The magical religious phrase of the dotcom era (1996-2001) was "media convergence." Somewhat like the New Age movement's harmonic convergence, with a side of Singularity: the sublime moment when TV, music, and homepages would all be united in a single monetizable particle-plus-waveform. The dotcommers famously crashed and burned, mercifully taking their dreams and jargon with them, but like all fanatics, they waited and bided their time in dank cellars (supported by their parents) until suddenly...they were back.
While these, um, curators work on integrating the home video picks of Joe and Jane Sixpack with the youth audience lusts of their children in a family convergence special, the art world has its equivalent of media Satori in high-minded talk of "new productive systems." At institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design, future-minded administrators are seeking to engineer a convergence of the convergences by collapsing the art, architecture, design, and media vizier departments into one uber-department that will guide our audio/visual/textual discourse into the next century (or until the fuel runs out).