Convergent Reality as a phenomenon, touches on three of the main activities in my professional life. As a University Teacher at Aalto University, I am looking at technologies that our students are working with, or will work with in the future. Our students need to understand the technologies and societal implications related to CR. As a researcher in management and organization, I am looking at what is being negotiated as the phenomenon occurs to us. What is it that is being organized and perhaps more importantly, who is the organizer when we have an actual and virtual self (selves). Lastly, as a communications trainer – I wonder how CR will affect my customers’ attempts to communicate in a disembodied, or multi-bodied experience.
I met Dominique Moralez in the Autumn of 2022 when I gave a training to Aalto's Digital Creatives. Speaking afterwards, I felt that there is something considerably larger happening in the CR space than I had understood. I wanted to investigate!
In retrospect, the first whispers of what would become convergent reality, for me, were heard already in my youth. I played a text-based adventure on our very first computer in 1982. The magic was two-fold: co-creation with the authors through making choices, and my own creation of images in my imagination based on green text on a black TV screen. The technology was not greater than a book at the time, but it began a life-time love of virtual worlds that require actual people to do something.
In teaching young adults, particularly those who have grown up with digital media in their hands, we need to engage with our students not only in the actual space of Espoo or Helsinki, but also in the digital spaces in which they spend a great deal of their time. I don’t mean online learning. I mean their lives are developing in an already converged reality – fully physical and fully digital in some respects. To maintain a healthy and just society, we need to teach what it is to be human, compassionate, and critical, as new forms of experiencing our world(s) arise.
I am not sure what the solution is, but being near the phenomenon and researching what narratives emerge over time, I hope we can use the space to create a more just or fair approach to our fellow human beings. CR, as a philosophical stance, is not well defined in management studies and so there is room for dialogue about what we want this convergence to be.
The ability to create new and as-yet-unseen realities through experiences that have previously not been possible to have, even incomplete and short-term as they may be, is a catalyst for activity, innovation, and change. It is not an opportunity that lays waiting to be discovered but rather an opportunity that comes into being through dialogue and narratives.
Convergent Reality is an expression that posits a permanent present space and time, constantly unfolding, where there is a coming-together of an actual world(s) and virtual worlds. In this, there is an objective and a subjective Self to whom and with whom convergent reality emerges.
Published by Convergent Reality (CR) on 29 May 2023