As I start reading the book "Convergence Culture, where old and new media collide" by Henry Jenkins, I am getting fascinated with the ideas that the author expresses in the introduction of his book. He gives us a summary of many of the concepts that have been going around for some time now about the use of a single black box that will do everything, and that willl be the entertainment center in our home. I remember hearing and seeing examples of this box from companies like Commodore (Amiga CDTV) and Gateway(All in One Multimedia Center) from the beginning of the 90's, and in recent years from Apple (Mac Mini, Apple TV).I agree with Jenkins that we will continue seeing more and more attempts of this black boxes coming out, but we will never see one that will replace completely the other appliances that we have in our homes, on the contrary we will probably have many of these boxes to use them for the different locations or situations that we have in our daily lives.
Another idea that Jenkins mentions is that the media will never dissapear, but what will change is how it is produced and how we consumed it. An example of this we can see it in the music business: in the 50's you could hear your favorite songs from recordings made on 45's or LP's, in the 70's from tapes, in the 90's from CD's and now from MP3's and the internet.
I am really excited about learning more about these ideas on the next chapters of this book.
Good observation. Jenkins' point was that the manufacturers were/are looking for that one box that will do everything (as you note with your evolution from Amiga to Apple TV), but what ended up happening is that users are consuming media and creating media in unexpected ways.
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