Aashish Mishra

This is the age of convergence. Previously, separate and independent pieces of technology had come together to create larger and newer equipment that are indeed greater than the sum of their parts.
The field of communication has also not remained untouched and communication technology has also undergone significant convergence over the last years and decades. This convergence, in a scholarly sense, can be taken to signify the coming together of telecommunications, computing, social networking, cloud and other means we use to exchange information with each other. As such, convergence has huge implications for the human society. One such example of this implication is visible in the emergence of smartphones. While they may bear the name “phone”, their functions go well beyond than just allowing people to talk. They are respectable cameras, recorders, GPS device, basically little TVs and computers that we carry in our pockets. Therefore, we can see that convergence in communication has eliminated the need to carry multiple devices for our daily tasks.
However, there is also a flip side to this coin. While convergence has enabled all our necessities to be conveniently fulfilled by one single device, it has also caused an undue dependence of the society on that device. Our lives today revolve around our smartphones; if something were to happen to it, it would cause great turmoil. So, convergence has made and is making human society more dependent on (often unreliable) technological devices.
Convergence of communication technology has also revolutionised data recording. Gone are the days when recording something meant writing or printing it on paper, binding and filing it to be stored in some library or archive. Now, everything is typed, scanned or entered into a device and sent to be stored on the cloud. This data can, in theory, be made accessible to everyone in the world with an internet connection, thus, making data retrieval more efficient. This means that we have instantaneous access to the entire world’s knowledge at our fingertips, limited only by our thoughts. One can see the considerable implications this has in fields like education, research, journalism and data mining.
With convergence, also arises the control paradox for the human society. The driving force behind every single innovation of the human civilisation has been gaining greater control over our lives. Convergence is no different. But the great irony here is that while convergence may have intended tighter control, the opposite has happened in practice. It is now easier than ever for the control of lives to be taken away from us. One only needs to steal our phone or hack our laptop to access our entire life history and then misuse or alter it. We quite truly lose our ‘self’ when we lose our device.
Largely, it would not be wrong to say that convergence of communication technology, today, has ushered in an information society. This society is a great egalitarian one which erases the divides of the old days. One no longer needs immense wealth to buy various TVs, computers, access a cable connection, etc. A modestly priced smartphone with a few freely downloadable apps can do all that and more. Knowledge and information are not only limited to a certain class anymore. Anyone, living in any remote part of the world, can access any information he/she desires in any format through a simple Google search. However, where it erases one divide, it creates another. Today’s bourgeois are those who create and wield information. The new divide is among the information rich and the information poor with the former subjugating the latter in a phenomenon known as digital slavery. Today, it’s not the question of the haves and have-nots but the connected and the unconnected.