"Come Together" - Just Like Lennon Said

     Welcome back to week #2 with me, Autumn, here at Strategically Yours, my professional blog in the Troy University graduate course "Strategic Communication and Emerging Media".  This week we were introduced to research regarding digital technologies and media convergence.  We were tasked with reading numerous business-based articles, scholarly communication publications, and with watching a few TedTalks that covered this important topic.  Before I lose any reader to the seemingly "overhead my head" self-identification let me assure you I'm going to put into practice a favorite Lombardi-family communication approach.  Simply put it is the "spaghetti" concept for communicating information.  Yes, I've done all of the required readings for this topic and I promise to serve you a delicious bowl of communication spaghetti, I'll strain the information and serve up just the noodles.  So let's have some "Media Convergence" pasta -- Buon appetito!

     One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of convergence is, “the merging of distinct technologies, industries, or devices into a unified whole.”  The same dictionary even shares this as an example: “Many companies are combining rapidly converging communication technology into one device that can act as a phone, take photographs, and send e-mail.”  So in the basic sense the convergence of digital technologies and media is evidenced by the different all-in-one technologies available to consumers today.    It is the video game console that allows the user to not only play games, but to also search the internet, watch tv and movies, and listen to music.  It’s also the smartphone that can do more than just call someone.  From the smartphones a user can search the internet for multi-media, network socially, watch tv and movies, listen to music, track personal health, serve as a home monitoring device, and much more (Ballard, 2013).  Taking it a step further and looking closer within that convergence it can be seen that television and the internet have converged as well.  We now have access to television, movies, and music through online streaming websites like Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify.  All of this media convergence brings to my mind the chorus of a Beatles tune written by John Lennon, “Come Together”.  The similarity ends with the chorus because I don’t know about you but I can’t make sense out of the rest of those lyrics.  Actually, why would the lyrics make sense?  Lennon wrote the song as a campaign rally for the “tune in, turn on, drop out” phrase-creator and LSD-use advocate Timothy Leary’s bid for California Governor.  But I digress, back to media convergence and how communications have been and continue to “come together”.  Before we do here’s a quick video of a “Come Together” live performance in New York City:

    I’d like to present one more quick (pasta-side) example of media convergence and the coming together of the traditional and the digital formats.  Consider “Star Wars”, now note how it was originally a movie and then a book.  More convergence came along in the form of audio books, traditional and digital comics, merchandise, music, and video games where people could play games as the characters of the original movie (Ballard, 2013).  This example best represents the www.vocabulary.com definition that explains convergence can be “things that have already come together.”

     So while we have just illustrated and discussed one of the primary areas of digital convergence in existence today, and also the focal point of this week’s reading assignments, there remains an area in the digital world that needs to be addressed.  An area that doesn’t seem to be having much luck in coming together, but it can and probably should.  The area was found in this week’s required course materials, and this is where the spaghetti and the straining comes in to play.  We find ourselves in a time of great possibilities provided by the internet.  But it is there, an area existing just above the internet, and there is a need for a convergent co-evolution to occur. This convergent co-evolution might just help the divide in what is happening with the world wide web and semi-closed platforms.  Convergence would exist because of change to already existing parts of the web and platforms, and co-evolution could exist because of the new parts being created there above the internet (Latzer, 2013).  So let’s define convergent co-evolution.  Simplified, it occurs when things having different origins affect each other, developing similarities, as they grow and develop over time.  The web developed, and continues to operate, from an open source mind-set.  The emerging platforms developed, and continue to operate, from a semi-closed mind-set.  (Shirky, 2012).  It is here that there is a real disconnect.  How can an open source mind-set, free of cost, all about sharing seem to converge and evolve with a semi-closed mind-set, for profit, all about consumer accessibility?  For this I say let’s take a look at crops.  Wait, what?  That’s right, just as Everett Rogers, whose earliest beginnings were as a crop-working son of a farmer, gave us Communication's powerful “Diffusion of Innovation” theory I think there is more to be learned from crops that could prove beneficial to these two communication areas.

