country would take months, and it was so ineffective for communication that in many ways one side of the country may have hardly known what was happening on the other side. Today, on the other hand, we have truly instantaneous media consumption possibilities. Our media access today is unprecedented, some may even argue overwhelmingly so. Thanks to 24-hour news on television, Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, and other platforms, there is never a moment where we cannot access media of some sort. And not only are access and distribution so hugely expanded today, but it is accessible to the very minute of happening.
These emerging technologies and creation of new industries and markets took our cultures from almost nothing to something, in the sense that a new technology or industry was created where one previously did not exist. The advent of the radio revolutionized communication and media access. Radio broadcasting has become an industry that nearly everyone interacts with, though in recent years and in the years to come, it may be fading slowly. The television has become a staple in nearly every household and only seems to be getting more important. The cellphone also revolutionized communication, but on a smaller, peer-to-peer level, in ways that we are still feeling today. The key is how emerging technology and media industries changed western culture drastically through their creation and adoption.
Convergence today
Convergence and technology are more impactful today than they ever have been before. Because of this, our culture in the Western world, as well as most other developed cultures, is inseparable from technology. Thus, where technology goes, we follow. More and more, our lives revolve around use of technology that changes how we interact with and even perceive the world around us. Since I argue that convergence is at the heart of technology advancement, the impact that convergence has on technology leads to impacting our very culture, today more than ever. I think this is the discourse that surrounds our culture today. While it started in the past when emerging technology laid the foundation for what we see today, the ubiquitous nature of technology, how it pervades just about every cultural aspect of our lives, is leading to the incredible growth of technology we are experiencing now. One great example that we can currently see shifting today is online video streaming. In the past, we had in-person viewing of plays or shows. This transitioned to things like television and movies, though they did not entirely replace live viewing of plays or shows. After television, we are seeing Internet streaming take over. Thanks to smartphones, laptops, and other portable devices gaining Internet access, a prime example of direct technological convergence between a computer and a phone in itself, we have the capability of accessing television and movies just about anywhere we want.
Closely related to this accessibility is the emergence of participatory culture, largely thanks to the advent of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is in many ways the birth of user-generated content and participatory culture. Almost universally, any citizen with the means of accessing the Internet has the ability to become a journalist or a content creator, anywhere from animator, musician, videographer, photographer to moviemaker. Some people, often times businesses or corporations that work as content producers, may criticize this shift from a dichotomous relationship between producer and consumer to a tightly-knit relationship between producer and consumer. Whether or not it is viewed as good or bad, I think this is a great example of the power relationships of discourse analysis I. As Foucauldian discourse claims, power is not imposed from the top down in society. Power and discourse are everywhere. Similarly. in our participatory culture, power is everywhere now. Where previously a corporation existed as a producer and therefore held the power, anyone can be that powerful producer. In fact, Web 2.0 users with enough of a social following have incredible amounts of power. While the power is not necessarily concrete, one Tweet today from a popular YouTuber or some other user with a large fanbase can be metaphorically deadly. On the other hand, Jenkins also argues that “Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media— still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.” There is still a dynamism to power on the Web, and this is where discourse analysis II plays a part, as the corporations are the dominant institutions that show the production and audience factor through producer and consumer relationships. Usually this is through one-way media, such as the television and, to some extent, the radio. Part of the argument that convergence is driving technology and culture forward, and developments from Web 2.0 show more progress from previous technology. As mentioned, the radio and television are, and likely always will be, one-way devices. There is no way to interact with the radio host or the news anchors on TV. New media technology has completely changed that, and also the way our culture works because of that change.
