What this question is really asking is that have the devices that allow multiple uses made the internet more useful.
What convergence has done, is made the internet more user friendly for audiences and allowed institutions to maximise their profits by producing convergent devices. Eg as a case study look at apple, the iphone, or ipad 2, now have cameras on, so audiences can film or photograph and upload their creations to say flickr or youtube or facebook.
If audiences didn’t have mobile phones with cameras on would audicnes still bother to upload their pictures in a more conventional way, the answer is, yes, but not as much.
Generation Web' - the generation who have grown up knowing only a wired world - will enter adulthood having spent 10,000 hours online. These digital natives thinknothing of uploading their lives and really exploiting the convergent possibilities of devices, X box live, PSP etc, in terms of the phone, many older people complain that they want a mobile phone that simply telephones and that the other apps are irrelevant and a nuisance.
You could expand these examples to the film, music& news industries but in essence , the answer is that convergence has maximised the usefulness of the internet, it would never be obsolete (useless) now, but convergent devices have enabled its massive expansion and the pay off is
Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.
Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.
Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.
So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed
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