Media is simply the space through which information passes. As information technology has created new ways for people to communicate and pass on information, "new media" have appeared; new spaces which will shape the messages that are passed on.

One definition of New Media is ‘where technology meets communication.’

Another is ‘digital media.’

Yet another is ‘interactive media.’

All point towards the world of information technology and the ability for many-to-many communication; for the audience to be able to speak back to the producers or broadcasters, and enter into a dialogue or conversation.

My own generation may have memories of casting a critical eye over pictures sent into "The Gallery" in Tony Hart’s Hartbeat (now in an online form!), or remember the Saturday morning television TV jingles to encourage viewers to phone in to ask guests questions, play games and enter competitions (at a time when they were simply London numbers, rather than premium-rate lines.) So, is the new idea of "interactive media" fundamentally different to television show’s competitions, phone-ins and Points of View’s letters?

Well, yes.

The nature of TV, newspapers, magazines, cinema and "traditional media" in general is that it’s all built around the idea of sending a message out to the public/audience/consumers. Sure, amember of the audience can speak on the phone, or have their drawings shown to the country, but you can’t get a situation where every member of the TV audience can see their own content.

Digital television is finding ways to interact with a broadcast- a choice of commentators for a sports event, with playercam to take control of the coverage and chatrooms to talk about it yourself. No need to worry about phone rates (and fake callers)- just press a button on the remote control and have your own say.

The internet (which most digital media is in some way connected to) is the first many-to-many mass medium in the history of the human race, and the human race is still in the early stages of getting to grips with exactly what it is, how it works and how best to unlock it’s potential.

In other words, there’s no more need for fake audiences in a TV studio filled with mirrors to create the illusion that it’s more crowded than it actually is. There’s a whole new form of crowd noise to replace the prerecorded TV audiences.

Old "New Media"

In the past, whenever a new medium has been created it has always taken time for it to develop it’s potential. First, people use it in a way that they are already familiar with— the same way that they use existing media. Then they experiment with new things that can be done with it. Eventually, the new medium becomes established in it’s own right.

For example, when the printing press was created it’s immediate impact was in making it easier, cheaper and faster to copy information. A bible that had to be hand written could now be printed with a fraction of the time and energy. However, the consequences of this went far beyond it being easier to make a bible; all written texts easier to make and easier to get hold of, so literacy levels increased as more people had the opportunity to learn to read. Before the age of the printing press, news and other information had to be passed on through public assemblies and speeches; once literacy had been improved by the availability of texts, it was possible to take stories or information away, to be consumed at the individual’s place and time of choosing. The idea (if not the terminology) of "Timeshifting" and "Spaceshifting" was born.

As Marshall McLuhan has written about extensively, the relative importance of the senses had changed; news and stories were seen, rather than heard. The importance of voice, intonation and timing were diminished, and the importance of the actual words (now that’s all that were being passed on) increased. No longer did everyone have to go to church to hear the news, when they could take the news home with them.

Around 1450, Gutenberg’s printing press was most likely in operation. In 1517- Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was posted, and within months, printed copies were distributed across Europe- a major factor in the reformation. In 1660, the Royal Society was officially founded, with the motto "On the words of no one" ("Nullius in Verba"), signifying a commitment to establishing the truth of scientific matters through experiment rather than through citation of authority.

More recently, when television was invented, radio was already an established medium. So television was treated in the same way as radio- a presenter would sit down in a studio and read the news, only with a static camera pointing at them, sitting still in a chair, reading pretty much the same news that was read out on the radio. It took time for the medium to develop, and for producers to exploit the fact that the presenter didn’t need to be in the studio— they could go out and actually show the news from where it was happening; outside the Houses of Parliament or 10 Downing street. (Obviously, this also depended on the development of the technology; for cameras to get smaller, lighter, and batteries to improve.)

The Impact of New Media

So where are we with "New Media"; the internet, digital TV and radio, mobile phones and iPods, and whatever other devices that we can hardly imagine now, but won’t be able to imagine life without in ten years time?

