My boss made a timely comment: “I suggest you keep writing good articles for a specific audience.” I will do that — here the focus will be on communications and computers, the convergence between technology and the way we connect with one another, now and in the future.
To make that more obvious, I changed the title of the entire blog to Convergence. Wikipedia defines convergence as “In the absence of a more specific context, convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state.”
I see this blog AS the context, as the definite point, whether time passes or not (and it always does). I would hope that my approaches, values, opinions, could spark threads of discussion that lead to a common view, a fixed point where we share equilibrium. At least for now.
I’ve had people tell me they think my website (http://www.heavenr.com) is too unfocused — or actually, focused on too many topics. I want to avoid that here, so everything I post will be aimed at convergence … or one of the previously-stated converging interests. Thus it falls into the mathematical definition of convergence: “to claim the existence of a limit.”
Since this blog purports to be about computers, the computer definition of convergence is “a means of modelling [sic] the tendency for genetic characteristics of populations to stabilize over time.” At least that’s what Wikipedia says about evolutionary computing — and that’s exactly what I want this to be about. Not stability, per se, but about the tendency for characteristics to stabilize, or converge. Or evolve.
And Wikipedia (gotta love it) says convergence in a social or language sense is “the blending of two languages that are perceived as having equal social status” — in this case the languages of communications and computing. As far as I’m concerned, they are certainly equal; I can’t do one without the other.
By the way, I include in the term communications both mass and personal. Mass because I want the message to have a long … perhaps limitless … reach to all parts of the Internet and the globe, and personal because at the point where and when my fingers touch the keyboard, it’s just me talking to myself. If this works, if someone (you maybe?) reads and listens, and maybe responds, I’ll call it a success. On the other hand, if I simply succeed in relieving myself of things I want to say (or my socially-acceptable demons), I’ll be happy. I’ve banged my gong, tooted my horn, put on my funny hat, and called attention to myself as well as I know how.
My former boss (Life is Beautiful) also said “I am not aware of any quick and easy way to get attention … It took two years for me to get 5,000-10,000 pageviews/day. The average pageview/day in the first year was less than 1,000.” Pageviews, another convergence term (generally assuming one page equals one reader, except at my house where people point at the screen and say with excitement “hey, look at this”). Man, this blogging thing is rich, fertile ground.
