A Preface to Convergence

Thanks to my mate Mauricio, I got to write the preface to the Brazilian Edition of Convergence Culture, which was pretty awesome.

It's a bit long for a blog post so I've turned into a paper thing with pictures and everything.

It begins thus [with a quote I probably won't get away with using ever again]:

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" - William Gibson

When the world changed slowly, looking into the future was a mystic art, shrouded in secrecy, extracted from entrails, and almost always erroneous.

But today the world is changing very fast indeed. As William Gibson has observed many times, to see how the world will be soon we need only look at those who have already embraced the future: the early adopters.

No one understands the early adopters of convergence culture better than Henry Jenkins.

And it goes on from there. You can download the whole thing here.

[Mini Update: Someone has put it up on Scribd too.]

There is one other bit I thought I would pull out for those of you who don't read long form anymore - it comes up in reference to the fact that Henry found me because I had been blogging about him - that seems to increasingly describe how conversations begin online:

On the Internet, conversations about you eventually find their way to you.