A World of Digital Gypsies: Defining a New Communication
Medium
Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report may take place in
2054, but the futuristic world he constructed is built from
modern experience. A think-tank of experts from fields as
diverse as Advertising, Architecture, and the Military
gathered during the film's pre-production to construct a
plausible future. The end result is a world of
communicative technologies, where interaction is personal
and informative. Where mass communication can speak with a
personal message. Interpersonal and Mass Communication
evolve in the digital world to create a third medium ' The
New Medium.
Can you recall the first time digital communication
startled you with a personal suggestion? Your first
Amazon.com recommendation, or a television show TIVO
recorded for you, just because it thought you might enjoy
it?
No doubt you sat for a moment pondering whether mass media
had made you so mainstream that broadcasters could paint
your personality with one broad stroke of their brush.
More importantly, I can safely bet you wondered as well,
just how your own company could learn to turn mass
communication into a personal experience, reaching a broad
audience with refined messages.
Someone was manufacturing crystal balls, and like every
great entrepreneur and businessman you immediately wanted a
coveted peak at the answer floating inside amid swirls of
smoke, pixie dust, and strings of binary code.
The Medium has become A Medium?
The world of the 21st Century is not full of "squares."
Quite the contrary, we live in a vibrant community of
unique individuals. Reaching out and connecting with a
broad audience today requires the sophisticated delivery of
your message in countless variations. The "crystal ball"
is not magic; it is the efforts of a talented and dedicated
pool of marketing managers at defining the breadth of their
client base and coming to an understanding of how to adapt
their message and pitch to each group. Using a computer
database, TIVO and Amazon.com are successfully able to
deliver a custom pitch to their clients. The computer is
no longer just a sales tool; it's a salesman!
The classification of Communication Mediums is important
step in selecting the medium appropriate to your project.
Interpersonal Media is a format for person-to-person
communication. This type of communication is specific and
personal, as it is direct correspondence between a known
sender and receiver. Examples include letters, e-mail, the
telephone, and instant messaging. Mass Media is a format
for person-to-public communication. Mass Media aims to
send a message to a vast audience, reaching larges numbers
with a single communicative stroke. Public oration, books,
television, film, radio and Youtube are all prime examples
of Mass Media.
In comparison, New Media builds upon the strength of these
two Mediums by delivering personalized person-to-public
communication. Through a defined client base,
individualized marketing materials, and a refined method
for sorting users, New Media can deliver a higher impact
message to consumers while still benefiting from the
reduced overhead of Mass Media. As you might have already
surmised, the defining difference between the mediums is
necessarily technological: both Interpersonal and Mass
Media have existed since man's first cognitive exchange.
New Media, however, is born of the digital age, a byproduct
of the digital database.
New Media and Moving Images
As a scholar and contributor to the world of film and
computer science, I am thrilled by the collision of the two
worlds. Most recently the world of film has been
revolutionized by non-linear, digital editing systems. On
the flipside, the Internet has reached a highly publicized
benchmark, dubbed "Web 2.0," through the introduction of
virtual broadcast spaces, such as Youtube, which rely on
user-generated content.
This history runs back further than most would guess, in
fact, film and computers have been connected since the day
the first digital computer ran a successful calculation!
Like every great computer entrepreneur, German engineer
Konrad Zuse built the world's first digital computer in his
parent's living room in 1936. This hulking contraption of
tubes drove calculations and stored the results. Like the
computers which would dominate the next few decade, input
and output came in the form of punched holes representing
binary digits. However, unlike the future machines, Zuse's
ran on a curious media: discarded 35mm film prints!
The creation of New Media brings Zuse's story full-circle
as we now see the potential for film and video content to
rely upon digital computers in order to communicate. Of
course we see this reliance in many of the new digital
media formats such as online media players, ipods, DVDs,
etc; however, these examples of new Mass Communications do
not take full advantage of the digital computer's ability
to analyze, interpret, and deliver specialized content.
Through the incorporation of database structures in a
communication delivery network, Mass Communication content
can be created and appropriately distributed. It shouldn't
be a stretch of the imagination by this point to envision
your current marketing campaign reaching a new level of
personalization through a multimedia CD-ROM or web
application. With New Media you are encouraged to leave
the broad paint brush behind, and begin to reach out to
more refined divisions in your client base, touching each
on a much richer level than you would at the traditional
broad level. What's even greater is the same act that lets
you analyze your client will let you establish a
communication with them...this is the personal side. With
digital video formats hitting new performance peaks,
personalized, media rich communication is primed to be the
next leap.
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Metro Productions is a full-service video and multimedia
production company headquartered in Virginia. Metro
Productions provides clients with the ability to realize
the benefits of high-end visual media products for the
purpose of sales, marketing, recruitment and training.
Delivery mediums for these productions include DVD,
streaming media and broadcast quality High Definition
applications.
http://www.metro-productions.com
