Jim
Macnamara"s "Measuring
Up"
Welcome to a new age where media are software and the audiences
are the networks.
I don't
know about you but, as fascinated as I am with media developments,
I am fed up with hearing
the term "new media." And I am not too enamored
with "social
media" either.
What's
So New About New Media?
Why?
First, because many of the media that we are talking about are
increasingly not new. OK, so Web 2.0
has upped
the
ante with interactivity and participation, but newsgroup
chat rooms celebrate their 30th anniversary next year, having been
conceived by
Duke University
graduate students Tom Trucott and Jim Ellis in 1979. The
term
"Weblog" was created in 1997 and bloggers have been blogging
for a decade. Google
is into its second decade, celebrating its 10th anniversary
as a company in 2008, while MySpace will celebrate its 10th anniversary
next year.
Even YouTube and FaceBook are three and four years old respectively
and, with hundreds of millions of users between them, are hardly
new.
Apart
from being increasingly inaccurate, the term "new media" leads
us to an inevitable terminology trap when the next wave of media
developments arrive. Web 3.0 is already under construction and new
hybrid forms of
media are evolving – what Roger Fidler calls "mediamorphosis."
Rather than a choice between "old" or "traditional" and "new" media,
which suggests a simple two-horse race, we are living through a period
of ongoing media and communications change.
What's
So Social About Social Media?
"Social
media" is also a problematic term. As much as social networking has
wide interpretations and social network mapping is all the rage,
"social
media" suggests to most that these media are primarily used for
chat and gossip, friendship, dating, etcetera. It is this confusion
that is causing many businesses to ignore these media or underestimate
them.
In reality, so-called social networking utilities and social media
are making and breaking brands and products every day, building and
destroying
political careers, and shaping corporate reputations. They are used
for civic and political engagement, research, job searching, marketing,
shopping,
knowledge sharing, and a host of other purposes.
While
the U.S. progresses through its primaries in preparation for the
November 2008 Presidential election, Australian had a national election
in late 2007 which was widely dubbed "the YouTube election," and
resulted in a new government. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd,
and his party were elected in a landmark campaign spearheaded by
Kevin07,
a Web-based strategy which extensively used MySpace, blogs, YouTube
and other so-called social media. Even though many conservative politicians
clung to traditional media advertising -- particularly those who
lost the election -- Web 2.0 type media were used for political
communication and civic engagement by a large number of both politicians
and interest groups.
The U.S.
Presidential race is also seeing Web 2.0 media used at an unprecedented
level -- even more than in the 2004 election which was described
as a critical turning point in media use for political
electioneering. (See, for instance, this article, previously in The
Measurement Standard.)The term "social media" fails to reflect the
serious and substantial communication
that is
flowing
through
these channels.
To take
the point further, a few hours of research will show that many of
the so-called social media are also downright anti-social. Political
spoofs and parodies that ridicule, mash-ups of children's nursery
rhymes with lyrics replaced by obscenities, and various types of
pornography, racism, and other abuses are features and challenges
of the Internet
and the new forms and genre of media that it facilitates.
What's
In a Name?
So what
do we call emerging media forms and genre? And is it important what
we call them? I suggest it is because our way of describing things
frames our understanding. Language limits or delimits the concepts
we deal with. It seems clear that we need a review of terminology
in
relation
to media as convergence escalates. In preparing a public lecture
which I am due to deliver in June, I compiled a list of 32 different
terms
used for media today. Many of these are based on delivery systems
that are increasingly redundant -- such as film, video tape,
broadcast, and so on. Even traditional terms such as "newspapers,"
"press," "broadcast," "radio" and "television" no
longer adequately describe our media, as newspapers are less and
less provided on paper, radio programs are increasingly distributed
as podcasts
rather than broadcasts, and television content is being "transmitted"
via the Internet and watched on computers and even hand phones.
And "phones" are
not phones any more.
The benefit
of a review of terminology is that we would find we can dispense
with more than half the terms in use and simplify discussion
considerably.
What does it matter that content is distributed on paper, plastic,
magnetic tape or disk, celluloid, cable, broadcast waves, or in jello?
Only two
things seem to matter: content and users -- whether they are
producers or consumers, or a combination of both, as reflected in
the terms "prosumers"
or "produsers."
This
raises three points that I will throw out there for comment. The
first observation is that media are becoming immaterial. By that
I
do not mean that media don't matter per se; I mean the materiality
of media is becoming unimportant. With convergence, content pays
no mind to the medium on which it is distributed -- nor do most users.
In the digital art world, Lev Manovich talks about "post-media" referring
to the same notion, so I am not alone in this thinking.
In the
same way, hardware technology such as computers and telecommunications
networks are disappearing and becoming invisible. The invisible computer
was first forecast in 1998 by Donald Norman and research continues
through the Disappearing Computer Initiative in the U.S. Similarly,
cables and
wires are disappearing as we move to wireless. And "logging on,"
which was an often troublesome ritual that regularly reminded us
that we
were entering a complex world of machines, is increasingly being
replaced with "always
on." But it is not only the increasing physical invisibility of
hardware that is significant; what is most significant is the growing
psychological invisibility of hardware. Today, what Marc Prensky
calls "digital natives" and assimilated "digital immigrants" move
seamlessly and effortlessly between sources of content without a
moment's
thought to the hardware infrastructure that delivers them.
Today
media are software -- intellectual property in the form
of both applications and content. And audiences are the network,
actively connecting, linking, redirecting, forwarding, and injecting
local comment
and static into communications.
Welcome
to a new age in which media are software and audiences are the
networks. 
Dr
Jim Macnamara MA, PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC became Professor
of Public
Communication at the University of Technology
Sydney in late
2007. His 30-year career in journalism, public relations
and media research culminated in the 2006 sale of CARMA
Asia Pacific,
which he founded, to Media Monitors. He worked as Group
Research Director with Media Monitors - CARMA Asia Pacific following
the sale
and continues as a Consultant with the Group.
So when his flagship UK newspaper, 
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
The Paine
of Measurement
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many… Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders... But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” 