Convergence

Henry Jenkins is the author of "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide." It is a book that conceptualizes how humans' consumption of media is a collective process also known as collective intelligence (coined by French cyber theorist Pierre Levy). It highlights the idea that none of us can know everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.

Jenkins writes that convergence starts and ends with what he calls the "Black Box Fallacy." This means that sooner or later, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms. These black boxes include VCR, digital cable boxes, DVD players, digital recorders, sound systems, gaming consoles, videotapes, DVDs, CDs, game cartridges, controllers, and TV.  He goes on to explain that a pull toward more specialized media appliances coexists with a push toward more generic devices. The proliferation of black boxes is a symptomatic moment of convergence where we are being forced to buy a range of specialized and incompatible appliances. An example of this is the iPhone 7. This iPhone requires one to either purchase wireless headphones or buy an adapter because there is no headphone jack on the phone.


The idea of convergence means that all the technology we have today, will continue to exponentially expand until we have an ultimate, even possibly artificially intelligent, device through the process of a technological convergence. Through applications, or through other forms of media, this merging of technology would significantly change our day-to-day lives.

Media convergence impacts the way people consume media. For example, as young adults who grew up with technology, we have experienced this first hand. Sometimes we find ourselves doing homework while surfing the web or online shopping, while listening to music and searching for new music, all at the same time we are texting friends, responding to emails, and much more. This picture of the iPhone as a tool with many different function (i.e. an umbrella, knife, cork screw, hammer, etc). More and more, convergence is requiring media companies to rethink old programming and marketing assumptions about what it means to consume media.