Convergence

Before the information revolution of the late twentieth century, telecommunications, television, and computers were usually considered to be different technologies, produced by different industries, and studied by different academic fields. Convergence refers to the growing interdependency among these technologies, and indeed among all communication media. The term has come to be associated not only with technology, but also with industrial and institutional structures, as well as social and cultural norms that shape and are shaped by converging media. More recently, it has had some influence on the potential successors of the personal computer, including television set-top boxes, multimedia cellular telephones, and Internet appliances.

Ithiel de Sola Pool is usually credited with first describing convergence in his 1983 book, Technologies of Freedom, which examined how media were becoming interdependent, and the implications of this interdependency for public policy. Pool suggested that, increasingly, a given physical network could provide any sort of media service, and that conversely, a media service that had once been constrained to one physical technology could now be carried on any number of physical distribution networks. Advances in electronic communication were allowing for a complex merging of hitherto separate media systems. While he focused on what have come to be seen as the emblematic technologies—telephone, television, and personal computers—he also provided earlier examples, discussing the use of the telephone system to send text messages (“telegraphs”), as well as the interesting intersections of telephone and radio.

While Pool recognized that codes and conventions were an important part of electronic media, he failed to clearly indicate the role of digitization in this process—what author Nicholas Negroponte has famously labeled as the transformation from “atoms to bits.” As the production and transmission of information becomes increasingly digital, the walls between media become more porous. New motion pictures (which can no longer accurately be called “films”) have begun to be recorded digitally, and often ultimately end up as DVDs to be viewed on televisions or personal computers. While there still remains a significant amount of media in non-digital form, the adoption of digital equivalents has been accelerating over the last decade.

Mergers among media owners have accompanied this convergence in technology, either reflecting or driving the technological change. More subtly, the expectations of users of communication technologies, and the nature of the content these technologies record and carry, have also shifted. Many argue that these economic, social, and cultural shifts are as much a part of convergence as the technological changes. Pool, and many of those who have followed, recognized the vital part that economic and cultural structures have in the process of convergence. Deregulation in the United States has placed media and telecommunications companies in the same competitive arena, each hoping to provide telephony, broadband Internet access, cable television, cellular telephone, and a wide range of other media services to the customer.

Commentators agree that the word convergence is more often the object of hype than a clear analytical category. However, there are certainly key milestones of the convergence of media. Some of the most striking examples may be found in the interactive television experiments that began in the 1980s. [Page 94]Warner's Qube project, a first attempt at cable television-on-demand and interactive programming, failed to produce a long-term profit, although it served as a template for the current trends in digital set-top boxes. WebTV, an effort to provide access to the World Wide Web via a set-top box, has met with moderate success. Intel has made a number of efforts over the last few years to unite broadcast television and the PC, and the recent emergence of Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) will likely spur further development in this area.

...