ABSTRACT
Against the long history of the use of tools and technologies, contemporary biotechnology and digital information technology together fall within a third category-meta-technologies. Their shared meta-technological characteristics make it worth examining them side by side because they often share economic, social, cultural, and legal spaces. These shared characteristics will become even more important as digital information technologies and biological organisms merge, for the convergence of technologies that brought computing and communication technologies together is just one in a series of types of convergence of communication with other materials and social processes. There have been four:
1. The convergence of symbolic communication with materials when language was first expressed in writing.