I would also add that from experience, consumers never knew about or asked for capabilities or convergence we have seen so far. Most consumers would never have seen a television show or movie in their home and then ask cellphone makers to let them watch their favorite shows online. In fact, in 1998 at a Cause conference, Steve Jobs thought it would never happen. He saw the PC and the TV as two completely separate and functionally opposite pieces of technology, the TV is to turn the brain off, the PC is to turn the brain on. In the end, it appears he was a bit off the mark. The unrelenting cycle of developing and converging technology achieved new capabilities that consumers ended up wanting, even if they did not know they wanted it. In other words, the consumers did not drive technology, and by extent, the culture around it, convergence did. That being said, I think that is changing slightly when we look at today’s technology. Several years ago, consumers never would have seen the great leaps of technology we experience today. Not only were they often unpredictable, but consumers did not have easy access to new progress when it came to technology. In an interesting self-driving cycle, not only is new technology advancing more rapidly, but also new advances in media technology have opened access to both far-reaching advances and also advances in what we can expect to see tomorrow. In essence, advancing technology has opened up more and more opportunities for advancement, as well as making it more widely accessible to the consumers. In a presentation also by Steve Jobs, he pointed out how,
“Yesterday’s software is today’s hardware. So, those two things are merging, I think. And the line between hardware and software is going to get finer and finer and finer and finer. And one of the ways that we’re approaching the problem of how to remove the barrier is to try to look ahead a few years and make some predictions as to where the technology will be, both hardware and software technology, and how they are going to be merged together, and at the same time very carefully looking at the kinds of high level tools that our customers are going to need and trying to make those two points the same target.“
Believe it or not, this presentation was in 1980. In fairness, since this statement seems contradictory to his own statement he made in 1998, this was before the PC was a consumer product. But its principles still apply today. And if anything, it shows how historically, convergence was never predictable. A great example of his point is the smartphone camera. It is difficult to describe it as a piece of software or a piece of hardware anymore, and it is something that has become inextricable from the smartphone.
Industry Convergence
Information technology, which is any technology relating to the storing, retrieving, and sending of data, is an industry that has been growing rapidly in recent years. On the consumer level alone, we have gone from storing tiny amounts of data, in the megabytes, on massive, room-sized hard drives to storing thousands of times that amount on tiny drives the size of one hand. Jucheng Yang, along with the other authors of the Advanced Information Technology Convergence editorial in the Journal of Electrical & Computer Engineering have largely credited such progress to convergence, saying,
”The tremendous growth and usage of information technologies led to rapid development on the various aspects of advances in convergence and hybrid information technology. The spread of current technologies is more emanative at all stages of research, development, diffusion, and use. Moreover, different regions of research and applications are often integrated together to achieve better performance, solve problems and restructure systems, and improve the computational intelligence both theoretically and practically. Hence, the convergence of information technologies could lead to the new stage of innovation with significant increasing speed” (Yang 1).
This particular issue includes 13 different papers relating to information technologies, and convergence is a large part of all of them. Outside of this journal, researchers in information technology have managed to succeed in storing data, a computer operating system and a short movie, on human DNA (Martineau). And this makes for an interesting example of industry convergence -- information technology with biotechnology. Youngjung Geum and other authors writing in Technological Convergence of IT and BT: Evidence from Patent Analysis, part of the ETRI Journal, claim that there is not enough study conducted on this convergence. According to them, most previous studies dealt with convergence from an industrial perspective and not the technological perspective. Then admitting that recent studies have addressed convergence at the technological level, they add that recent analyses have focused on convergence’s effects on information technology and biotechnology separately. So, they conducted a surprisingly mathematical (and very complicated) patent analysis to acquire new evidence of technological convergence between these two seemingly unrelated fields. They proposed that major information technology advances have led to innovative devices that allow them to advance biotechnology, and from what I can gather from their results, they showed that “biomedical devices in BT have a strong relationship with electrical computing, mobile telecommunications, and digital contents in IT” (Youngjun 447).
