Whose Convergence? When Technology meets Experience

Light, A. (2007) Whose Convergence? When Technology meets Experience, in Proc. Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference, Budapest, Sept 2007

Convergence is most often understood in a technical sense, as different strands of the Information Society come together. But to focus upon this is to draw attention away from the factors that encourage the design of good networked tools. This paper takes an experiential view of how people engage with the things around them and, presenting a case study of an MP3player/phone, offers a different idea of convergence, which prioritises the humans at the centre of the system and the activity spaces they move through.