Twenty-five years ago this month, two things happened to change the landscape of how we access and experience media: the first PCs took shape and MTV debuted.

Music Television’s breakneck editing rippled through broadcast media. Think of how fast even network news programs move now, with splashy graphics, quick cuts and a loud backbeat. The channel set the tone for a generation (or at least a marketing label for one).

Computers quickly permeated all parts of our lives. Of course, the computers we now live with no longer look like their early brethren. My two-year-old telephone has more computing power than the first PCs, and doesn’t need a tape drive. The PSP my nephew manages to walk and play at the same time takes graphics further than few imagined in the early Reagan era. I see commercials for Internet-enabled refrigerators.

The accelerations of pop culture and computing since the birth of MTV and the PC have set the scene for progressive, new ideas. In computing, witness the speed and vitality with which the Web has evolved. It offers a richness of experience full of video, audio and text, all on the device of our choosing. Its interactivity has touched fields as far-ranging as entertainment and medicine and politics.

Culturally, MySpace enjoys the same space as MTV shortly after its modest debut. Though it fills that space in a different mobbish-mentality way, it owes a debt to its cable TV progenitor. The lines have blurred between MTV, and the culture it represents, and computers, and the platform they offer.

That convergence has its downsides. People find it easy to withdraw from direct social interaction, preferring instead to blog, record video to share on YouTube or link to “friends” on MySpace. Our attention spans change and shorten as we get used to tuning out blinking banner ads, yet seek out short action-packed Web movies featuring the latest, hottest car model. An all-media all-the-time culture also emphasizes consumerism. That can crowd out other, more altruistic, instincts.

The growth and convergence of culture and computing now have an inevitability to them. As we grow into Web space, the braiding of the two becomes tighter. I guess we’ll have to wait 25 years for the hindsight to know whether that intertwining makes us better or worse.