Audience

We are the answer: the audience is the key to success in the eyes of big business since, after all, we buy the products and we won't if we don't like them. We are the victims, it could be argued, of corporate brain-washing at the hands of huge companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Apple. 'Old' media is slowly but surely being replaced by 'new' media, more active, more interactive, less linear. Often these big companies do a clever job of playing up to our modern-day insecurities about social class, wealth, and our 'needs'. And of course, if the product becomes successful, it is a fashion, thus more than simply a technology.

We respond to inventions by purchasing and this allows companies to decipher what is popular and what isn't. Questionnaires may be distributed too.

However, spending more and more time playing on games consoles and listening personally to music means consumers are spending less time interacting with friends and family, which has subtle but prominent consequences for us all. Society is changing: some would say from a community-centered society to a fragmented one. Where before, playing cricket or having picnics on the common were leisure (OK, maybe not, but seriously, it did happen once), now it is seen as a good thing for the whole family to settle down to enjoy a TV programme together. Even this is outdated now as each generation of the family has its own niche in NMTs; have you seen the Nintendo DS family adverts??? I think they're unbelievable! How the government can allow such blatantly influential marketing for a clearly detrimental product is beyond me. The family stare into each of their individual screens and talk to each other through the machines, without looking at one another or talking to each other.

Of course, there are the advantages of convergence, e.g. the 'simplicity' of having lots of devices in one, and it's fun to play on these things, but it's probably true that most people are totally unaware of the fact that the driving force behind these NMTs is economy. Also, they appeal mainly to people who have too much money (sorry, who are wealthy) and leave behind the majority of people who are the 'working class'.