The emperor's new trend

I'm talking about convergence from a slightly skeptical point of view. Although I'm very enthusiastic about the way in which technology may benefit society, I guess I sympathize with some of John Maeda's observations about this.

Definitions of convergence

Nicholas Negroponte
First, I'd like to look at some definitions of convergence. They're not necessarily mine, but they are important definitions in terms of the history of the discussion. The first one is from a fellow you're probably all very familiar with called Nicholas Negroponte from the Media Lab. Being Digital was published in 1995, and in it his definition goes: "Bits co-mingle effortlessly. They start to get mixed up and can be used and re-used separately or together. The mixing of audio, video, and data is called multimedia. It sounds complicated, but it's nothing more than co-mingled bits."

Negroponte's been a big proponent of the bit switch-the idea that we're moving from producing and distributing atoms in the form of products to producing digital things in the form of bits that get pushed around the world.

Don Tapscott
The second definition comes from Don Tapscott who has been an enthusiast of convergence since most of us were using Apple Macintoshes and has advised Al Gore who, for better or worse (since I once campaigned for Bill Bradley) may be the next president of this country. In his 1997 book, The Digital Economy, he describes convergence or digitization-meaning all content, including audio and video content being used in any order and rearranged at will-"Digital content can be transformed for use in another medium." So there's this idea of things being very malleable-as long as it's digital, then we can deal with it.

Jakob Nielsen
We have a third definition. Do you know Jakob Nielsen? This is from his book published just at the end of last year, Designing Web Usability: "Most current media formats will die and be replaced with an integrated web medium in five to ten years." This is, in the style of his writing, a pretty in-your-face statement-and, I will argue later on, a wrong statement-but still, a kind of popular view of this thing.

Claude Shannon
So, is convergence a new thing? Well, if we go back some way, we can find elements of it, although not the use of the actual word, in the writing of academics working in the decades after the war. Claude Shannon, who is a mathematician, in his book written with Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, talks about the idea that all communication essentially is digital. He was writing, in 1963, and that was a relatively radical idea for then.

John Von Neumann
The other person who's often associated with Shannon who is credited with the early discussion of digitization was the Hungarian immigrant mathematician John Von Neumann who came to the States in the early 30's and is often associated with the concept of computing being a digital, binary thing. He was involved in the foundation of the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

John Naisbitt
So the idea of digitization has been around for quite a long time. It was popularized by John Naisbitt, whose book Megatrends was, according to the cover, "A National #1 Bestseller with over 3.5 million copies in print." This was in 1984, and Naisbitt again predicted that the media that we're familiar with would converge in one way or another, imminently. This book has been republished and updated twice, most recently, this year.

Boosters
I just want to discuss some of the boosters for this. Not surprisingly they provided some of the most popular definitions of convergence. From Negroponte, "Wholly new content will emerge from being digital, as will new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of information and entertainment providers." Going back to another of our definers, now a booster, Don Tapscott, "The dominant sector in the new economy is the new media, which are products of the convergence of the computing, communications and content industries. In the U.S.," (and he's writing in 1997), "new media and their ancillary industries and services account for 10% of the G.D.P." So there we have two boosters who are very clear that something important is going on and it's going to fundamentally affect things.

Convergence or multimedia?
My contention would be that their definition of convergence is really what we used to call multimedia. A 1983-cover line of the UK-published Economist newspaper read: "Make Way for Multimedia." This was in the brave old days of CD-ROM, which people may remember and may or may not lament, when people like Peter Girardi were cutting new swathes of interactive content at Voyager and great things were happening. So, essentially, the definition of convergence, which I think Negroponte and Naisbitt and to an extent Tapscott use is really what we would call multimedia. And that has happened, to an extent. Whereas I would start to look for a broader definition of convergence, not one that essentially is old wine presented in new bottles.

