The New Medium
But then -- just like how then-new technologies were used a century ago to make the sky a new and practical medium for transportation -- new technologies have now been used to create the New Medium for communications. It is a new communication medium that, like Sky for prior transportation media, bridges the mutually incompatible characteristics of prior communications media.
Among the technologies needed to create this New Medium were the invention of digital communications during the late 1940s, invention of the Transport Control/Internet Protocol ((TCP/IP) during the late 1960s, ARPANET's creation of the Internet and other people's invention of the personal computer during in the 1970s, and to lesser extents the invention of the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) in the late 1980s, opening of the Internet to the public in 1992, and invention of the graphical browser software later that year. Those and other technological innovations converged to create a new communications medium that has characteristics inconceivable even a decade ago.
The hallmark characteristics of the New Medium are:
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Uniquely individualized information can simultaneously be delivered or displayed to a potentially infinite number of people.
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Each of the people involved — whether publisher, broadcasters, or consumer — shares equal and reciprocal control over that content.
In other words, the New Medium has the advantages of both the Interpersonal and the Mass media, but without their complementary disadvantages.
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No longer must anyone who wants to individually communicate a unique message to each recipient be restricted to communicating with only one person at a time.
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No longer must anyone who wants to communicate simultaneous messages to a mass of recipients be unable to individualize the content of the message for each recipient.
Again, please note that the New Medium for communications, as with use of the transportation medium of the sky, is entirely dependent upon technology unlike its two preceding media. It is not a natural communications medium for humans; it does something that a human cannot naturally do without technology.
Colloquially known as 'New Media' or 'the New Media', the New Medium is not whatever content or device is used online (or wirelessly, on an iPod, etc.). Any item of content is generally independent of any medium. Likewise, most vehicles and devices are generally independent of medium. (There obviously are exceptions: You won't receive much content plugging newsprint into the Internet or using a canoe as a transportation vehicle on land.)
Some Misapplications
Simply because the New Medium encompasses the characteristics and the reach of both of its predecessors and therefore can easily perform each of those media's capabilities, many people mistake the New Medium as merely an electronic extension previous media.
This misunderstanding is particular prevalent among publishing and broadcast executives or others who've worked in the Mass Medium. They see the New Medium and its vehicles only as a paperless or antenna-less form of Mass Medium — a perspective that neglects the New Medium's full potential.
A website can be a vehicle to display Mass Medium content, which indeed is how most newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts use it. However, that merely replicates online the hallmark limitations of Mass Medium vehicles and doesn't take advantage of the New Medium's ability to display a precise match of specific information to each and every recipient's individual needs and interests, however different those receipients may be.
Moreover, because each recipient in the New Medium shares with all publishers and broadcasters equal and reciprocal control over what that recipient gets — either by each recipient's choices of which publishers' or broadcasters' websites to visit or else increasingly by mechanisms that allow the recipient to aggregate that content without visiting each of those publishers' or broadcasters' sites — these New Medium consumers are leaving behind the traditional Mass Medium's packaging of information.
Each is migrating towards whatever mix of content most precisely matches her own uniquely individual needs and interests. This is why more than one billion consumers have migrated into the New Medium; it allows them more precise satisfaction of their needs and interests. They didn't migrate into the New Medium to read, see, or hear a Mass Medium package of information online — information they were receiving from traditional Mass Medium vehicles in more readily usable forms.
Nevertheless, almost all publishing and broadcasting companies still make the mistake of providing only the traditional Mass Medium package of information online. Many of those companies also mistakenly term themselves interactive merely because they now also operate online.
Interactivity, as long ago defined by Dr. Jonathan Steuer in the Journal of Communications is "the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time." That is a far cry from simply letting the user read Mass Medium newspaper, magazines, or broadcast content that has been shoveled online.
Within the next ten years, most New Medium consumers will be receiving information from each's choice of myriad broadcasters and publishers, perhaps too many for any individual consumer to name or even realize. (Early adopters of tag-driven XML, advanced RSS, and 'peer-to-peer' technologies have already begun making such use). Because these many consumers will be sharing content choices and control with all publisher and broadcasters, the New Medium serves not just a 'one-to-one' or 'one-to-many' medium but a 'many-to-many' one.
Publisher and broadcasters who don't make full use of the New Medium will likely be left behind and wither during this new century.