So far, we’ve seen the initial stages, where it was seen as a new version of print. Online newspapers or magazines, catalogues and brochures; the early Web was much like a catalogue without the paper. Online advertising, as a result, mirrored print advertising; it’s easy to see the parallels between the standard advertising columns in a newspaper page and the clickable adverts around the sides of a web page, or the pop-up windows and the leaflets that fall from the pages of a magazine.

More recently, we’ve seen the explosion of broadband; with more bandwidth available, video has become a viable option. Suddenly, it seems that the internet isn’t the new Print any more; it’s the new TV. So, like they do with TV, advertisers have replaced static adverts with video clips and animations- even sound effects.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how the internet simply isn’t capable of delivering a real-time, national broadcast event like a world cup final or even a Christmas soap opera special in the way that existing media can. If it ever does catch up with TV and is able to broadcast high definition video to a nation, will it provide an alternative that will kill off television? Or will it just be a different way of delivering exactly the same content?

You could argue that we haven’t yet seen anything truly new in terms of advertising on the internet, and that the "real" innovation must still be around the corner. But perhaps it’s been there all along— instead of looking at how advertisers can buy a part of someone’s website to try to push a message across, simply look at their own brand’s websites.

So, once we’ve all figured out how best to use the internet- from customers and consumers through to advertisers, producers (hell, why not even governments?), what is going to be the longer lasting impact of the internet and digital media?

One possibility lies in the nature of the information which can now be transmitted cheaply and quickly. Perhaps the internet and increasingly advanced technologies will mark the end of the written word as the dominant method of communication and a return to the pre-Gutenberg art of storytelling, as video and audio become feasible alternatives to written texts, and letters and emails are replaced by podcasts or YouTube clips. I would imagine that it’s quicker for most people to record a short message on a webcam than to type an email saying the same thing, but whether it’s better probably depends on the nature of the message and it’s audience; what sort of effect being able to hear the tone of your voice would make to how it’s received.

Although an interesting idea, I think that it’s very unlikely to actually happen; just looking at the popularity of SMS messages and MSN messager, it seems that less is more when it comes to communication; people would still prefer to paint their own pictures; to tell people about where they are than just show them their surroundings. (Besides, if communication technologies became obsolete when
something "better" came along, then why would people listen to the
radio after TV was invented?)

Another possibility (and one which to me seems far more likely to happen) is in what’s currently labelled "Web 2.0"; blogs, social networking and user generated content, where the information uploaded is just as important as what’s downloaded. The reason I put so much importance on this is that the one feature of the internet that distinguishes it from television, radio, newspapers and all the other mass media that have come before is that it’s a two-way line of communication; "consumers" aren’t passive receivers of a stream of information, limited in their choice to a selection of television channels, radio stations or newspaper titles. Now they can be their own editors, choosing the sections of the news that they are interested in, selecting their preferred sources. They can even be their own journalists, writing their own editorials as blog posts or comments, or messages on social networking sites, or be their own directors, uploading their own videos to YouTube— even their own paparazzi, taking photos of celebrities they pass in the street with their mobile phone cameras and uploading them to the website of their choice.

Another more recent trend (one which isn’t necessarily related to "new media", but more with the increasing volume of media consumption) is the multitasking consumer, and the idea of "continuous partial attention". While someone may be primarily surfing the internet, playing a computer game or reading a newspaper, they might also have a TV on in the background which they are monitoring, ready to switch their attention to it if something interesting catches their eye. (Not necessarily a TV— it might be a radio, or an eye on an email inbox or MSN messager window, or watching out for a mobile phone alert.) Asking for a minute of someone’s time isn’t much— but asking for 60 seconds, continous and with their undiverted attention is becoming an increasingly large demand. If visitors to a website are then being presented with distracting adverts on the page to further add to the barrage of information they are trying to simultaneously process, then the actual attention that they are going to give to an advert is likely to be minimal— unless it’s something that they choose to give their attention to.

