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Monday, January 23, 2006 |
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Vin Crosbie, What is New Media? |
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Reading through Vin Crosbie's article, "What is New Media?" I came across this paragraph:
Imagine that when a person visits a newspaper Web site, he sees not just the bulletins and major stories that he wouldn't have known to request information about but sees the rest of that edition customized to his own unique needs and interests. Rather than every reader seeing the same edition, each reader sees an edition that has simultaneously been individualized to his interest and generalized to his needs.
Which reminds me of Epic 2014, a mock timeline of the creation of the most empowering and dangerous new media technology I can personally imagine. Epic raised some of the questions that woke me from my "blogging is the future of news" slumber I was in after the blogger triumph in the early Dean campaign days.
While we're looking at Vin Crosbie, there's a few points in his essay I have issues with. Granted that this was written in 1998, which is an ice age in new media time, so we won't hold Crosbie responsible unless he wants to be.
This is it:
No longer must anyone who wants at once to communicate [a] message to a mass of people be unable to individualized [sic] totally the content of that message for each recipient.
I don't know if he is thinking in the dramatically long term, but the fact is that the above statement is only true if we accept that the "individual" is really no more than a collection of data that can place you within the confines of a demographic. Ie, I am a college student, therefore I must love pizza (true) and the American Pie series (false). I don't accept that as anything besides targeting channels of potential viewers, as in the broadcasting model: throw a net over a particular segment of the spectrum (MTV, for example) and you will catch a lot of very eager fish (college kids) but you will have to throw some back. As the dolphin trapped in the tuna net most of the time, I guess I don't like this particular point because it seems to assume the perspective of the side that wants to communicate their message/brand/v1agr4 on an individual basis, not the perspective of a person who wants to receive or construct communications on an individual basis.
It undermines the entire notion of bottom up authenticity and the generative qualities that separate new media from other, old testament media. I wish I would stop seeing new media articles that try to understand it from a hierarchical perspective, and more that would analyze the best uses of a grassroots medium for grassroots uses. Everyone wants to look at the trees and no one wants to look at the soil.
Posted by
Eryk @
11:20 AM
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