and embedded them into Web pages. Netflix reinvented itself as a streaming-video service, followed by Roku, Boxee, AppleTV, and Hulu. The TED Talks and Kahn Academy show the promise of amassing libraries of educational videos. A9’s Block View and Google’s Street View recreated the Aspen Movie Map [ 3] around the world.

An early sign of the convergence of broadcasting and computing was the video game. Today video games are a $10.5 billion-per-year business in the U.S., rivaling the movie industry’s $10.6 billion annual revenue [ 4]. The two industries are now closely intertwined. Studios such as Disney regularly turn films into games. In a similar example, the Harry Potter book series has spawned movies and hundreds of games. At the same time, some movies have adopted aspects of games (for example, Sucker Punch), and an animation genre, Machinima, has emerged using video games to produce movies.

Video games have affected culture more broadly. Gamification— including game play or game principles in applications and services—has become a way to increase user engagement and has spawned articles, books, and conferences.

Publishing + broadcasting.

Shipping atoms costs more than shipping bits. The printing of newspapers, magazines, and academic journals may largely disappear. Last September, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, acknowledged “we will stop printing” as the paper reinvents itself online [ 5, 6]. In May, Amazon reported selling more Kindle books than print books—hardcover and paperback combined [ 7].

RSS has disaggregated publish-
ing and created opportunities for
re-aggregators like Google News
and Popurls, and for attention ana-
lyzers like Flipboard, Pulse, and
Zite. At the same time, thousands
of new voices have sprung up in
blogs, microblogs, and tweets.

Convergence 2.0

The rise of the Internet requires a reassessment of Convergence 1.0. Negroponte developed his model of convergence very early. Personal computers were in their infancy. The Internet was a small government experiment used mainly to exchange mail and files. Nothing like the Web existed.

Negroponte has acknowledged that none of us saw the Web coming. It took a while to see, as Andy Grove later did, that “all companies will be Internet companies, or they will be dead” [ 8]. Or as Tim Misner put it, “All hardware products want to be Web sites” [ 9]. Or that most human services will become networked. Or as Tim O’Reilly observed, “Virtually every application is a network application, relying on remote services to perform its function” [ 10].

Convergence 2.0 recognizes
that interactive multimedia exist
within a networked world and
depend on networked services.
It recognizes that most services
have a social component. And it
recognizes that people are rooted
in the physical world and that
nected to things. Convergence 2.0
integrates interactive multimedia
with Internet-based services, social
networks, and the physical world
(see Figure 2).

September + October 2011