For the last 20 years or so, influenced by the visionary George Gilder, The Cable Gamer has accepted the techno-doctrine of Convergence; the idea that all communications media--the telephone, TV, the computer, newspapers--are Converging into a digital One. That is, one machine to link them all, based on the ubiquitous ones and zeros of bits and bytes, tied together by the www prefix of the URL--Uniform Resource Locator. (That phrase alone communicates the sense of oneness in the new technology.)
Convergence is an an appealing notion, and it has made sense to me, as I saw that digitalization increasingly collapsed the categories of TV, radio, newspapers, and even books. Everything is digitalized, and so everything ends up on your iPod or iPhone--or being Napster-ed and Bit Torrent-ed.
This Convergence process has been calamitous for old media. First newspapers and magazines, and now Convergence is similarly ripping up local TV and book publishing.
But now comes a fellow named Gerry Campbell, who blogs at a site called LuckyRobot.com, to tell us that maybe Convergence is not the final world in the digital era.
Campbell is not saying that digitalization is going to be undone, or that the old media can be saved. What he is saying, in a brilliant piece, "Search is broken--really broken,"is that search might not be the Convergence play that everyone thought it would be.
That is, over the last five years or so, everyone has assumed that search--most likely, Google--would be the engine of Convergence, when everything was revealed to the seeking web surfer. The Google Boys (now both in their late 30s, so maybe we should call them the Google Men) declared that their goal was to "organize all the world's information," and for most of this decade, they sure seemed to be on track for doing so. But now, as Campbell points out, there are whole new realms of information, whole new gushing streams, such as social networking, and Twitter, which seem to be outside the scope of Google. (Indeed, Google has not shown as much upward momentum in the category of news as one might have thought--c'mon guys, buy The New York Times!)
So, Campbell is saying, even though everything is digtitalized, and thus fungible-ized, for various reasons, Google can't get to everything. And so while it might be too strong to say that search is "broken," it is apparent that Google will not "organize all the world's information," as the graphic, from Campbell's site, shows.
