The rise of the movable type printing press – “the tyrant’s foe and the people’s friend” – curiously coincided with the fall of slavery, and technological progress continues to change politics, from Antiwar.com to Move On’s national video parties. The cutting edge now is the video-gaming industry.
“[Sony] … has just launched the PSX, a home-entertainment device that combines a PlayStation 2 with a DVD recorder, a hard-disk based video recorder, satellite and analogue TV tuners, and photo-album and music playback features. As well as cutting down on spaghetti-like wiring behind the TV, this jack-of-all-trades is the first example of Sony’s new strategy to combine its games consoles with other consumer-electronics devices. By throwing in PlayStation 2 functionality with other devices at a small premium—made easier by Sony’s recent cramming of a PlayStation 2 on to a single chip—it hopes to broaden the market and appeal to people who would not normally dream of buying a stand-alone games console. ‘Once they get it down to a single chip, then economies of scale come in, and the potential for integrated devices becomes very real,’ says Nick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting.”
Where it stops no one knows.