With snail's pace of innovation in really new media over the past weeks (same ol' stuff week after week), I thought it was a good time to think about trends in media education as well as in media work.
We've all heard about "convergence." Despite its value, what it means too often is efforts to cut costs primarily by trimming staffs and making each remaining person wear more hats.
While there's a benefit gained with people breaking out of narrow job-description silos, the trouble is that the broader people are spread, the thinner their knowledge and practice inevitably becomes.
Nowhere is this more true than with really new media. If the demands for profitability increase to the extent that we return to the days in which fewer people do everything from copy to design and production, the inevitable result is thin, safe work.
The pressure to produce overwhelms the need to explore and create. Safety in reusing what's worked in the past becomes valued over innovation.
Particularly with digital techniques, only extreme techies have the depth of technical sophistication to help creatives translate concepts into execution. There's no way the creatives who cook up the concepts could also execute work such as the
Nokia World Biggest Signpost and the
Halo Monument Light Sculpture.
So, consider this a vote against workplace convergence--not in favor of a return to the assembly line of yore, but of pioneering new ways of working together that preserve depth of knowledge and the freedom to create and innovate. And the value of doing so.
