CONVERGENCE

I noticed it first when Pratik bought a Pim-Pom lollipop from Uncle ji's dukan. This was a simple and non-threatening dollop of flavoured sugar enclosing a chewing gum, both supported on a thin stick (if you haven't tried the Pim-pom, go do that). This lollipop is testimonial to a whole new wave of societal change that we are at the outset of experiencing. The change that I'm referring to is convergence.

In a layman's language, convergence is the combination of multiple unrelated fields to solve a common purpose. The case of Pimpom can be analysed thus: there are people who like lollipops; and there are people who like chewing gums. If the two products can be combined to give one single product, the target group of customers is simply a little less than the union of the 2 sets of initial customers. Hence, for the manufacturers of Pimpom, the customer base has risen all of a sudden just by placing the gum at the centre of the lollipop.

On a slightly advanced level, convergence shows up with the rise of the Prosumer. Since Adam Smith, economics has always been studied treating the producer and the consumer as separate entities driving the market system. With the onset of the information age (thereby driving the digital revolution and forcing in the cyber world), convergence of the producer and the consumer is starting to show up across various layers of society. In the near future, it will become essential for us to 'produce' a part of what we are to 'consume'. Take the whole concept of a self-service restaurant. A conventional restaurant might make the best noodles in town. But the noodles is not really is the product the restauranter is selling. The restaurant is not in the noodles business; it is in the service business. The guy who makes the noodles and the guy who serves them at the table and gives you the check at the end of the meal are both 'producers' of the service which is being 'consumed' by you and me, the customers.

In a self service restaurant, the definition of service becomes slightly skewed. True, the guy inside still makes the noodles. But the customer is required to walk up to the counter and pick up his order. Effectively, a part of the service production is shifted back to the consumer. As a result the cost that he incur es on the noodles should be lesser than if he were served. Similarly, across every field of the economy today, we see the rise of the prosumer happening. It is only a matter of time before we stop talking about 'production' and 'consumption' as separate terms and start talking of a new converged activity called 'prosumption'. Will supply-demand economics apply to prosumtion? Yes. And no. However, we will need the laws of economics altered to fit this evolving mould.

In academia, our universities run degrees in sciences (BSc), arts (BA), engineering (B.Tech/BE), commerce (B.Com), architecture (B.Arch) and many others. These are field specific. It is expected that an individual completing a B.Com degree will go on to become a banker or a CA and serve his base of clients in that domain. Reading the problem backwards, it is expected that a client(consumer) will go to the banker(producer) for fulfilling his financial services. Or in other words, the consumer is being domain specific and expects the banker to do nothing more than fill out his loan application or manage his assets. But the prosumer of tomorrow is not that domain specific. He would walk up to one single person and expect the latter to fill out his loan application, take his pulse rate and help him find a copy of Don Quixote off the book shelf. This would immediately imply that the latter would have to be educated in multiple disciplines. And this is something that the education system will have to evolve out of need. In the future, we might see a student specialising in accountancy, bio-sciences, literature and cooking - all covered under one degree. We just don't know what we would call such a person. Maybe the degree would be a B.ConS, as in Bachelors in Converging Studies!