Biotechnology is not the only industry converging with information technology, either. Geert Duysters and John Hagedoorn, back in 1998, saw the convergence in the IT industry between telecommunications and computers. In their paper Technological Convergence in the IT Industry: The Role of Strategic Technology Alliances and Technological Competencies, they note that “Although telecommunications and computer equipment are based on the same enabling technologies, it can be argued that the convergence process has taken place much more slowly than was expected in the early 1980s” (Duysters 358). In their analysis, they also argue that it is “inertia” that slowed down the converging process, where firms are still “doing more of the same instead of being involved in a process of redefining their ‘core’ business” (Duysters 366). As this was written in 1998, things have changed considerably since then. While it is impossible to tell, just as Steve Jobs incorrectly speculated in his 1998 conference, it seems today that the trend is moving toward dropping cable television in favor of Internet streaming, which I talk about later. It would seem that convergence is finally winning over the inertia that held it back between telecommunications and computer systems.
Another convergent industry is the music industry. Through new advancements and converging technology, we have gone from the only source of music being live music to entire libraries of music on your phone. As newer technology was introduced over time, accessibility of music started to converge. First we had records, then we had tapes, and then tapes became CDs. Then, referencing the iPhone presentation in 2007, Steve Jobs said, “In 2001, we introduced the first iPod, and it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.” Having music accessible for so little and with such ease forced the industry to make changes in how it produced and circulated music and media. Now that Internet streaming has risen as the top source of music, the industry has changed again (Fitzgerald). It is no longer about selling CDs at the store, or offering downloadable music on iTunes, it is about streaming music, due to ease of use and low cost of access. And not only that, but this convergence to streaming has reduced piracy, which was a common concern with the previous method of downloadable music content, and this is an unexpected beneficial side effect of convergence (Reichert).
More and more media companies have also been participating in convergence culture through media ownership. In Henry Jenkins’s article in the International Journal of Cultural Studies he points out that “the new media conglomerates have controlling interests across the entire entertainment industry. Viacom, for example, produces films, television, popular music, computer games, websites, toys, amusement park rides, books, newspapers, magazines, and comics” (Jenkins 34). A recent example is the attempted merger between AT&T and Time Warner. Much like their competition, the merger would allow them to own an Internet access company, a cable network company, and a home telephone network company, Verizon already has its own proprietary subsections, with Verizon phone, Internet, and cable network. Comcast also has its own phone, Internet, and cable network. Avoiding the politics of the merger, theoretically it would allow AT&T, which is has phone and Internet access already, to then own a cable company as well, which is Time Warner. Of course, it is mostly a move to make more money. Just as it is with Amazon, which started out selling books and has now developed to an online streaming service, a consumer goods store, a delivery service, and more. But all of the converging technology and media have also driven media ownership convergence.
Brand Convergence
The majority of examples are of technological or industrial convergence, but brand convergence is also occurring today. In many ways, brands have become examples of cult consumption, where many consumers simply buy from a brand because they always do. To continue the theme of Steve Jobs that I have already used so far, Apple is a prime example. Seeing it from a semiological point of view, Apple has become an extremely well-known signifier. The Apple logo is a sign that is recognizable in almost any developed country. And whether the signified concept in the viewer’s mind is quality and sleek design or expensive and bad technology, Apple has become a symbol for countless people. Any brand that achieves this sort of brand awareness becomes a symbol as well, and this is something they strive for. Largely due to economic interests, many companies want to participate in our convergent culture by promoting brand loyalty. Apple wants you to consume not just their smartphone, but also their laptop and tablet as well. They converge their technology by expanding their capabilities among each other. There is a seamless experience across all Apple devices so that you are more likely to buy a Macbook instead of a Windows laptop. Of course, other companies have the same goal, such as Microsoft creating their Windows Phone, Microsoft Surface tablet, Windows desktop operating system, and soon-to-be proprietary Windows-based laptop.
