Monday, July 2, 2007

Thoughts on Reading

I thought there were many good points in the articles, but one thing that stood out for me, that I think sums up convergence, or at least my thoughts on it, is the following quote from the Saul Hansell article:
"Since the invention of the printing press, mass media have been created for the masses, not by them."
I feel like that sums it up for me because that's really the "power" (if you want to call it that) of all these "new" media formats. It allows all lots of different people to publish lots of different content to reach lots of different audiences. But it still leaves, for me, one question because it's one of those "where do you focus" scenarios (as in the cart or the horse, the chicken or the egg); Is something, like a blog, or content that is on the web and your phone convergent because it's "viewable" in many locations, and on many devices or is it convergent because it's many ideas and or individuals coming together regardless of the medium? Or, I guess, is it convergent because of both?

2 comments:

Ravi said...

Key questions about the very nature of what we are looking at with this course!

Experiential Education Metrics said...

Interesting notion... I remember when the promise of "multimedia" was all the rage in the late 80's-90's. Now it seems rather quaint and simplistic to think of the "promise" of "multiple" media through a single computer device to simply enhance the user's experience of content; now its multi-purposefulness of the devices as well as that of the many networks that we now have multi-points-of-access to that should be included in a definition of convergence... guess we had kind of a "swiss army knife" view of the the content playback methodologies... and now we have added the "swiss army knife" affect to the content itself, as well as the contexts (places) within which we can experience the content.