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Tuesday
Nov032009
Defining Media, Cross-Mating Elephants and Zebras
Young Urban Professional
Five years ago there was media and social media and the two were distinct. You know what was what. It was like there elephants and zebras. You knew the difference.
Today all media is social, all social is media. It's impossible to separate the two.
The media all actively use social technologies to innovate, converse and collaborate with their audiences. Meanwhile, social content from friends - be it tweets or status updates or videos - all should be considered media. Yes, the elephants and the zebras have cross-mated.
My colleague overheard me say this and he drew this little doodle for me a few months ago. I keep it handy and refer to it often when thinking about big topics, like this one: just what is media? I don't have an answer any more. But it's important we have one. Google has a bunch of definitions here, but none of them seem to apply any more.
The reason we need a new definition for media (as opposed to a definition for new media - a topic for another day) is because entire industries depend on it. People say "I work in the media business." There are "media buying" agencies. And so on.
So in asking this question, I turn to you. How would you define media today? Maybe we can begin to crowdsource a definition.
Reader Comments (11)
This is an interesting question that I’ve been thinking about the last couple of days. Not to complicate matters, but it seems difficult to try and pull it off with one term. So, I tapped a couple of sources (Wikipedia and others) updated slightly, and came up with the following: Social Media is the actual physical media that is disseminated through social interaction and is created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.Social Computing is commonly associated with the technologies that enable distributed, user-driven communication and collaboration around Social Media. Examples of the technologies, or applications include: content authoring, content sharing, blogs, RSS, social networking, wikis, podcasts, ratings, tagging, P2P, micro blogging, and mashups. Social Business is a term for the business practices emphasized by Social Computing over legacy systems that are more limited, less flexible, and less open.Once again, hopefully I didn’t complicate something that you were trying to simplify.Bryan
Media = the systems and/or tools that deliver information
To paraphrase but update McLuhan, try this: communications that impact the way we perceive and understand the world around us.Re-reading him recently I think it's interesting to see how he felt media was "any extension of ourselves," which hits home your point in this post, Steve.
Media by definition are in ‘the middle position.’ What’s fascinating today is that they have moved from being in the middle to being all-surrounding; from medium to immersion. As we interact with and adapt to media, they evolve and we evolve with them. I would suggest therefore, that a definition of media is in flux and is being written and revised regularly now by all of us. Here then is a beginning list, call it ‘notes toward a definition.’Media are …1. Personal and bodily extensions, as in cell phones or Pattie Maes’ Sixth Sense computing developed by the MIT Media Lab.2. Windows, as in portals on the world that bring the world to us and put us into the (action of the) world.3. Mirrors, as in images that show us how to act, dress, behave and compel us to see ourselves and then look a certain way.4. Connectors, as in social networking sites and tools.5. Social structure organizers, as in the text creating the structure of priesthoods and churches, or as in John Medina saying the classroom (built around alphabetic organization) is a poor learning environment for the brain.6. Conceptual organizers, as in linearity and sequential thinking flowing from the alphabet; or with the rise of the ‘global image economy’ observational learning—the learning from others how to act, dress, or behave—also rises while visual expression starts to change written expression7. Third Places, as in Second Life or the virtual workspaces of a company like Sun Microsystems
from a comm. theory perspective, it's really not that complicated. Media are communication channels. The most basic medium is air - it's the channel that carries sound when we talk to each other f2f.Of course, media can have characteristics (such as mass, social, interpersonal, etc.) and based on these, can be classified into types. As characteristics overlap, our classification changes (that's what I think Steve means by the crossing of the zebra with the elephant).However, in phrases such as "media business" or "media buying" we're not talking about theoretical distinctions and definitions. We're talking about specific communication channels that can be bought (rented) and dealt as commodities.The question is interesting because the commodification of media (the business model, if you will) has changed. So, in this sense, the professions of "media business" or "media buying" have changed in ways that are just now being defined - how, I don't know, do you?
Media in the old sense is vanishing, because it WAS the middle man between information and its receivers. We are all the media now.In the "brave new world" of convergence and connections there is no need for traditional media. I'm liking the idea of curation as the "role" of "new media." I'm putting all those words in quotation marks, because they are old words that have to have different meanings.The horse is extinct, and so is the zebra. It's the centaur now:-)(Hi Steve)
media-an outlet that enables the spread information to many.
We could say that media is no longer the dissemination of chosen information (old middle man) but the dissemination of all information. Dare I say it cloud media! Although I think a lake is a better analogy. In essence media has gone public or been "democratized". So either of those terms could be used to create a reference term. Of course like any democracy you run the risk of the mediocre rising to the surface more and more.
From a communication point of view today everything between a brand and its audience can be used as and is media. Any "canvas" you can use to write a brand story on, get into a conversation with your audience and get them going is media.
Why not take a definition from the biological sciences? A medium is a substance or environment in which something lives or grows. It's also a substance in which lifeforms are preserved or displayed.Sounds pretty fitting, doesn't it?
Thanx for the valuable information. Both funny and interesting indeed.... keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.