Standards
So my contention is that getting data into ones and zeroes, essentially making it digital, is only the first step in order to start to achieve more useful ends with converged data. If you think about the Internet we have three or four standards, for distributing and displaying video, for instance. We have QuickTime. We have Real Audio. Microsoft has its own standard, and so on. So, although the data is stored in digital forms, it's actually not accessible to anybody in a device-independent way. It's not exchangeable in simple, easy ways. So the actual idea of getting information in ones and zeroes, which is the basis of convergence and making this thing useful, is not by any means the end of it.

On top of that, we need standard ways that we can interconnect things. Just to give you an example, I was traveling in Holland last week and I had a problem with my cell phone. I rang up my cell phone provider in the UK-a company called Orange-and told them that I was having problems getting my voice mail messages. They said that the problem was with Libertytel, which is a Dutch telco who do cell phone services. I said, "But if I ring them up, what are they going to say to me? 'You're not one of our customers. Go away.' Surely your system works with their system." And they said, "Oh, no. Not at all." And here we're just talking about voice data. Voice data is 120 years old. So being able to get systems to interconnect and exchange their digital bits in a format that is useful is the third level of this.

I contend that convergence is not particularly about consumers. I think it will have some effect on the way which we entertain ourselves and on the extent to which we use computers in our homes. But it's more about business, because when we're talking about convergence, what we're really talking about is being able to share and interchange all kinds of data. This is something that businesses do-whether it's people collaborating on projects within a company, whether it's electronic data interchange, whether it's sharing information that you publish if you're some kind of newspaper or media owner. Sharing information and information about information is the really key thing there.

Practical problems
So those are some of the conceptual problems with the idea of convergence. There are some very practical problems as well-one of which is that this is a very expensive business when we're trying to re-engineer lots of different companies and lots of different industries. It's very difficult to see where the investment is really going on. If we look at investment in the U.S. economy, historically it's lower than it has been at any time in the last 30-40 years. The second area that we have problems in is looking at how regulations and so on affect the development of new technologies. For instance, in the UK at the moment they are selling licenses for what's called UNTS, which are high-speed cell phone networks. Probably three or four of those licenses-and there are five being sold-will go to the traditional cell phone companies. The upshot to that will be that they will remain the closeted and mildly useless companies that they are today, companies who can't connect me with someone's voice mail in Holland. That's because the British government chooses to regulate things in that way. That's quite a serious problem. A little anecdotal example: NATO and the U.S. military can't even get their standards together about how to fix missiles to aircraft, or fix radio standards. And if a big organization that supposedly has one single goal can't do that, I pity the possibilities for our media industries.

A final note on some of the practical problems of convergence and defining these things. We have some pretty hard spade-work to do to actually build this network and converge all of these things. We've got holes to dig in the road to hold up the traffic. We've got to wire lots of things up, and you have to wear white coats when you do that because you can get very dirty. And you've got to deliver boxes with cowhide skin on them to offices in London. So we've got to do all these things-there's a lot of atoms to move around to make Negroponte's bits work properly. We can't underestimate how much work is involved in doing that.

What about the consumer?
So we've had the conceptual problems of convergence. We've had the practical problems of convergence. Now, I want to ask how people really live. The fact is it's about time that the technology companies paid attention to how people really live instead of devising new ways that we should interact with our televisions. Unlike in business where you can get rid of hardware in two years or so, in fact, in the UK there is now a complete tax write-off for any e-commerce related hardware that you purchase, consumers don't chuck out televisions that often. To get new technology installed in the home is pretty difficult. This is assuming we're still talking about the home, which will still be an important focus for what's happening.

The last question I ask is: who asked for interactive television, anyway? I know it's a cheap comment to make, but all of the trials that have taken place in the U.S. and in the UK have demonstrated that people like to play games on televisions, and if they want to be entertained, they want to sit back on their sofas. They don't want to lean forward and think too hard. Quite frankly, we need to be entertained sometimes, and we need someone else's vision.

