Convergent Technology (week 6 blog)

So I have a new phone, one of the Samsung Galaxy S2 deals and I’ve only just started pulling it apart and seeing how it work. It’s got voice recognition stuff, apps for checking FaceBook and reddit and I suspect it can even call people, although I’ve only used skype and free-wifi to do this so I’m not 100% sure. It has apps that let it work as a media centre and if I could be bothered going through the programming or getting the apps I could probably make it control my TV and computer.

It’s a convergent technology – Something that has taken previous ideas and mixed them together to present something different and new.

The PS3 is also an example of a convergent technology

The reason that I state it is different and new is that it can achieve things that the other devices separately would not be able to achieve. For example, a schedule only functions as I enter information into it, not taking into account details from other schedules. As my phone works off the Android system it automatically synchronises my schedules from Facebook, Google Calenders as well as the individual one I have on the phone itself. Although you could state that this additional functionality was something that could be achieved by my direct interaction, the point of it is that by being connected it doesn’t need it.

That’s what I see as the point of convergent technologies – it takes every intermediary step that we as humans would have had to have done to transfer information from one piece of technology to another and does itself. It saves a lot of time in processing terms as calculations now happen at electronic speeds allowing hundreds of calculations per second with the data as opposed to waiting for people to update every step of the way.  While I can’t state what uses this has other than real time automatic FourSquare updates (I think that’s how it works?) I’m not going to preclude anything from happening any time soon with this information.

However is this the end? At the moment I don’t think so. I’ve read far too much science fiction and think that we won’t be happy until we achieve the singularity of devices, in which you will carry around one object which will do everything – start your car and drive it for you, have coffee ordered when you start to feel sleepy, essentially something to run our lives for us and leave us with only the important stuff to do. I dare hazard a guess as to the way recent trends go that this will probably be some form of revolutionary Angry Birds game.