Converging the Converging
Love it or hate it but converging is part of human's way of advancing. First we came up with the telephone (which was the advancement of the MOS code). When telephone's first looked like this...
It took about half a minute to dial a telephone number and it was huge with crappy sound quality. Then it got better when it became the house phone..
This was more convenient. We could push in the numbers fast and the sound quality was better. Now this is when we started to think... Can we put stuff together with the phone? Hell yeah we can! Remember the time when caller id's were seperate from the phone? We placed it together sonner or later but did it affect the performance of the caller id? Nope... Still functioned the same.. Then phones started looking like this...
This was the first product of convergence in telephones. Convenient and compact compared to having a caller id machine connected externally. The idea of a caller id phone probably came from the thought of combining the pager and the house phone. As we move on we get to the GI Joe phone aka Da Ah Long.
From there we started using radio waves and we developed the cell phone. The cell phone evolved over the years like below...
Only recently have we stepped up the speed of advancement and converged multiple devices into a cell phone. The current cell phones are able to play videos and music, FM- AM radio, surf the internet, taking of pictures, video and sound recording, text and multi-media messaging and games! And that's excluding the other functions like calender and alarms etc. We don't usually speak of these functions anymore because it has become a standard in all cell phones!I realised something about how humans advance technology. If you think about it... We would always come out with something compact then combine it with something. Like the digital camera for example.
When it first came out it looked like the sun gun we use while filming! It was huge! And now it is small enough to combine with a cell phone. Convergence is a way humans try to make things more convenient. Well if you really thin about it I feel now we have so much lesser things to carry. Imagine if you broke apart all the functions of our cell phones and carried them in your bag. You'd have a paper calender, an alarm clock, a digital camera, a video camera, a mp3 player, a microphone, a radio, a game boy, a laptop, phone book, envelops with pens and stamps and a phone. If I had to carry them all I'd rather carry my house with me. But now with the power of technology and convergence, we are able to carry all that in our tiny little pocket.I'd say cheers to convergence!
-elf
posted by elf @ 9:54 PM
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