From experience, many consumers see themselves as “fanboys” or “fangirls” of a certain brand (whether they like it or not) if they only buy from a particular brand. Just seeing the Apple logo on something someone owns leads most people to make assumptions about them based on the signified concepts they imagine the logo to hold, whether good or bad. I would even argue that certain pieces of technology each hold a different position as a signifier. Continuing the Apple example, various products carry different signified meanings, in addition to Apple as a whole. I think most people do not have many judgments at all when they see an iPhone. Some users see an Android versus iOS debate, but I think that to most people, an iPhone is just another smartphone given its widespread use. A Macbook carries different meanings. Seeing Apple’s laptop lineup likely carries the signified concept of the fanboy or fangirl, because why would that person buy one if they did not really want another Apple product? Seeing somebody who owns an iMac brings it a step further, as an iMac still carries the “Mac or PC” debate along with it. Does that person prefer unparalleled build quality and impressive aesthetics? Or does that person waste their money on a product that comes with a high price tag and has no hardware to show for it? These semiological meanings derived from a brand drives the technological ecosystems that they create. Software suites, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s office suites or Adobe’s productivity suite have a similar function. If the user prefers one software application over the other, chances are they will buy the whole suite, since they assume the rest will be equally good. The brand that created the software then makes it preferable to stay in the ecosystem, by creating the cohesive unit of an ecosystem. Not only will users who want their products likely use the ecosystem, but if, for example, somebody wants to switch to an iPhone, they may be more inclined to switch other products that they own to the Apple ecosystem to reap the benefits of using all their products. In the end, the brand carries meaning, and we choose to represent ourselves through it if we think that the brand represents us well. Or sometimes, we align ourselves with what we think the brand means to other people,
On a larger scale, brand convergence has impacted consumer interests as well. It is expected of a company to have a social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, along with a desktop and mobile website, and maybe even their own app. On a weekly analysis and news podcast for technology, tech enthusiast and expert Luke Lafreniere talked about how “in this day and age, it is true that you’re not successful [as a company] unless you have an app. But having a good mobile site is a good compromise, as some mobile sites feel like an app” (Linus). Essentially, if users cannot get access to the company through their mobile device, then they are less likely to use the company at all.
Downsides and Divergence
There are some counterexamples to convergence happening now, such as Google’s recent decision to split their Google Hangouts app into two separate apps. Google’s Hangouts app was first designed as both a video, audio, and text messaging app all in one button on a phone. In the end, Google decided to split it into separate Chat and Meet apps, which both provide the same functions but in different apps. Principal Engineer Justin Uberti Tweeted about it, saying, “All-in-one apps are not the future” (Uberti). Fairly negative feedback and discussion followed his tweet, but this shows that while most technology appears to be converging, not all of it is.
Not only is there divergence, but convergence is not necessarily always good. Despite the wide availability of media, access is not guaranteed. Economic factors are usually the largest issues behind lack of access, and this is another one of the ways convergence is impacting our culture. The sheer magnitude of media and collective knowledge that is available on the Internet has become so important to our daily lives that access is crucial to our culture. Today, knowledge is power. If someone does not have the economic means, the United States government has a program for low-income consumers to get a smartphone at a very low cost (Lifeline Program for Low-Income Consumers). This goes to show how smartphones, not just cell phones, are considered basic living requirements, alongside food, shelter, and healthcare. Unfortunately though, this increases the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” With media access increasing, technology advancing, and convergence driving them, those without this technology only suffer more.
At a 2007 D5 conference, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat down for an interview of their respective technologies. Steve Jobs said in the interview that “We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor, so, so what? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter” (Ashish). This was true in 2007, and it has only progressed since then. At one point, it was considered a feat of technological advancement to have a computer in a phone, or a computer in some other device. Today, it is simply par for the course. And the way that this has influenced our culture is incredible.
Convergence in the Future
Bill Gates was asked at the D5 conference interview about his projections of mobile devices. He said, “How quickly all these things that have been somewhat specialized, the navigation device, the digital wallet, the phone, the camera, the video camera, how quickly those all come together is hard to chart out. But eventually you’ll be able to pick something that has the capability do every one of those things. And yet given the small size, you still won’t want to edit your homework or edit a movie on a screen of that size. And so you’ll have something else that lets you do the editing, and the reading” (Ashish). This is especially true today, even more so than in 2007 when he said it, given Microsoft’s current ideas for the future of its mobile devices.
