May 29 2007
New media / old media
Theme of the week: “old media doesn’t turn in to new media when you put it on the web”. Somewhat counter-intuitively the most problematic medium to transpose for the net is television.
Short snippets of video where our hands stay on the mouse work fine. The net is well suited to watching a 2 minute video, stopping to send a link to a friend, responding to an instant message - and then watching another 90 second video. The web is a non-linear interactive medium.
In counterpoint the TV experience is essentially linear and passive. Combining the two creates dissonance. Being passive while we watch TV is fine - we sit back to watch TV. But we sit UP at our computers - its a totally different experience. We want to be clicking.
As the web matures producers are learning to adapt the content to suit the new medium. The context is transforming the content. Just as with television - the early days of TV simply involved filming radio announcers or stage shows and broadcasting the film. It took 10-15 years before a genre shaped by the medium itself began to emerge.
As newspapers and TV stations transition to the net, the content they present and the way in which it is presented are being transformed. At first the transformation is haphazard, clumsy and tentative, but gradually new paradigms are evolving.
Jeff Jarvis in an article in the Guardian yesterday suggests that newspapers at least may have found some interim resting place on their march to the virtual new world:
The Guardian’s website has a new home page and I am among those who like it. But I also think it looks of a piece with other newspaper.com redesigns of late, with a balance of white space and blue type and clean organisation similar to what you see at the Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and News.com.au. Perhaps that means - as with newspaper front pages in black and white about 60 years ago, and in colour about 25 years ago - that we have arrived at a common visual grammar for news home pages.
Television stations seem much further behind.
POSTSCRIPT
A few folks took issue with the “sit back for TV sit UP for web” characterization. They take their wireless laptops out onto the deck and surf the net in all sorts of different positions. So for them:
TV is food for donkeys. They might move to a different piece of grass (channel surf) but grass is all they want to eat and they never play with their food
The web is food for tigers. You never know what they are going to eat next. It just might be you.
It really amazes me that TV stations are lagging so badly with redesigning and implementing new paradigms for their websites.
But in a sense, TV deserves some it’s losses in viewership. The pablum being fed to the viewers, at least here in the states, is ridiculous. The sheeple aren’t willing to become critical thinkers in the programming they watch. If they did, and voted with their pocketbooks, we would see a radical change in the quality of content being distributed via TV and on the net.
We VJ punks want to change that - and I say, let’s get this party started
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