The curse of having been an editor is that you always have a critical eye for language as it is used in daily life. You try to explain that misspellings and bad grammar can be impediments to communication. They cannot always be forgiven.
Take the most common confusion about convergence. Everyone wants to talk about convergence without understanding if they are using the word correctly. The easiest way to explain convergence is that you have two trains racing toward a point where the two tracks intersect. If both trains meet at the point of convergence concurrently, those trains are going to converge. When they converge, it is most likely that both trains will be derailed by the impact.
But that is not what people mean. They are actually referring to a confluence. A confluence is a point where two rivers meet. At a confluence, the two rivers become a bigger river and continue their journey to the sea. This is why when people talk about the convergence of technologies, they are referring to the two technologies working together. They are really talking about a confluence of the technologies.
Probably the largest and most incompetent company in Canada in this regard is Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). The company is involved with a number of technologies that are undergoing a technological confluence. BCE refers to them as their converging technologies. We can hope that, when BCE’s latest technologies come together, it is a confluence and not a train wreck.
The company has taken control of Canada’s largest television network: CTV. The company intends to sell CTV’s content development over the BCE’s wireless cellular network, as well as its satellite television and Internet services. This is a failure of the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in doing its job. It means the Harper Conservative government has allowed BCE to completely disregard the public interest in favour of monopoly practices. It is a complete reversal of what the CRTC was originally intended to do for Canadians.
It means that the CRTC now belongs to the media companies. It serves their interests and not the interests of Canadians.
In the original model, 40 years ago, the radio and television networks were independent entities that provided content to a national network of independent stations that served their individual communities. Technology has changed and so has the model. Today, the national network no longer needs the network affiliates that were its customers. The network goes directly to the consumer.
The original concern was that then strong newspapers would try to own the networks to utilize the synergy of their news gathering strengths. The CRTC was supposed to ensure that Canadians had a variety of opinions and no one business interest could create a monopoly situation. Nobody expected that when the television networks had swallowed their affiliates, they would then start to take control of the country’s print media
The Harper government and its version of the CRTC are a serious failure for Canadians.
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