Continuing with Bill Gates’s response, one example of convergence that has not fully occurred yet lies with Microsoft’s attempt to create its own all-encompassing ecosystem. While the company already has what might as well be a monopoly on the desktop computer market, it is in the process of expanding its reach to as many markets as it can. Starting from a desktop operating system market, Microsoft created its own tablet. The tablet market has always been in an unusual middle position between a computer and phone, which I think has led to its fairly slow adoption (Bolkan). That being said, after the introduction of the iPad, tablets in general became more popular. While the tablet itself is a direct example of convergence between smartphone and computer, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies have tried to make the tablet a one-size-fits-all device for users who do not have the need for a workstation desktop by converging just about every function except phone calls into one handy device.
Later after the Surface, though not as successful as they would want, Microsoft created the Windows Phone. The Windows Phone is both an attempt to move their influence into a new market and also an attempt to allow users previously using a phone from Apple, Samsung, or any other phone maker to have that seamless experience with their Windows-based computer, tablet, and phone, like its competitors already do. Moving forward, Microsoft may even be moving toward an all-in-one Windows Phone that has capabilities of a computer and phone, more so than today. One reason many people own their own desktop, laptop, and smartphone is because they each have capabilities and limitations. Each device has its strengths and weaknesses, so users may do things that involve heavy multitasking, graphical work, or various other intensive tasks that require the use of a workstation desktop on that desktop. Then they have to own a laptop as a way to be able to do light work tasks on the go, as they cannot take their desktop anywhere. Lastly, their phone may be able to complete basic tasks, but it cannot do anything near the level that a desktop can handle.
Microsoft looks to be pushing to change that. As it stands now, smartphone hardware, specifically the processor, is built differently to accomodate form factor and energy use. However, Microsoft wants to change the Windows Phone’s processor so that it can utilize full-fledged desktop applications. Currently, the hardware between computers and phones are different in that smartphones cannot process the same applications that non-smartphone hardware can process. This is why we see a“mobile version” of just about any application or program that we find on our computers. We may see a smartphone that can actually work with non-mobile applications. From there, the goal would be to allow users to cast their device to a screen, hook up a mouse and keyboard to their smartphone, and actually have a portable workstation right in their pocket, indistinguishable from a regular desktop PC. The end result would be that all of these capabilities and devices may converge into just one device, and this could potentially eliminate the need for multiple devices at all.
Industry Convergence
As we move forward from fourth-generation, or 4G, mobile technology, we are beginning to see fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile technology converge. Raul Chavez-Santiago and other authors studied changes and convergence of wireless communication technology and found that convergence in parts of mobile technology like infrastructure will increase coverage, capacity, and more efficient economic ability for expansion. From the societal perspective, they claim that 5G could improve mobile access in rural areas. Their study shows that it costs too much for the mobile company to move to these rural areas, in addition to the average revenue per user being low (Chavez-Santiago 1634-1635). Fortunately, advances and convergence in 5G technology could potentially alleviate some of these issues.
An interesting piece of convergence we may see soon is input convergence, meaning any connectible device for a piece of technology, such as a bluetooth mouse. There are some more basic examples, such as USB devices trending toward using one universal type-C connector that can perform all previous USB requirements as well as new ones, and there are some more impactful examples, such as touchscreens. Michael Simon, in an issue of Macworld, notes how he believes “Apple’s convergence will be about input, not interface” (Simon). His article discusses future evolution of Apple’s devices, saying that convergence between mobile and desktop devices is “simply too tantalizing for it not to happen” (Simon). His argument is that it will occur through input, so that all devices can share input options, whether they be mouse and keyboard attachments, a stylus, or voice-based inputs. One key advancement is the voice input, noting the integration of Siri with the Apple TV which brings a level of simplicity and cohesiveness that would allow convergence between iOS and OS X. To Simon, this is what will “bring the post-PC revolution to reality.”
