The Age of Convergence

As information and its connected systems grow to fill the industrial core, borders separating disparate fields will fade. The resulting combinations are already underway. This is the subject. Its aspects are broad and multiple. Informed by the author's experience and investigations in technology and media since the 1990s, with emphasis on recent trends in data, mobile, networks, and the cloud, The Age of Convergence is a summation, through a collection of related essays, of what the author believes to be a major new economic era. An attempt is made to render the abstract in a pragmatic manner and the pragmatic as universally as possible. The aim is to present the material usefully to students and practitioners alike, realizing that these circles overlap, much as they do for the author. From the "Afterword," page 163: Pattern recognition, data visualization, information processing are the recounting of stories. Facebook timelines, Twitter streams, LinkedIn updates, Google searches and results, much like reality TV, are stories, too. Stock charts and analyses, financial ratios and credit ratings, research reports, are variations, commentaries, stories about stories, and so on. Journalistic content and entertainment product, often interchangeable, are stories unabashedly, if previously listed examples are maybe less self-aware. When an entrepreneur pitches a venture capitalist, a story is told much like a filmmaker pitching a studio chief. In turn, investors tell stories to explain the risk that's taken. When we speak about a new era of information, a new economy based on information flow and connectivity, we are speaking about a world of stories. This book contains the story of a pattern that is starting to shape.