Installed bases
Everyone in Europe is getting very excited because we have WAP phones. WAP stands for Wireless Access Protocol. Everyone is excited because we beat the Yanks; we've got a technology that's European-wide and GSM. But as a colleague of mine pointed out, WAP would better stand for "Where are the phones?" If anyone could buy a WAP phone, and they don't work for an Internet services company and get one sent to them from Nokia, then good luck to them. I certainly can't find one. So that's an important point about installed bases.

The network
So my argument is that digitization and convergence has really enabled the exchanging of data, but it's not enabled the network-and one of the key commentators is Kevin Kelly, associated with Wired magazine and the Whole Earth movement. New Rules in the Economy, which was published in 1998, posits a world of network-enabled devices and things and Fed Ex packages and socks that come home to you when you lose them, and that kind of thing. I'm making light of his analysis; it's more profound than that. And the other is the ever-grumpy Don Norman, who wrote The Invisible Computer, published in 1999, talking about information appliances, or network-enabled appliances. The concept of convergence and digitization really is about enabling this kind of network, enabling some kind of useful functionality of things, which are tools we think of, not in terms of how they function or what technologies enable them, but in terms of what they do for us. It's a can opener; it's not a piece of metal bent into certain shapes. It's a telephone; I communicate with it.

My argument is that convergence will primarily be important in business, or be important in the way that businesses run. That includes design companies and web services companies and so on. It's going to be more important for manufacturing things than it will be for delivering things. Just two more quotes. "The future of industry is driven almost 100% by the ability of a company to render its product or services in digital form." Again, Negroponte. Wrong. Here's Negroponte again: "Digital technologies will be of help in the design, manufacture, marketing and management of atom-based businesses. I am only saying," he continues, "that their core businesses won't change." Well, right in the first part, wrong in the second. I think the network and convergence will allow businesses to manufacture things, and this is everyone from General Electric to Boeing to Hughes, in a different and more efficient way, a way that allows us to produce better physical products more cheaply, more efficiently, and more elegantly. And that's really where the core is going to be.

Internet History Timeline
I just wanted to mention briefly a project we worked on called the Internet History Timeline, which is an attempt to analyze the relationship between technology and society looking at economics, geopolitics, industry, individual figures and institutions. This is very much a work in progress, but we're looking at the history of the Internet from the late 50's to the late 80's-when, essentially, the web was born-and looking at how all of the technologies interconnect. It's focused around technological developments, but informed by societal developments that were taking place.

What do we want?
Integration of information into our lives in appropriate ways at appropriate times. Some good examples would be public transport information systems that don't crash, or car information systems that tell us how to get somewhere, or even public information systems so we don't get lost. That would be a very good start.

What will happen?
Well, I'm not too optimistic in this respect, but I think the people in this room could make a big difference here. We're definitely heading for collision, rather than convergence-and the collision is going to be between competing industries. So this conference is very well named.

What can designers do?
Well, unlike an ad from Adbusters which says "Crash. Progress ended in 1945," which is a very backwards-looking sentiment, we're in the job of technology, even if we don't have control of our laptops, and there's a few things that we need to learn. We should not be technologically deterministic:-just because something exists doesn't mean it's going to succeed. Because it's crap doesn't mean it's not going to succeed as well, unfortunately. We need to push out clients to invest properly in the right kind of technologies. We need to take a more proactive role-some of you may already be doing this-in telling them just what's what. If we understand it, we should be playing that role. We're not just servicing them. We should be giving them strategic advice as well. We should help them design their organizations; if it's really about networking and information exchange, that changes the way the organization works as well as how our own companies and organizations will work. And we should put users first, not as couch potatoes who need hand-holding against bad technologies, but as people who need to be empowered to be more effective in the way they work and the way they do things so they can change society themselves.

We need to keep our intellectual independence and broadly ignore much of what's written in the media about these things and come to our own judgements in an informed way about whether things are converging or not and whether that's a good thing or not.