Thomas Alva Edison, perhaps the one person who changed the way we communicate more than anyone else, at one time forecast that conventional educational institutions would be entirely replaced by motion pictures as an educational medium. For years, we were told that computers and communication were converging. Both firms lost big and the supposed convergence, along with all its supposed synergies, never occurred. Today, we are told that computers and television will converge. Computers are an interactive machine used to process words and manipulate, access, and process information.
Television is a passive entertainment medium.
However, television sets will increasingly use computer technology to process the images that they display. And computers use cathode ray tubes for display. Yet the purposes to which computers and television sets are put are entirely different, although the technologies in which they are based are becoming increasingly similar. We are now being told that news and entertainment will converge. Perhaps there is some truth to this in the sense that newspapers, radio, television, and the cinema are all media that can deliver both news and entertainment.