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As we travel further into the future, technology will advance faster and faster. The more technology that we have access too creates more opportunities for different types of media to converge. For example when our wall becomes a touch screen 3d projector movie theatres may become our new movie theatres. When convergence of media becomes even easier, as it will as our society advances though out the years, more and more media will converge. The business of distributing media has changed and will continue to change though the advancement of technology, so more media types will have to converge to survive in the market. Lets say that in the future interactive films become popularized or the standard of a video game script surpasses the standard of a film script. The two industries will have to converge even closer to maintain the loyalty of their audience.

The intersection between technology and storytelling is something that was destined to happen from the moment a primate used a club as a tool to smash a rivals face in. As soon as evolution allowed us to create languages the human race was telling stories. The same concept of carving wood into utensils is the same as using ink and paper to write down our imagination. As soon as technology evolved so would our ways of story telling. Technology is created to make things easier and more convenient. Books created pictures we envisioned in our heads and then camera’s let us act out those pictures to be viewed with our eyes. The more technology advances the more storytelling will change and adapt to work with it.

We can approach the future intelligently by learning from the knowledge of the past and our contemporary experiences. Remembering what worked and what didn’t will insure that our future would be brighter than our past. We can pay attention to how our society has been affected by its systems and functionalities and improve by learning from our failures. Technology and everything else will get better as we use the present as beta testing for the future.

Some foresee a decline in thought and dumbing down of society while others think present day media is making us smarter. Steven Johnson argues his point that our intelligent society has become more demanding of intelligent games movies and television shows. People seem to enjoy a brain workout. An example is how slapstick comedy is not mainstream anymore. These days’ people expect clever comedy that takes more than someone just hitting their head on something to make the audience laugh.

Modern audiences now expect films to have deeper twists and enjoy mind-bending thrillers that keep us guessing. It expects media that relies on transmedia storytelling to tell its entire story. Movies like the matrix and shows like lost that leave the viewer critically thinking about hidden themes and meanings behind the many details. Media like this has proven to be favored by audiences who crave being able to solve the mystery rather than having it served for them on a platter. Jenkins says in Searching for the Origami Unicorn “The deeper you drill down, the more secrets emerge, all of wich can seem at any moment to be the key of the film.” This suggests that in the future audiences will expect even more from films, television and video games and that these forms of media will only become more complex in time.

We can prepare for this future by educating ourselves on different converging technologies and how we can use them to improve our development and consumption of media. Once we take advantage of these new technologies we need to think about all the possibilities that will be created through developing media convergence. We should also be thinking about how we can use future technologies to make our lives easier and more convenient. Using the many different aspects of media convergence as a tool to expand what we can do with technology. The possibilities are endless and the future looks promising as long as we utilize this technology to make progress in media convergence.

Trailer for Film God Bless America

Steven Johnson believes that modern media is making us smarter but like he says in The Sleeper Curve, there are still plenty of critics that feel the opposite.