Wireless

NEW DELHI -- Today, the business world is clouded with jargons, and we get swayed by them. One word that was everybody's favorite in late 90s was 'convergence'. When I was heading Alta Vista's broadband initiatives in Europe, convergence was the mantra for many a business plans. Come the Internet melt-down in 2000 and this became the most abused word. Everyone eschewed it. Come 2005 with the Internet V2 becoming a reality, the word again became the flavor of all. Although now it was referred to along with its new sobriquets - triple-play or now even quadplay!

Convergence is a reality. But few of us realise or apprehend how it is impacting the very warp and woof of our very existence. It is transforming our culture as profoundly as the Renaissance period did. Media convergence is an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences; it's not an end state. There will never be one black box controlling all media. Rather, thanks to the proliferation of channels and the increasingly ubiquitous nature of computing and communications, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere, and we will use all kinds of media in relation to one another.

We will develop new skills for managing information, new structures for transmitting information across channels, and new creative genres that exploit the potentials of those emerging information structures. History teaches us that old media never die. It will "recreate" itself for the new form of distribution. And before you say, "What about the eight-track," let's distinguish among media, genres and delivery technologies. Recorded sound is a medium. Radio drama is a genre. CDs, MP3 files and eight-track cassettes are delivery technologies.

Genres and delivery technologies come and go, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment eco-system. A medium's content may shift, its audience may change and its social status may rise or fall, but once a medium establishes itself it continues to be part of the media ecosystem. No one medium is going to win the battle for our ears and eyeballs. The ecosystem will constantly emerge.

For me, this evolution of the media ecosystem is an unending story. In one of my earlier assignments, I was mandated to initiate the New Media Division of a publisher. The new media, then, was the CD Rom. And this was as late as 1996.

For me the real essence is not the media convergence being enabled by technology convergence; but the social convergence it is creating all around us.

Economic convergence: Every company today is de-facto a media or content company looking at providing media experiences to consumers. Citibank, when it had set a goal for a billion customers, retained Micheal Wolf, the author of the famed Entertainment Economy, as a consultant to work out how to create exciting content to bring people to the bank. His brief was to have content in keeping with the bank ethos of stability and global yet beig cool and right of the cultural wave. Hasbro, whose bread and butter has been creating toys from movies and television, decided to entertainment properties that would generate new toys.

Social or organic convergence: Consumers' multitasking strategies for navigating the new information environment. Organic convergence is what occurs when my five-year old son is watching Disney on a big-screen television, playing his gameboy and reading a book. And all of them are the same Disney character.

Cultural convergence: The explosion of new forms of creativity at the intersections of various media technologies, industries and consumers. Media convergence fosters a new participatory folk culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate, recreate and re-circulate content.

Shrewd companies tap this culture to foster consumer loyalty and generate low-cost content. Media convergence also encourages transmedia storytelling, the development of content across multiple channels. As producers more fully exploit organic convergence, storytellers will use each channel to communicate different kinds and levels of narrative information, using each medium to do what it does best.

Global convergence: The cultural hybridity that results from the international circulation of media content. In music, the world-music movement produces some of the most interesting contemporary sounds, and in cinema, the global circulation of Asian popular cinema profoundly shapes Hollywood entertainment. These new forms reflect the experience of being a citizen of the "global village."

Much as the historical Renaissance emerged when Europe responded to the invention and dispersion of movable type, these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance -- a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives. The first Renaissance was a period of political and social instability, and the old monastic order crumbled.

Today, media convergence is sparking a range of social, political, economic and legal disputes because of the conflicting goals of consumers, producers and gatekeepers. These contradictory forces are pushing toward cultural diversity, homogenisation, commercialisation and grassroots cultural production. The digital renaissance will be the best of times and the worst of times, but a new cultural order will emerge from it. This, for me, is the real essence and impact of convergence.

(The author is the founder and chief executive officer of Recreate Solutions)