Convergence-speak focuses on the melding of qualities of television, computers, and the telephone. Historically, the tendency in this conversation is to take for granted that adding computers to television just gives us more TV with a better remote control, or that telephones, computers, and TV combined means videoconferencing. But I'm convinced that we need to have a better understanding of how we use each of these different technologies before we can envision what a useful convergence can and should be. I think, for instance, that we overlook the phone. Television, movies, and print are all media that demand our direct attention.
Computers are so powerful, so transformative, and still so new that they stand out.
But the telephone has become so invisibly, powerfully utilitarian that we barely think about it anymore, and that's an attribute that is worth understanding when building good Web apps. It's useful to think about each of these technologies in its relationship to time and our subjective experience of it. When we watch TV, we have to synchronize our time with the time of all of the available channels so that we can tap into the stream of programming. When we find something we want to watch, we allow ourselves to be immersed in the flowing current that the program provides. Computers are nothing like TVs.