Hunt for the New

The pace of creating new devices continues to increase. This recent posting in "I Have an Idea" surveys the most recent lot of them. (No, this poor guy in the image doesn't have a bad case of acne; read the article to see what the heck's really going on.)

While I can understand its gee-whiz wonderment at these devices, it's not yet clear how they might be used for telling compelling stories and for creating compelling forms of involvement.

While it's important to keep a finger on the pulse of new devices, it's just as important to remember that devices are only one part--and, frankly, an increasingly small part--of what really new media are all about.

A Troglodyte's Call

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.

More on the 'Real' as the 'Virtual'

Okay, so there's video games and real games, right?

Britvic wants to change all that, and, by doing so, underscore the cutting edge of digital as dispensing altogether with such facile distinctions as that between 'virtual' and 'real'.

Britvic's Champion of the Playground is an online game/competition directed at kids, and intended to interweave a product message about their juices with encouraging kids to exercise more ('really', not virtually).

Kids register and receive a 'skill kit' to use. As The Drum puts it, "Skills kits contain a kit bag and a web cam, as well as a digitised skipping rope and a digitised hackysack that contain micro-chips which record a code when the child practises certain skills. Children can enter the recorded code online to receive further skills points and see how they compare against their friends in their friends league'.

The activity takes place virtually and really, rendering the ol' division between 'virtual' and 'real' increasingly irrelevant. 

Blurring the Line Between "Virtual" and "Reality"

How often are campaigns and promotions thought about as linking a separate "virtual" with a separate "reality"?

A number of recent efforts highlight how limiting this is.

Another recent effort that doesn't simply make a "virtual" anything, but instead maps the "real" onto/within the "virtual" is the mixed-media project/proposal "110 Stories," pitched through Kickstarter by Brian August.

By visually reproducing a view of the absent World Trade Center towers to anyone looking at Ground Zero through an iPhone, it not only helps people see/remember what once was at that site, it helps them share that experience with others.

Just as the virtual makes tangible what once was real, the real provides the impetus and substance for the virtual.

These and other efforts are remaking what we mean by "digital."

My Current Favorite

In terms of meeting "really new media," few I've seen recently can top Nokia's effort it titles the "World's Biggest Signpost."

The installation is strategically very sharp, with the user involvement not simply a standard contest or game, but rather is directly contributing to delivering/enacting the key message. What's more, the monumental scale  underscores the power of a user's finger digitally enabled, while the sheer fun you can see on people's faces (rather than stress, as in many competitive games) sets this one quite a ways apart.

Finally, this project also demonstrates what to me is the next frontier in digital thinking: Namely, that digital isn't simply what happens virtually as opposed to in the "real world," but it's how the virtual becomes mapped onto the real.

And Now for Something Completely Different

(I've been looking for a chance to use that Monty Python line for a title...)

While the point of the blog is to highlight fully-realized examples of really new media, it's also a good idea to highlight those that aren't so fully realized, if for no other reason than they have a great potential as yet to be figured out or realized.

One is augmented reality using Bing maps. Blaise Aguera y Arcas (at this time, at Microsoft of all places, but who knows where he may be now) did a TED talk last year on this project. Imagine Google Maps and Google Earth integrated with video, and that almost captures what this is all about.

A second is laser tagging--as in, instead of using cans of spray paint and getting arrested for vandalism, using digital mapping and a pen laser to draw.  Our friends at the Graffiti Research lab have it all worked out.

When measured up against "really new media," these are, of course, incomplete. But that means they and others like them are ripe for thoughtful creative development.

Near Misses, Near Hits

Integrating this blog into my teaching has its plusses and minuses. While it encourages students to initiate their own search and investigation into new media (a plus), it also tends to be repetitious and ultimately safe (a minus), due to how the grading system encourages students to play it safe.

This helps explain the over-reliance in student postings on smartphone apps (easy to search in iTunes, other postings have apps so that seems to boost chances of acceptance) and on Facebook apps.

So, for next academic year, I won't accept any submissions of free-standing smartphone apps, and any pitches for Facebook-related things had better be good!

It also takes me away from posting things I encounter, as does the crazy Maymester teaching schedule. But, now that that's done, time to re-engage.