Posts tagged with 'the media consortium'
Radical New Ways of Meaning-Making and Filtering
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The next phase of filtering will center on the evolution of the “Semantic Web,” which Ashish Soni, who directs the Information Technology Program at the University of Southern California, describes as an interactivity evolution a step beyond aggregation that aims to makes information more meaningful and useful. According to an article co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with founding the web, the semantic evolution “lets users engage in the sort of serendipitous reuse and discovery of related information that’s been a hallmark of viral web uptake.”
“Meta tagging” as we know it today is just the beginning. The Semantic Web builds upon any metadata (e.g. hyperlinks, location, time, movement or categories) to infer greater meaning from information. (more…)
Social Reading
“The problem of how media has evolved is that it has isolated people,” says Amy Gahran of the Poynter Institute. “Your role was passive and to take it in. That damaged society in some ways.” David Weinberger points to the early history of writing when reading became internalized. “Some people say that’s the origin of modern consciousness. The voice we heard externally, reading to us, we now hear internally.” (more…)
Mass Mobile-Media
John Battelle of Federated Media predicted that mobility would become a presumptive aspect of everything on the web by the end of 2009. Mobile phones and netbooks are just the beginning. Companies are building photography, video and audio recording into more than just phones and laptops. Apple’s iPod nano added video recording for the first time in September 2009. (more…)
Multisensory Web
Video is quickly overtaking the web and will diminish the primacy of long-form, text-based journalism. Although people are consuming more information than ever before, they are reading less.
The impact of text will decline further because of an emerging multisensory web. Shapes and gestures are already augmenting or replacing text input on touch screens, game consoles (e.g. Wii) and other devices, and 3-D televisions and computer displays are expected to hit the market in 2010.4 We will eventually have the ability to transmit smells and other data about the physical world, such as air samples to test for pollution. For instance, the Defense Sciences Office in the U.S. Department of Defense, which focuses on “mining ‘far side’ science,” is working on a way to make multi-sensory data converge in real time, just like it does in humans. (more…)
Human-Centered Design
The next online frontier is how technology adapts to us. When companies are disrupted by new technologies or demographic shifts, their problems still have people at their heart wrote Tim Brown, president and CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO. “They require a human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions. … By [human-centered design], I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.”
“A human-factors approach assumes that the things we’ll carry in the future are not going to be invented so much as discovered—that the answer to the question of what devices we’ll carry will become obvious as we learn more about human behavior,” explained Claire Tristram in Technology Review. Therefore, as mobile and multisensory devices proliferate and alternative economies grow, media organizations will find the best path forward by following its users. (more…)
Location Aware Mobile
Mobile devices’ ability to detect a user’s exact location will revolutionize how we find, discover, create and interact with information.
The wave of location-based services has barely begun. Latitude on Google Maps and services from other companies such as Loopt already enable a user to broadcast their location and find friends. Location awareness will change how everyone interacts with their offline environment in even more dramatic ways.
People will not consume media primarily as a departure from their offline lives, but they will use it to enhance everything they do. Android and iPhone have augmented reality (AR) browsers that superimpose online information on its screen based on users’ physical surroundings. The devices even know if a user is sitting still or walking. Wikitude, for example, draws from Wikipedia entries when a user is near a landmark. Furthermore, shopping applications such as the iPhone’s LikeThis, G1’s Shop Savvy and some Amazon applications enable users to photograph bar codes or objects to compare prices, retrieve product information and aid mobile search based users’ location. The greatest leaps will come as satellite-positioning (GPS), tilt sensors and compasses become commonplace on most mobile devices.
Location awareness will help news become more relevant to users without any user input needed. Possibilities exist for journalism at many levels. Imagine:
- News alerts sent to people based on their location, for example, when an underground explosion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin caused a power outage for 8,600 residents in June 2009.
- Users scanning products for price comparison and getting news about a company, a health issue or consumer safety.
- An immediate call for volunteers that reach people who happen to be nearby.
- A network of users that enable media outlets to find a trusted source for a breaking news story in a specific area (e.g. Kansas tornado).
- The ability to send news about the Dali Lama to users who have travelled to Tibet.
- Users receiving news based on their friends’ locations? (e.g. New York on 9/11, New Orleans in August 2005).
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
Future Possibilities
Many people assume that the of media future is to be predicted rather than created. The future does not simply happen to us; we shape it. This next series of blogs poses important questions for independent media to consider as it shapes the future and nine possible trends that could further change the game.
People interviewed for this project highlighted future possibilities (see graphic below) that add weight and complexity to the new realities described in Vol. 2. Most of these trends are underway. While they have yet to reach game changing scale, many of them will.
In this next series of blogs, we’ll discuss future possibilities in the competitive landscape, including mass mobile-media and multisensory web; distinctive competencies and sources of value; and the new value chain in journalism.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
What Role Will Government Play?
Lawmakers are increasingly stepping up to address the crisis in the journalism business. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter in March 2009 to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the Justice Department to consider an antitrust exemption to help newspapers survive. The public benefit of saving newspapers might outweigh historical concerns about anti-competitive behavior. In Connecticut, among other places, lawmakers are also intervening to keep newspapers alive. Pelosi’s letter prompted a House Judiciary Committee hearing the following month about problems in the newspaper industry.
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen. “There is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems,” said Sascha Meinrath, Research Director for the New America Foundation, during a speech at eComm in March 2009. (more…)
What Will Commercial Media and Technology Companies Do?
Many online users and independent media-makers have taken for granted how much big companies have done for them. Independent voices have soared due to innovation in free tools, investment sophisticated platforms and much more. These companies will continue to support many new independent voices if they find profitable business models in doing so. If they pull back, it could ultimately hurt independent media.
The industry could also change if major technology companies successfully move into the content business. John Battelle of Federated Media has argued from the very beginning that Google is good for the news business. One of his primary questions about the future is whether Google will go into the content business full force. “I think that would make a lot of people think very hard about a lot of issues,” he says. Similarly, Nokia, which has a global market share larger than its three closest competitors combined, is transforming itself from a technology to a media company. (more…)
The Future?
The Big Thaw began with David Weinberger’s question: “How much more of the game needs to change, really?” In some ways, this is the future we have been waiting for. Independent media has successfully amplified independent voices and empower communities for many years. The online world has made this more possible than ever before. But in other ways, it might not be the future we had expected.
While people interviewed for The Big Thaw were optimistic about online journalism, they were uncertain regarding how it would affect quality and availability of investigative journalism, how consumers will behave, how the biggest players in the game will act, and which new strategies and business models succeed. (more…)