Mediamorph This!

Did everyone have a crazy weekend with the papers, homework and life like I did?

My first overall impression of this article is that it was a Reader’s Digest version of Winston. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It did seem a little rushed though at the end. Again not a bad thing considering my schedule, it just seemed to have more details in the beginning than the end.

Now to the question of the effects of computing power on communication, there were a couple of things I that came to me as I was reading this. The first is about adoption of the new technologies discussed.

• Telephone: it could extend communication without delays or added complexity and that this significantly contributed the rapid adoption.
• Radio: adoption really grew after not only after content was there, but when easy to use receivers were widely available as well.
• Color TV: its adoption was slow because of two things, the new sets were expensive and difficult to tune.
• Internet: it had been around for sometime and was growing in use, but it wasn't until the creation of Mosaic and the World Wide Web that the popularity became widespread.

One factor that is common in the adoption of all of these technologies on a mass scale is the ease of use of the technology. There are other factors at work as well, but I think that every new technology, invention, service that people get exposed to, the initial thing they think is, "It this easy and is the benefit of use going to be worth effort it requires to learn?" I think VoIP is at stage right now where adoption is certainly there, but on a rapid, mass scale it still needs a device or something to shorten the learning or effort curve. Basically something that is as easy as a good old telephone.

The other thing I found interesting was all the new ways of mass communication technology coevolved together, each one benefiting to some extent from the other, and then diverged finding their niche in the human communication system. Which brings me to computers and how that is ever increasing easy to converge these different mediums (radio, TV, internet, telephone) into one, this isn't a giant revelation by any stretch, it the major theme of this program, it just makes me pause and think.

Pretend each media channel were its own separate small ecosystem, each with its own little money making animals coexisting with each other. Now, pull one these animals from an ecosystem and place it into another. The dominate little animals in that ecosystem are going to fight and squash the lone new comer. Pretend now you're God and just created a whole new type of ecosystem, one that all animals from the other ecosystems can survive in and it is also really big, room for everybody. Now place one animal from each of the small systems in the new environment so there is no dominant 'species'. That is the power of computers on media, taking a bunch of money making animals and throwing them together. The will either figure out a way to coexist or kill each other trying to be the alpha male. It's sweet.