The Future of Convergence

The future of convergence is going to be all based online. Everything we know and love now will be online for people to enjoy instead of having hard copies of what we had in the past. The intersection of technology and storytelling is everything that the Bing campaign with Jay Z displayed. The Bing campaign was able to tell Jay Z's story while also creating innovative ways of doing it through technology and other forms of media.

Convergence has also encouraged this participatory culture that has also been infused in video games. Users are able to make their own decisions to decide on their character's fate and users are able to play online with other people. In Jenkins' "Spoiling Survivor," he states, "New forms of community are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional developments." All forms of game play will be online simply because users will be able to share their gaming experiences with other people. Xbox, for instance is a game console that offers a lot of online game play and they are already ahead in the game because they have already began doing that.

Marshall Mcluan was able to grasp the idea that the media needs to be studied and that the medium is the message. In Mcluhan's lecture The Medium is the Message he describes how the medium shapes the way we view the messages.The medium is beginning to change and we are moving into a world where things might eventually be very brightly colored and picture heavy because our attention spans are getting shorter.

The entire look and feel of newspapers and magazines will be completely different as well. News will never go away, but it will be online and ad driven.

We should be thinking about how how we can make things digital to get ahead in the game. Netflix, for instance was one of the first pioneers to create a space where people can watch movies online without worrying about ads.

we do know that we are moving into a digital society so we have to prepare the upcoming generations for whats about to come. We are currently using and manipulating technology and social media but we aren't really fully aware of the ways that it affects us and how we can use it to our advantage. In Jane McGonigal's Ted Talk 'Gaming Can Make a Better World,' she said, "My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world as it is to play video games." While her idea seems to be pretty far fetched the concepts and problem solving methods learned through game developing can be used to solve real life problems.

Bibliography:
Henry Jenkins:
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message