Post 4 - Future of Convergence

What is the future of convergence? As technology becomes more advanced and easily accessible to the public across multiple platforms, it’s only expected that there will be even more advanced and interactive creations produced in the future. The media world keeps changing constantly thanks to new technologies and all the new digital media entrepreneurs who are creating these products. 

Possible Future World

Today in society, media convergence has become a vital element of your average consumer’s life. With all these different platforms such as television, Internet, applications, mobile smart phones, tablets, video games and etc., the audience have control over how they want to consume their media. According to Jenkins, "Audiences empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media are demanding the right to participate within the culture" (Jenkins 24). This participatory culture will only advance tremendously in the future. Convergence has lead the media to become more interactive and audience participation is encouraged. And in the future the possibilities for convergence are endless.

The intersection of technology and storytelling has evolved already. Children that are growing up now in this generation may never have the same experiences as I did when I was growing up and learning. For example, with all these new inventions such as the tablets and even video games, children are now learning in different ways. In the future, I can foresee that children won't even have the experience of going to a library and even the experience of turning down the corner of a page in a book. According to Cecilia Kang's article, 'Kids apps explode on smartphones and tablets', in a growing number of families across the country, infants and toddlers are deftly swiping and tapping away even as they wobble toward their first steps. In the future, children will be able to personalize their media consumption and customize it to their specific tastes and have access to a diversity of opinion much broader than now. The way we consume media now will be old news. But still, we are able to get all the information that we need at a touch of our fingers on a screen.

The future of pop culture will be much more advanced. People won't have to rely on people to keep them up to date, by gossiping in person. According to Jenkins, "Technology allows storytelling to live through film, television, books, games and amusement parks" (Jenkins 98). Also social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter help people connect and share information and opinions to any one around the world. Currently, we consume media and discuss it with others who share the same viewpoints and/or with others who don't. For example, there will be a digital filter for us to view the things that we're into such as a particular song artist or presidential candidate.

The future of gaming will change as well. According to the article Why I Love Bees, there is a already a website called 'I Love Bees", which is a Web-based interactive fiction that used websites, blogs, emails, jpegs, Mp3 recordings, and other digital artifacts to create an immersive backstory for Microsoft's sci-fi shooter video game Halo 2. The role of the site was to oversee the emerging collective intelligence of its players. By reconstructing and finding out the fragmented fiction, the fans would be collaboratively authoring a narrative bridge between the first Halo video game and its sequel. I could only imagine the future of gaming will progress to highly-pixelated devices that will make players feel like they're in the game, transporting them into a virtual gaming universe.

Citations

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture;Where Old and New Media Collide.New York:New YorkUniversity Press  2009 Print.Rodman, George, Mass Media, 2006. Print

http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf