The Future of ISE--Convergence
From Media and Informal Science Learning
For the last twenty years, convergence has been a Holy Grail of media and technology, and there are a number of important ways in which we can predict it will come to fruition, though not necessarily in the same ways many originally expected, which should give us some pause in projecting.
Contents |
Consolidation vs. fragmentation
For example, as recently as 2002-03, the conventional wisdom[1] was that the Internet specifically, and media in general, were headed down the same path as the automobile industry in the early 20th century, destined to consolidate from hundreds of companies down to three or four major players from whom everything would be integrated and flow.[2]
But as some saw then[3], rapidly falling barriers to entry, both on the production side (hosting, open source, diffusion of knowledge, platform development, etc.) and on the marketing/distribution side (viral effects) have resulted in a new paradigm of ever-increasing media fragmentation in which technology and media recapitulate biological dictates of ever-increasing diversity and specialization.[4] New media, specifically, thrives on a human hunger to get beyond broadcast content; as one researcher in the early part of the decade found, even specialists want more specialization when it comes to new media offerings--cardiologists, for example, don't want a site for cardiologists, they want a site for cardiology students, another for cardiology residents, another for interventional cardiologists, another for electro-physiologists, and so on.[5]
Even in landscapes like search and personal page media that appear to be dominated by giants today, a new generation of companies (and some old ones) is seeking to gain ground by carving out specific niches--search engines specifically designed for learning, for example[6] (which, at a minimum, are less likely to find themselves fighting the war of attrition with those gaming the search results of an all-market player like Google), or companies like Marc Andreessen's Ning that allow individuals and organizations to create their own niche-specific Facebook or MySpace-like networks, with design, content, member recruitment, and functionality specific to their needs. Ning's hardly the only creator or enabler of boutiques, but it's instructive that since the site launched, there have been hundreds of thousands of Ning-powered social networks created (30,000 were created in the beta period alone[7]), some with hundreds of thousands of members. The mainstream generic social networks like Facebook have, at this point, in fact acknowledged the power of the boutique movement by working to strike deals with smaller social networks that enable unified logins and information exchanges.
In the face of ever-growing fragmentation, organizations--including informal science practitioners--that want to achieve widespread mindshare are finding themselves compelled to take up new approaches (beyond traditional methods like scorched earth competition, strategic partnerships, and mergers & acquisitions) such as content syndication (increasingly via RSS feeds) and/or creating widgets and other applications that thousands of sites might find useful to incorporate, but that also provide the originating company with visibility or other benefits. The average widget in Facebook Apps or Open Social is, after all, orders of magnitude more popular than the average Facebook group or MySpace page, and as illustrated below, the most successful widgets far outpace the most successful groups, particularly in the case of applications that have built into them a rationale to involve the user's friends (e.g. a quiz creation widget that encourages the creator to challenge his/her friends to take the quiz).
| Rank | Most Popular FB Groups | Most Popular FB Applications |
| 1 | 1,612,000 | 24,134,200 |
| 2 | 1,176,000 | 17,504,100 |
| 3 | 1,110,000 | 17,504,100 |
| 4 | 993,000 | 17,341,400 |
| 5 | 850,000 | 15,982,700 |
| 6 | 689,000 | 15,490,800 |
| 7 | 532,000 | 9,790,000 |
| 8 | 532,000 | 9,631,400 |
| 9 | 509,000 | 9,451,000 |
| 10 | 468,000 | 8,056,700 |
| Ave. | 847,100 | 14,488,640 |
Figure 1. Facebook's most popular groups and applications (rounded to nearest one hundred) as of February 28, 2009. In addition, the application totals show monthly users, while groups show the total number of individuals who have ever signed up for them.
Convergence of devices: A cautionary tale
Another area of convergence that hasn't worked out exactly as envisioned is the convergence of devices. For example, by now we were all supposed to be down to one wireless device that combined all the functions of a PDA, phone, web browser, email/IM, MP3 player, camera, portable game player and more, and while there are certainly devices out there that perform many of these functions (e.g. the iPhone and Blackberry Storm), we still seem to be some distance away from seeing a point where most users will believe they really need only one device to perform them all, although there is some interesting research going on into wireless devices that can sense by the way you hold them what function you want them to perform and reconfigure themselves (including form factor) into that type of device.[8] In the present, at least, the fact that camera phones now take pictures with 8 megapixel resolution still leaves a number of reasons why the average person with an interest in photography who owns a digital camera isn't going to give it up any time soon,[9] even though the existence of camera phones has certainly greatly expanded the number of photos being taken that couldn't or wouldn't have been taken before. And while many users now play games on their cell phones, they seem unlikely to displace portable game consoles any time soon.
For some similar reasons--and some different--television/film and interactive media have been slower to converge than expected, too. Many of the interactive features touted in technologies like Blu-Ray are not significantly different or better than those offered on some of the earliest multimedia prototypes like Life Story, for example, more than twenty years ago, even though at least some of these prototypes were robust enough even then to penetrate tough markets like K-12 schools.[10] As with cameras and cell phones, some of this is the result of difficulty optimizing a device for all relevant uses, albeit in a more subtle sense: interactive media is widely believed to be a 'lean forward' experience, while television is 'lean back.' To a greater extent than wireless innovators, proponents of interactive television have also had to deal with a daunting degree of institutional intransigence where their vision is concerned.[11] As a result, most of the convergence between television and interactive has been internal to the users of both media as they increasingly multi-task between them,[12] a scenario that the television industry has increasingly chosen to support as it has become clear that it's irreversible. ____________, __________, and _________ are all good examples of television shows that have clearly embraced a '360' or 'surround sound' approach to media, coordinating television and interactive offerings in real time. Not surprisingly, many of the best examples are targeted to younger consumers, as is, of course, the bulk of informal science education.
Will television eventually really converge with interactive as the default consumer experience, or will it turn out that a two-screen solution-0one screen 'lean forward' (and likely relatively small and wireless) and one 'lean back' (and likely increasingly large)--is really the best approach (as even some of the earliest multimedia proponents believed)? The most optimistic convergence proponents say widespread adoption of interactive television is, at best, one or two years away, and warn television executives not to be on the wrong side of history,[13] but even if one accepts a logarithmic view of technology adoption,[14] the length of this particular curve seems to indicate more resistance than one would expect from a purely technological progression like Moore's Law.
At the end of the day, the point is not that device convergence won't happen--in many cases it has, and will continue to--the point is that it has already taken significantly longer than many expected, which should be a cautionary note as we consider other forms of convergence that in many ways look to be considerably more profound. After all, as has often been noted, as much as 90% of the success or failure of a particular technology is the result of good or bad timing,[15] and this can apply even more to resource-constrained appliers of technology like informal science practitioners.
Convergence of media function
The simplest and most subtle of these convergences, already well underway, is a convergence of function within media, in which one form or format of media merges with another. The most obvious and well publicized example of this is the many ways in which social media such as blogs, profile-based social networks, and user-generated video and photo sites have merged with traditional news media. News now is often broken by social media, explored in more depth by social media (while the traditional news media moves on to the next story); beyond this, social media has changed the definition of what's newsworthy and even changed the look and feel of traditional news (as network graphics, style, and layout become increasingly Web-like in format).
Often, these types of convergences are viewed as invasions by the new of the old, and in a biological sense this may be accurate in that their trajectories can resemble nothing so much as the process by which organisms often co-evolve into relative stasis with one another. It may appear, for example, that social media in the form of wikis have more or less overrun traditional reference media (and generalist publishers whose customers can live with 'good enough' accuracy may have difficulty surviving), but ongoing, nagging, and widespread dissatisfaction with Internet accuracy[16] may well presage an ultimate synthesis between the top-down expert-driven approach of traditional reference media and the bottom-up 'wisdom of crowds' faith of social media proponents in which new forms foster collaboration between experts and end-users to gain 'best of both worlds' benefits. In fact, it could be argued that this synthesis, not the semantic Web, will be the real Web 3.0, a synthesis based, for example, on end users' desire (and competition) to become better authors of online content, a desire experts will fulfill by creating tools, apps, widgets, and data for end users to work with, in this way distributing their expertise in highly scalable--and highly memorable/constructivist-ways.
A particularly intriguing 'invasion'/ functional convergence that seems to be on the cusp of happening is the spread of games into a wide variety of other domains. A constellation of factors ranging from corporate realization that adults are often at least as drawn to games as children are[17] to post-Cold War diffusion of knowledge from military contractors with a sophisticated understanding of the potential of games for training and learning has led to the rise of so-called serious games, and this, in turn, is causing providers in a variety of arenas to look at games or game-like features as potential vehicles to advance their goals.
For example:
- Google is using a game called the Google Image Labeler to get large numbers of users to help it semantically tag images for more accurate searches;[18]
- Medical researchers are using a game called Fold It to harness humans' puzzle-solving powers in competition with each other to determine the correct structure of proteins;[19]
- Microsoft expects much of its future productivity tools and how people interact with them to be derived from learning it has gained about the game space via Xbox and other offerings.[20]
- More examples?
Convergence of the real and virtual worlds
In some ways functional convergence is a subset of a broader and deeper merging that's also rapidly gaining momentum: the convergence between the real and virtual worlds, which takes a wide variety of forms. For example:
- Sociopolitical integration: In politics and economics, the virtual world is having increasingly profound impacts on the real world, whether making possible the organization of massive cause-related efforts on college campuses[21], the instant organization of civic protests in China[22], the election of a long-shot US presidential candidate[23], the movement of labor within and between countries, to name only a few examples.
- Forces driving further integration: The more closely fitted real and virtual socio-political worlds become, the more profound the impacts become as well, which only encourages innovators to find ways to more tightly integrate and coordinate them. Consider the evolution of new media's involvement in the political process from 2004, when the Internet was viewed almost exclusively as a vehicle for raising money, to 2008 when it became an integral element of organization and persuasion at all levels (with many more opportunities still to be exploited).
- Blended environments: Over the next decade, we can expect virtually the entire geography of the United States to be GPS-tagged with increasing precision, both by companies and institutions and, increasingly by end users/consumers themselves. With GPS-enabled cell phone penetration approaching saturation during the period, virtually every environment and, eventually every environmental detail, will become, in essence, a blend between its physical reality and its virtual informational attributes. Of course, the reverse is also true: the virtual world is becoming increasingly infused with the real.
- Higher order blended environmental features: Beyond simple tagging, we can expect a plethora of location-based games like Torpedo Bay and Swordfish[24]--30% of kids 6-17 already say they're played one or more location-based games on their wireless devices[25]--locative art creations evocative of William Gibson's Spook Country, locations mapped onto other locations (e.g. national parks mapped onto urban environments for kids unlikely ever to visit them to explore), and more.
- Sentient environments: Kevin Kelly recently counted more than 6,000 "species" of technology in his home (the King of England at the turn of the 20th century had only 7,000 objects total).[26] It seems clear that location-aware, context-aware objects-from major appliances to children's building blocks-that can communicate with each other are only going to increase in coming years until we reach a point where, to use the Institute of the Future's term, our environments can be considered, for all practical intent and purpose, sentient, if not to the same extent as we are ourselves.
- Cloud computing: To the extent one views offline computers as part of the real world, it seems inevitable that more and more of the functions these devices perform offline will migrate online until there is, in effect, one machine that all others plug into,[27] an ultimate convergence of a kind, current (legitimate) concerns about privacy and reliability notwithstanding.
- Cloud computing effects: Complete migration to the cloud could, in turn, result in major gains in accessibility, since the high up-front costs of computers (particularly for those whose credit is poor) and key software packages (which have always been the key barriers to entry, not Net access itself)[28] would presumably be replaced by much lower device costs and more manageable monthly software subscription costs. We could also see a variety of interesting applications of the "one machine's" raw processing and other powers as it becomes, in essence, a new type of organism or ecosystem, depending on the scale with which we view it.
Convergence of humans and machines
A third, potentially even deeper convergence, is between humans and the machines we use which, like the real/virtual convergence, could take many forms. Meme theorists like Susan Blackmore would argue that it's already well underway, that just as the replication of memes required an increase in our brain size beyond what our genes required (to the point where gene reproduction--child birth--became uniquely dangerous in humans to both mother and child), temes (techno-memes) are already compelling changes in us to make us more efficient replicators of themselves--the rapidity and facility with which our children develop the ability to use technology (Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiments are a particularly compelling example of this[29]), the growing extent to which we are permanently 'connected' 24/7/365, the burgeoning power and variety of substances we are consuming to stay awake and alert so that we can 'keep up,' and more.[30] Consider also:
- Wearable technologies for health monitoring, communication, and fashion have gone from 'outlandish' concepts in places like MIT's Media Lab to an industry segment robust enough to justify its own international conferences.[31] Meanwhile researchers have moved on to trying to print holograms and even entire functioning computers on pieces of paper.[32] Restaurateurs like Homaro Cantu are already printing out food (and menus that you crumble into your first course).[33]
- This year will see the first toys hit the marketplace that allow children to manipulate virtual or real objects with their thoughts, e.g. Lucas' Force Trainer and Mattel's Mind Flex,[34] while other games already in the field such as Journey to the Wild Divine already integrate biofeedback (such as stress levels) into their environments.
- There has been a profusion of medical implants in the last decade. Now the first robotic cells--respirocytes (robotic red blood cells) are in testing and have already been shown to cure Type I diabetes in rodents. As a side benefit, creators claim that replacing 10% of our RBCs with respirocytes will allow us to sprint for fifteen minutes on a single breath and sit at the bottom of our swimming pools for up to four hours (assuming the need ever arises). Multiple conferences on the next steps for these technologies (white blood cells of various types appear to be the next target) are slated for the coming year.[35]
- Researchers project that many of the devices being first developed for the disabled will have subsequent generations that enable humans in general to do things that were formerly not possible--to see infrared and ultraviolet, for example, or hear bats sing.[36]
- There are already hundreds of medical applications available for the iPhone,[37] and scientists have hacked other phones to use them to do a variety of disease diagnostics.[38]
- MIT's Technology Review recently picked biological machines--biological systems ranging from cells to entire organisms (early work has been with insects) remotely controlled by humans to collect, manipulate, store, and act on information from their environments--as one of their top 10 emerging technologies for 2009. Creators envision applications ranging from tissue or self-repair (e.g. wood furniture that repairs itself) to search and rescue missions.
- Sometime between 2020 and 2040, the combined processing power of all the world's computers is expected to exceed that of all human beings.[39]
Technology optimists foresee a day in the not too distant future when human intelligence will literally be merged with machine intelligence (e.g. via implants), combining the creativity and pattern recognition strengths of humans with the raw processing power, storage, and analytical powers of machines, and each of us will be able switch what we actually see and experience from real world to virtual reality (and back) with a thought.[40] In fact, teme theorists like Blackmore would argue much of this is already happening even without implants or other medical devices. Optimists further believe the potential resource barriers to their vision will be eliminated by nanotechnology just over the horizon that will allow us to create anything we need from inexpensive raw materials.[41]
Leaving aside the dangers of gray goo (i.e. nanotechnology run amok) and the related possibility that we could, in our quest to develop machine intelligence (e.g. using evolutionary programming), create machines and temes that no longer need us to replicate (and therefore have no particular vested interest in a planet habitable for life[42]), there seem to be at least a few shorter-term disconnects in the vision as well. For example, at a time when the healthcare industry is moving en masse to personalized medicine because it has discovered that organs much simpler than the brain--such as the heart--are actually highly individual, it seems a bit strange to tout how simple it is to model different parts of the brain with a computer program as evidence for the facility with which humans and machines could be integrated. More to the point, can abstract computer modeling in an environmental vacuum really project the likely mechanisms and effects of this kind of integration on the most plastic of human organs, the brain, which is a product--in each individual--of a complex combination of genes, an impossibly complex myriad of environmental influences (that tie social scientists in knots), and time? Are we sure that what might be gained via a 'better processor' exceeds what might be lost in the process?
Implications for Informal Science Education
In any event, even if only a fraction of what tech optimists hope for comes to pass, the impact is likely to be profound. The same is true of real world-cyberspace convergence and, to a lesser extent, any further convergence of media functions. Thinking of informal science education, in particular, some of the likely opportunities and implications include: Answers from the group?
References
- ↑ testing
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
- ↑ To be added
The original draft of this article was written by Tom de Boor, Principal Analyst, Grunwald Associates. For the full article on the Future of Informal Science Education as delivered at this conference's kick-off event, please click here.
