What is Technological Convergence?
Technological convergence is the trend of technologies to merge into new technologies that bring together a myriad of media. While historically, technology handled one medium or accomplished one or two tasks, through technological convergence, devices are now able to present and interact with a wide array of media. In the past, for example, each entertainment medium had to be played on a specific device. Video was played on a television by using a video player of some sort, music was played on a tape deck or compact disc player, radio was played on an AM/FM tuner, and video games were played through a console of some sort. Similarly, different communication media used their own technologies. Voice conversation was carried on using a telephone, video communication briefly used high-end video phones, facsimile copies used fax machines, and e-mail used a computer. Technological convergence in the last few years has resulted in devices that not only interact with the media they are primari
Communications technologies have historically been separate a distinct services that operated independently of each other with little or no cross-system integration. In other words, fax, voice, documents, files, video technologies did not talk to each other, at least not easily. It is also well known among technologists that software engineers and telecommunications engineers, for example, practice very different disciplines and rarely coordinated their developments. The concept of convergence is the concept of new technology designs that incorporate voice, streaming media and data development into the same systems. This is easier said than done. It requires much cross-over knowledge, as each of these technologies is a different discipline. Leader’s inventions focused very intentionally on implementing convergence, not just talking about it.