One interesting trend in online advertising that doesn’t really follow in the way it does with traditional media is that advertising is seen as directly supporting the website. Because users don’t usually pay to look at a website (in the way that we pay to read magazines or most newspapers), and running costs aren’t on the same scale, the connection between advertisers money and the work done by website owners is much more visible and apparent to the users. This might be a reason behind the fact that 18-34 year olds report being much more receptive to advertising on User Generated Content sites- because they see the advertisers as funding the service that the site provides them.

Same content + Different media => Different reactions

It’s not just the way we process media that’s changing. Technological advances mean that the media itself is also transforming. Is there a difference between watching a TV show in the living room, and watching the same show at a different time- or a different place? The obvious differences come from our surroundings— as anyone who has missed a bus or train stop while engrossed in a portable video or handheld game will know. But there’s also a difference in the media itself.

It’s clear that the same content will affect people differently when shown it in different ways. For example, there is a clear difference in the experiences of reading a novel, listening to a novel as an audiobook and watching a film or television adaptation of the novel. While it’s still (usually) the same story, apart from the more obvious aspects that while reading a novel allows the reader to create their own mental picture of the locations and characters while a film or TV adaptation creates the visual imagery on the audiences’ behalf, there are other more subtle factors that also change the way we process the different media.

Similarly, the experience of watching video on a mobile device or a computer at a desk is fundamentally different to watching it on a TV at home.

The printing press transformed the way we told each other news and stories- from something we were told by other people into something that we took in on our own, at our own pace and timing rather than those of whoever was passing on the information.

While authors and directors alike can play with the portrayal of time and general pacing of a story, a reader is more in control of the speed that a story proceeds; whether reading more quickly through an exciting or action packed passage, or the slower pacing of a more dialogue-intensive chapter. (Of course, saying that the reader is entirely in control of the speed and pacing of a novel would be to do a tremendous disservice to the skills of a writer; when Stephen Fry can criticise an author, saying that he is a "writer of absolutely zero interest, insight, wit, understanding or ability" based on no more than the first word of a novel, the importance of every single word becomes apparent.)

With the Fordham Experiment in 1970, Eric McCluhan set out to illustrate the more subtle differences between the perceptions of media more clearly, showing how similar audiences will respond differently to exactly the same content when presented it in different ways. Two groups, after watching the same piece of film when shown it as either a film-style projection from behind the audience or a projection from behind (to create a television-like appearance) give significantly differring reactions.

The researchers concluded that the ‘light on’ (film-style projection) subjects exhibited a sensory shift characterized by a drop in visual sense and an increase in tactile sense; the number of comments on specific scenes or cinematic techniques dropped, while comments on a sense of involvement and a loss of time increased with "light-through" (TV- style) projection.

Whether this is because of the way our senses process the information or due to the cultural differences to the way we perceive or preconceive television and cinema as different media is difficult to say, but the indication is that there is certainly a difference in the way that we process the same information when it’s presented in different formats. I think that’s something worth bearing in mind at a stage where the approach to the internet seems to have shifted from "digital print" to "digital television", and still on it’s way to being a genuinely new medium.

Handing control to the consumer

Charlie Brooker has been credited with the observation that when internet comedy hits television, it immediately stops being funny.

When a programme is broadcast on the television or radio, the vast majority of the audience will listen to it at the same time—the moment determined by the broadcaster. For internet use, on the other hand, the consumer is much more in control; the fact that content is being delivered rather than broadcast obviously lends itself more readily towards time-shifted or space-shifted consumer behaviour. When you’ve chosen your search engine, your search terms, which of the results to click on, and which page on the site you land at to look at (and at the time that you feel like looking at it), there’s a personal connection that goes beyond your choice of TV channels or shows, or which is your favourite national newspaper.

Perhaps there’s something in the nature of a medium so fragmented, yet so interacitve and immediate that makes it feel somehow personal when it’s exposed on television to the masses; in the way we would react differently to seeing the same story when it involves a complete stranger, compared to when it involves someone we know?

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website