Reading Response 2- Rob Weidner

I particularly really enjoyed this reading because it was very applicable to my education here at DePauw. I am a media fellows student and we talk a lot about this idea of convergence between the media. Yet in practice here at DePauw, there is little to no convergence at all that occurs. The three main student media outlets on campus are very segregated and there is a ton of unhealthy competition amongst them. This was the first article that I have ever read that provided an alternative to the typical "convergence" ideas. Instead of simply stating that different media outlets need to work together to become one or that one medium needs to be now deliver via other techniques is overstated and I have yet to read an article that provides alternative methods to convergence like this article.

One quote that resonated with me was "convergence is a process, not an endpoint". Whenever I have had brainstorming meetings about how the media outlets on campus can converge we always were talking with an end goal in mind. We were never able to really describe what this end goal was either. Just that we all wanted to "converge" with one and other.

One criticism of this article that I had was near the beginning when the author talks about his difficulty getting a cell phone that was just a phone. He claims that it is nearly impossible to just a phone nowadays but if you travel to other countries outside of the states you might find that statement to be incorrect. I was in South Africa and Japan within the last 6 months and in both countries, one I would consider a developing country (South Africa) and another that I would certainly consider developed (Japan) both had simple cell phones that were very popular among its citizens. Pay as you go is very prevalent in Africa with basic cell phones and in Japan you see a lot of basic flip phones in the hands of both business people and teenagers.

The first article I found was dealing with convergence in the work place and how it is now built into business models as an overall strategy. http://chiefmarketer.com/archive/diverging-convergence
The second article deals with a study on basic smartphone vs "dumbphone" stats. http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/16/technology/smartphones/index.htm which I would consider a somewhat out of date article being that it was written in May of 2012 and smartphone popularity is growing exponentially.