Digital Convergence

Jon Udell of Infoworld has some interesting and innovative thoughts in his recent column on timeshifting and telepresence

At the end of the day, it struck me that time-shifted content and space-folding telepresence are becoming complementary. For example, it wasn't strictly necessary for me to drive to that meeting. I could have made a phone call. Because it was a first meeting that may turn into a professional relationship, however, face-to-face was preferable. In the past that reasoning would have entailed a trade-off. Now, though, when I'm not folding space I can shift time. Given that I needed to listen to those recordings anyway, listening to them in the car — away from interruptions and distractions — was the most productive way to do it.
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Shifting time, folding space, juggling atoms and bits — is this how we want to live and work? Yes!

These ideas were inspired in part by Martin Geddes of telepocalypse.net, where he asks important questions of the nature that "We’ve no idea how the world of bit-shifting interacts with the world of atom-arranging. How do telecom and transport substitute or complement one another? Using economic analysis, he concludes,

The separation of the “tele” from the “com” suggests we should be looking separately at the layers of the architecture. That means considering the information services separately from the bit haulage. What’s the price cross-elasticity of going to NASCAR races with car-racing TV shows and video games? And will that have the same effect on connectivity demand? I suspect the answer is we know even less at this level of detail than we do at the aggregate level.

In the future, IPv10, perhaps, everyone will be an IP address. Number and place were seen as interchangeable a long time ago, in every mathematical abstraction.

I recently took another step forward in digital convergence within the home. Ever since I was first haunted by the ghost in the machine many years ago, I have long held a fascination for technology. This has in recent times translated into an appreciation for social implications of technology.

My home setup until recently featured an integrated model with my XBox(which also doubles as my DVD player) hooking up with my home theater system, DVR and television. This afforded me the convenience of combining gaming, film and timeshifted television. My other source of media was my computer. hitherto an independent device, straining at the seams with information and media.

Article Author: Aaman Lamba

Aaman Lamba is a Blogcritics editor, as well as the Publisher of Desicritics.org, a Blogcritics network site covering media, politics, culture, sports and more with a global South Asian focus

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