     From an article in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Genetics (not part of the assigned readings) 3Cs are looked at to learn how crop mixtures not only survive, but thrive in a plant community.  When used as a conceptual framework for the web/platform mixture within the internet community I find those 3Cs might offer some insight in to how these seemingly opposed mind-sets might just survive and thrive too.  The 3Cs are: Competition, Coexistence, and Co-evolution.  The first, competition means that when demand exceeds supply and creates pressure within the community, a niche diversification needs to occur to offset that pressure.  In his work, “Net Effects” Tom Wheeler noted that competition is the “lifeblood of innovation” (2013).  Coexistence means they would need to adapt to each other and adapt to their shared community.  After all, I think it is fair to say that both web/platform mind-sets want to, as Jeff Bezhos from Amazon said, “make the most of the gifts of the internet” (Novaes, 2015).   Finally, co-evolution means that they reciprocally affect each other’s evolution (Hill, 1990).  I honestly hope to see a coexisting convergent co-evolutionary future driven by competition for both the web and the platform areas of the internet.  Change is never easy.  As Wheeler mentioned, “History teaches us that while new networks create great opportunities, it is only through torment and tumult that these opportunities become manifest.  The economic dislocation, ideological confrontation and uncertainty that dog us today repeat similar experiences during previous periods of network change.”  I personally am an optimist, and a believer in innovation.  I agree with the inventor of the world wide web, Time Berners-Lee, when he said, “the goal of the web is to serve humanity.  We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine” (Berners-Lee, 2010).  And then, I also agree that it is important for the semi-closed platforms to continue to provide a “more designed, directed, and polished experience” to users willing to pay for that experience.  So I say again, the 3Cs to survive and thrive in a mixed plant crop community might be worth framing the open/semi-closed mind-sets of the internet community – COMPETITION, COEXISTENCE, and CO-EVOLUTION.                                                                      

     Since we began this week’s blog with a Beatle’s reference to convergence, and coming together I’d like to close out with them as well.  All of this talk of convergence, co-evolution and framing a digital paradigm all stem from the same deeply humanistic desire to change the world.  Key lyrics for me were found in the opening line:  

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world…

     I can think of no better song to reflect that feeling, that desire to innovate and to inspire than the Beatles’ “Revolution”, I submit for your pleasure a live-performance video:

And as always…

Strategically Yours,

Autumn

Works Cited:

Anderson, C. & Wolff, M.  (2010, Aug.). “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”  Retrieved on        17 January 2017 from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/.

Ballard, B. (2013).  “Media Convergence and Its Impact on Our Changing Culture.”  Retrieved on 19      January from https://storify.com/brittballard2/media-convergence-and-its-impact-on-our-       

     changing-c.

Berners-Lee, T.  (2010, Dec.). “Long Live the Web.” Retrieved on 17 January from         

     http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Long_Live_the_Web.pdf.

Hill, J. (1990, Aug.) “The three C's — competition, coexistence and coevolution — and their impact 

    on the breeding of forage crop mixtures.”  Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from 

    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00225947.

Latzer, M. (2013, Apr.). “Media Convergence”. Retrieved on 19 January 2017 from 

     http://www.mediachange.ch/media/pdf/publications/Latzer2013_Convergence.pdf.

Novaes, L. (2015, Jan.) “The Future of News--How the BBC Is Thinking About Its Future.”   

     Retrieved on 17 January from 

     http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_01_15futureofnews.pdf.

Shirky, C. (2012, Jun.).  “How the Internet Will (One Day) Transform Government.”  Retrieved on 

     17 January 2017 from 

 http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html.

Wheeler, T. (2013, Dec.).  “Net Effects: The Past, Present & Future Impact of Our Networks".  

     Retrieved on 17 January 2017 from https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2013/12/02/net-effects-

     past-present-future-impact-our-networks-history-challenges.