Convergence, hah. Right now, I’m suffering from massive media divergence. I’ve got TV shows on my TiVo, photos and some videos on my PC, different MP3 tunes on my laptop and my desktop (not to mention on my portable MP3 player). So when I want to find a particular piece of media, I don’t know where to start.Much has been made over the last decade about the promising of converging media. It's still something of a pipedream, an advertising image that looks cool in canned demos and--more rarely--when it works in real life. There's no doubt that we're participating in a trend toward convergence, but because of the way markets operate in our culture, that trend itself opens up market opportunities for the opposing trend, divergence. Perhaps the term "divergence" is the wrong one--it's not so much that different media are fighting convergence; they're fighting convergence on any platform except their own.
So, as in Raymond's example, the PC wants to be the location of computing as well as television and music; mp3 players, not wanting to lose their portion of the market, are positioning themselves as the location of not only music, but video and television. Ditto cellphones.
This isn't so much convergence or divergence, but ubiquitous media, to borrow a term from the related ubiquitous computing movement. Perhaps in twenty years, drawing distinctions between various media based on their physical players will be difficult (and maybe we're already getting there): a newspaper isn't something on newsprint, in relatively huge broadsheets. Instead, a newspaper is a genre with multiple, topical, purportedly objective stories of a relatively timely nature.
In an environment of ubiquitous media, users understand that different physical use environments have different characteristics--that reading the New York Times in print is different than reading the New York Times online. The ability to skim large, two-dimensional space is more limited on most digital displays compared to the enormous size of an open broadsheet. Some ads are missing or, at the very least, formatted different (at least as far as I can tell). So, yes, there are important differences between using the same medium on two different physical platforms: but those differences, in terms of ubiquitous media, matter all that much. Expert users of ubiquitous media know, as Kelly pointed out in a conversation this morning, that if they want to see advertisements for some reason, they pick up the print version of NYT. If they want to be able to search recent archives or read the most up-to-date information, they look online.
This goes against a lot of what media theory says about communication--the fact that there are differences between physical platforms would lead, some say, to such fundamental differences that NYT online is a different medium than NYT in print (or, say, NYT over cellphone or PDA). But I think those physical platform distinctions are becoming less important in the context of ubiquitous media.
Posted by johndan at July 24, 2004 10:53 AM
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