Changing media

With the holiday media season in full swing at the beginning of October, I thought I'd reflect on how we wrap our heads around keeping up with all the new motion sensitive controllers, e-readers, smartphones and other media/devices. It's exciting, but an initial perspective must be considered. These devices and related experiences are basically remediations. We can think of an infinite number of possible representations for a page of information. So why do we create this neverending, depleting hype and quickly move on to the bigger, better thing? One simple answer - because it's what we want to do.

There is no lasting progressive experience. As a writer, it's a challenge to sustain the audience experience in this fickle, technology filled world. Many time I have to stop and think - what would I really get out of this experience that is beneficial and, more importantly, memorable?

Data mining, immediate information and media genre blending impress initially. Our minds delight, but what lasting effects remain...another experience based on the same parameters. Bing makes fun of the search engine mind slush in it's marketing, but Bing is just offering a different way of doing the same thing yet Bing put in the time and research this new media method, so they get the benefit. This world values these new methods, so communicators must research a subject fully and really put in some considerable time to create a sustainable experience for audiences. "Reinventing" is a tiring term, but we must to some extent to survive professionally. We must market ourselves and prove how we can be useful as a "mediator of meaning."