My favorite radio show is WNYC’s On The Media with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. It is great, because they just don’t report on the news: they report about the news, why something is or isn’t news, and how different media work, interrelate, and evolve. I listen via podcast.
In last week’s segment about the future of telecommunications, guest Clay Shirkey had this to say about the (lack of) convergence of devices or screens:
CLAY SHIRKY: No, that’s right, both the number and proximity of chips around us is continuing to grow. I mean, the whole conversation about digital convergence and we’d all have one device, do you know anybody who owns one device? I mean, it was clear that the devices were coming together, but they weren’t converging, they were mating. Right? And there were lots more of them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I’ve always been a believer in the one-screen theory.
CLAY SHIRKY: Do you know anybody who has fewer screens now than they used to? I mean, I do an exercise with my students at the beginning of class where we take every CPU in the room and we just pile it up on a table, every computer, every noise-canceling headphone, every digital watch, every iPad, every phone. And it is a stack of technology, layers deep.
And I point out to people that in the developed world, we are living in a CPUs-per-person world, and try to get them to realize that in the developing world, the people for whom we are trying to make appropriate technology, they are in a people-per-CPU world.
But I think the CPUs-per-person curve is going to continue to rise in the west for the foreseeable future.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That sounds horrible. I mean, just carrying around a huge bag of a bunch of a little things?
[OVERTALK]
CLAY SHIRKY: The things get smaller and smaller all the time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
CLAY SHIRKY: Eventually they’re going to go into the back of your neck and you won’t notice.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’re just going to wear them all, and that-
[BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CLAY SHIRKY: Wearing them is the second-to-last step. Embedding them is the last step.
So something about this strikes me as very true. I used to count myself lucky to have a computer. Then I got a laptop, then a phone, then a smartphone, and soon I will have another magical category of device. I think Shirky is right that the direction of the business is NOT convergence. Maybe I used to think that Apple’s iPhone was a step in that direction, but actually it relies on a computer, and the iPad is the same way. And there are tons of companies making small niche devices.
This podcast comes from America. In Japan, a lot of people use their cell phone for everything, but a lot of people own more than one cell phone! They will buy one for each carrier so they can talk to different friends. Or, they’ll but a Japanese phone to use Mixi with, and an iPhone to use all its other apps with (that’s actually just an insane problem with Mixi, IMHO). So in Japan the particulars are different but the story is the same: that people are buying more microchips, not fewer.