Translation of Techno Convergence? Expressing Information Bit by Bit : Communications: Thanks to ‘interactive multimedia’ speeding along the ‘information highway,’ the way people read a newspaper, listen to music or talk on the phone will never be the same.

Convergence. Interactive multimedia. Information highway.

The buzzwords seem to be everywhere as communications, entertainment and computer companies chart a united future.

These changes involve lots of companies, new rules, enormous sums of money and the lives of everyone.

But they are driven by the technological equivalent of a cell in a living organism. It is called the bit.

Nearly all expression--the spoken word, music, video and text--can now be turned into combinations of bits. Moreover, it’s getting easier to turn things into bits and send more bits more places.

Bits explain why Bell Atlantic Corp. and Tele-Communications Inc. are combining into one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Bits explain why Viacom International Inc. and QVC Inc. are throwing billions of dollars at Paramount Communications Inc. in the biggest takeover brawl since the 1980s.

A bit is a binary digit, the zeros and ones that represent information in a computer. Information in this form is often described as “digital.”

Just as everything that goes wrong with the body can be traced to a cell, the business world’s excitement over communications and computer companies goes back to the bit.

Here’s why.

As a bit, anything can be sent through a wire or the air, picked up by a device equipped with a computer chip, and then stored and manipulated however a person wants.

That means the differences in the ways that information or entertainment reaches people are gone.

For instance, newspaper writers put their product on paper and send it to your doorstep and movie makers put their art on film and require you to go to a theater. By turning the news or movie into bits, both can come to a TV or phone-like device in your home. The news can be printed if you like and the movie can be stored for viewing at a convenient time.

“People thought of themselves as being in the newspaper business, or movies, music and so on,” said Nicholas Negroponte, director of the media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But they’re really not anymore. They’re in the bit manufacturing business.”

Bit-makers, however, are only part of the picture.

Phone, cable and wireless companies can be thought of as bit shippers. Consumer electronics and computer hardware and software companies are bit manipulators.

The bit business began with the invention of the computer. But it didn’t start edging into everyday life until a decade ago with the onset of compact discs, in which music is turned into bits and read by a laser beam.

Now, bits have revolutionized phone communication. Bit-driven answering machines have arrived. Bit-driven cellular phones, with vastly improved sound, are expected next year.

People in telecommunications have known for decades that eventually the power of computer chips, which decide what bits do, would reshape their industry.

“Most of what you see happening today is a scramble to position for what looks like dramatic growth on something that’s new,” said George Fisher, chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Inc.

“In fact, it is exponentially escalating growth on something that’s been pretty well known in the industry as the nirvana for a long while.”

Partly because of Fisher’s preeminence in the bit business, he was chosen recently to take command of troubled Eastman Kodak Co., which has been searching for ways to aggressively modernize its photographic products.

“The industry mud wrestling is over the evolutionary path,” said John Reed, executive vice president of IT Network, an interactive TV company in Dallas.

An understanding of bits can help sort out this frenzy.

For instance, many of the mega-deals are happening because a company that does one thing with a bit wants to do another.

The reason, said Arno Penzias, vice president of research and development at AT&T; Bell Laboratories, is no one is sure “which part of the value chain is going to provide the value so you try to get by with something in all of them.”

AT&T;’s acquisition of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc., for example, represents the company’s interest in sending bits through the air as well as wires.

Another example is Sony Corp.’s 1989 acquisition of Columbia Pictures Enterprises Inc., which put Sony in the business of making bits, with movies and music, and changing the form of bits, with products like laser disc players.

Technology is making it easier to turn information into bits. Computer keyboards turn written and graphic information into bits. Videos and movies go through advanced chips called digital signal processors and codecs.

Those chips can also squeeze bits to be sent through a wire or the air and be wrung back out again. That’s particularly important with movies, since moving video is represented by many more bits than text, voice or sounds.

“The history of telecommunications has been just putting more sophisticated electronics on the end and putting more bits through the pipe,” said Harry Newton, a New York consultant and author of Newton’s Telecom Dictionary.