Looking back to the information and communication technologies industries (ICT), Cristina Bores and other authors studied economic determinants of different firms that are engaging in mergers or alliances, much like the AT&T/Time Warner merger mentioned earlier. They point out how the ICT industries are currently converging, and this converging process “implies that some markets will disappear to give rise to new ones” (Bores 23). As economy was the focus of their study, the show how economic factors, such as competitive advantage, demand, and portfolio diversification have led to this converging market. Particularly, one main conclusion they drew was that the firms want to be “the window through which the consumers access the market” (Bores 23). If the firms can control several different avenues of media access at once, they are more likely to succeed as a whole.
Cloud computing is another converged industry. Kihoon Sung and other authors conducted a patent analysis that used cloud computing as their focus. One of their main conclusions was that patent analysis was a great indicator of future convergence that has not occurred yet, but their discussion of cloud computing already having converged was also very useful. They described it as “a new type of technology that converges various storage technologies and network technologies in composite form” (Sung 34). In essence, cloud computing is a combination of a physical hard drive and the Internet. And cloud computing is not limited to the information technology industry, in that it is simply for storing data. Various companies such as Microsoft use their cloud for delivering computing services, such as servers, databases, networking, software, analytics, and more, where a user can access the cloud to download the same data (What is cloud computing?).
Similar to input convergence, touchscreens are sprouting up everywhere we look. Restaurants, for example, are beginning to use touchscreens for ordering food. Theoretically, this could increase flexibility of food choices, accuracy in orders, and speed of sales (Krystal). For the consumers, this convergence would change the way we get our food away from home. In the long run, seemingly small changes like this could have farther-reaching repercussions by speeding up our already fast and on-the-go lifestyles. On the other hand, touchscreens would be replacing people’s jobs.
Downsides of Convergence
The elimination of jobs, markets, and industries is likely the most impactful downside to all of this convergence. In the near future, and it has already begun today, we could see Internet streaming take over and replace cable TV. More and more households are using Internet streaming to provide their TV access, often in addition to cable (Will Video Streaming Replace Cable Television?). More and more households, especially with younger viewers, are no longer using traditional cable networks in favor of on-demand services or Netflix (More young people are watching less traditional TV). We may reach a tipping point where Internet streaming becomes the dominant form of media over television, and the media owners of the cable networks will have to react.
And convergence does not necessarily mean elimination one or all of the converging industries, as Jonas Lind concluded in his paper for the DRUID Academy Winter 2005 Conference. Lind set out to redefine technological change and technological convergence in a market and industry context along with technology. He found that “two separate industries merge (converge) does not imply that the number of industries fall – rather the opposite. The increased division of labor will give room for an ever growing number of specialized markets and industries.” An example from his own studies showed how “the merging of machine tools and electronics increased the number of industries from two to at least three: the mechanical industry, the electronics industry, and the new industry cluster built around mechatroncis [sic]” (Lind 15). Hopefully, other converging industries lead to more creative destruction, where destruction of the old leads to new and better replacements.
Despite some downsides with converging technology, in the end it is a positive development, and it is necessary for industrial growth. Gavin Cameron and other authors analyzed many United Kingdom manufacturing industries since 1970 to see how convergence has affected productivity growth in those industries. I found that their esoteric language clouded the concepts and analysis results, which made it hard to understand, but from my understanding, they found that the closer an industry is to the cutting-edge technological barrier, the more likely it is that the industry’s growth is due to efficient and effective use of that technology. They found this result within the context of converging technology, especially across borders, so that the more technology converges, and the more it moves across borders, the better it is for industry productivity and growth (Cameron 800).
Conclusion
Henry Jenkins in the International Journal of Cultural Studies also said that “Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences...we are entering an era where media will be everywhere and we will use all kinds of media in relation to each other. Our cell phones are not simply telecommunications devices; they also allow us to play games, download information from the internet and receive and send photographs or text messages. Any of these functions can also be performed through other media appliances” (Jenkins 34). Convergence of media and technology is not just changing media and technology themselves, it is changing our very Western culture.
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