Digital Convergence

Read how digital convergence will and is affecting our culture in the article below by Richard Freer.

By Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

It is time for another in our series on the effect of technology on our life. I am indebted to my grad assistant Craig Knowlton for the research on this article.

Well, that numerical title is either the beginning of the alphabet, the first few notes of the Star Spangled Banner, instructions from your cell phone to your home to turn on the lights, lower the temperature on the first floor and turn on the oven to 350 degrees, the picture of your cat speeding through phone lines and cyber space to your sister in Jakarta, or instructions to an intelligence satellite to photograph a suspicious formation in a far flung land……….. Or it might be all of the above, and that is the point.

Whatever the device, whatever its chore, our communication with it, and its communication with interconnected devices or with its own sub systems is increasingly likely to be in 1’s and 0’s, pulse--- absence of pulse, tone--- absence of tone indicating its dependence on a universal digital key that is wrapping us together ever closer to each other. Small world, big village is today’s reality. The opportunities and challenges we face are increasingly from this digital convergence creating a cat’s cradle of interconnecting lines tying devices together and culture to culture-- whether we are ready or not.

In the future, almost every device will be a network device. Some will be large and immobile, like home entertainment screens, and others will be small and portable, like cell-phones, watches, and digital wallets allowing us to access our financial accounts and arrange for payments for everything from a movie to a house. Given current display technologies, people mostly dislike reading online, but researchers at MIT have invented a new kind of ink that turns a sheet the thickness of a piece of paper into a black-and-white monitor—and they are working on the color version. Extremely high-resolution, reader friendly, screens will one day be everywhere. People will have the capability to carry, perhaps even wear, their computers and use them anyplace, anytime, to send and receive telephone, fax, video, or mail messages.

Some extreme predictions assert that eventually no books, photographs, movies, televisions, stereos, letters, post cards, billboards, telephones, or fax machines will inhabit the average day. Bits, the electronic 1s and 0s that create digital language, are cheaper to produce and store than the cost of cutting down trees to manufacture paper. Instead of paying $30 for a hardcover book, we can read the inexpensive and environmentally friendly digital version. Already many people no longer spend $15 on industry-packaged compact discs; instead they opt to download music directly onto their computer or cell-phone. While I don’t envision production of all tangible information and entertainment objects completely disappearing, one day they could be seen as artifacts more than practical devices. Already libraries feature electronic books and documents so that researchers can access material from around the world. At the College of Charleston, students normally receive teacher handouts via the university network; in this way, they can choose to read it onscreen or print it out.

Nowadays coffee shops, colleges, and private homes and offices feature wireless networks. Downtown Charleston has been promoting its up and coming wireless corridor, and New Orleans has instituted wireless service to help speed emergency service and communication in Katrina’s aftermath. Eventually, a global network of wireless connections will have profound affects on everyday devices that we use. Not only do automobiles access GPS data to provide street maps and car locations, but other products and appliances will access the network as well.

Cable, telephone, and entertainment companies now busily labor towards their digital futures, and eventually the distinction between the television and phone companies will become technological and cultural history. It’s estimated that by 2015, ninety percent of all households in the developed world will have a home media center, which will operate all network transmissions. Computers and televisions will be able to display the same media, so that people will cease distinguishing between them. All information, whether stored data, live streaming sporting events, or downloaded movies on demand, will come from the local—or worldwide—broadband network. People already conduct commercial transactions safely online, whether renting a movie or buying a car and the development of digital watermarks will protect intellectual property and advance business communications as well.

Ian McEwen, the Booker Prize winning author, is currently writing the introduction of a book in which one hundred and forty thinkers, mostly scientists; answer the question “What do you believe that you cannot prove?” While working on this project, McEwen has observed that “They appear to be working towards the formation of a common language. They need each other…The old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge is beginning, only just beginning, to emerge.” Digital convergence is both an immediate reflection and instigator of this worldwide unification of knowledge. Ordinary people will have resources that Caesar Augustus, Thomas More, or Thomas Jefferson never imagined.

There exists in digital convergence the fabulous opportunity for a renascence of human potential. Traditional societies might resist the effects of digital convergence upon their mores and daily life, but the open communication of a global network also promises to expose those traditions to a wider audience. While there will always be much left to prove and more to discover, it seems that consumer and communications revolutions occur daily. While much more enthusiastic about the beneficence of digital convergence for mankind than I am about the risks of nanotechnology which itself reflects the principles of digital convergence, like all change it is not an unmixed blessing. Already it is challenging the third world in ways that are very disturbing to cultures very resistant to change. While the Indian subcontinent may thrive by embracing it, other cultures through their resistance are at the heart of much of the misery that has held back the region and its people and now threatens us oceans away. It is too soon to predict its geopolitical impact, but I suspect that the forces of change are too great for technologically unsophisticated societies to withstand. They will change and sometimes change violently, but our republic is likely to change as well from the digital interconnection of interest groups on all sorts of issues who can more effectively make their wishes known to all levels of our government.

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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