The Future of Convergence depends on the future of media and technology. According to Jenkins in the book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, “convergence is a process, not an endpoint” (16). From the printing press to the age of technology and digital world, the convergence culture will be forever changing and developing. As new technologies, new platforms and new mediums are created, the more the media world will interlock. There will be new avenues that will be discovered. There is no “endpoint” to media convergence, it is a process that will always develop, even in the next media era.
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| THERE WILL BE NEW AVENUES! |
In this era of media convergence, transmedia storytelling is the best example where technology and storytelling intertwine. Even though transmedia storytelling is mostly used by media conglomerates to market their brands, transmedia storytelling is a form of collective intelligence (Jenkins). According to Clay Shirky, collective intelligence is “crowd-sourcing” and it is “sourcing everyone to crowd a project.” The next big thing will be the project that everyone will be crowding. Whether it is social media such as Twitter and Facebook or an apple product, there will always be this sense of collective intelligence or collective use of mediums and digital platforms. The future of convergence depends on whatever the next big thing is.
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| WHAT WILL BE THE "NEXT BIG THING" ? |
According to Jane McGonial, the “next big thing” are video games helping to solve real world problems. In her Ted Talk, McGonial explains how 21 billion hours of gaming is equivalent to the hours spent studying in school with perfect attendance. She has this theory that 10,000 hours of doing something makes someone an expert in that thing. Jenkins believes that there is a richer and deeper form of art in video games. He says, “the design of our interaction is a deeper form of art that shapes people’s perception of the world.” He also says “there’s a lot to see that we don’t see when we see games on the shelves at Wal-mart.” Steven Johnson’s Sleeper Curve was inspired by the movie Sleeper, where food items that were “unhealthy” in the 1970s were deemed nutritious in the year 2173. Whether video games can solve real world problems and shapes people’s perception of the world - or the “unhealthy food item” that actually benefits us cognitively - Marshall Mcluhan is right: the medium is the message.
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| VIDEO GAMES ARE GOOD FOR YOU. |
The message will always be embedded to the medium. In Mcluhan’s Medium Is The Message, he compares the use of an electric light. He says, “whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference.” The two cannot exist without the light. Whether it is McGonial’s theory about video games or apps on apple products, neither McGonial’s theory nor applications would be useful without its respective mediums.
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| WHAT WILL BE THE NEXT MEDIUM WITH THE MESSAGE? |
In the book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins states “For the foreseeable future, convergence will be a kind of kludge -- a jerry-rigged relationship among different media technologies -- rather than a fully integrated system” (17). We can expect the Future of Convergence to be filled with many digital mediums. Although paper mediums in journalism will be replaced with technological mediums, journalism is a form of art that will have the demand to exist. With new avenues being created, we should think about how we can contribute into their creations because it is our future. With no endpoint, we should prepare and think about how media convergence will continue to intersect and not tangle into one another.
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| THE FUTURE OF CONVERGENCE OR DIVERGENT? |
Bibliography:
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York
University
Press. 2006
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