The Rise and Fall of Digital Media
The end of the internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Internet buzzwords tend to sneak up on me in the middle of the night like a pod-alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. From then onwards, I begin liberally using the new phrase to friends, work colleagues and associates as though it has always been part of my vocabulary.
Most recently, I was overwhelmed by a serious case of ‘digital media’ (often just digital for short), which has now seemlessly deposed the previous incumbent buzzwords (Online, New Media) as catch-alls to describe the broad sweep of internet-related activities.
‘Digital Media’ is a great umbrella term to describe marketing/commercial strategies that aren’t just web-based, but also integrate with Video, Twitter, Facebook, iPhone et al. The brilliance of the buzzword is that it’s vague enough to imply dynamism and innovation, while at the same time not actually meaning anything,
No more New Media
Of course we’ve been here before. Since the internet exploded into the commercial sector in the mid 90s, a succession of buzzwords to describe itself have been rapidly deployed, adopted and then discarded.
It is a sign of a very young industry still trying to find its feet amid constantly changing priorities, technologies and expectations that its accompanying lexicon has likewise been malleable and unstable.
The industry rarely describes itself as ‘new media’ anymore: from a cultural perspective, it’s not considered ‘new’, even though one of the oldest of the clan – the world wide web – is still only a teenager. How can it be ‘new’ media when it is so ingrained in the cultural landscape and there is a generation who have grown-up not knowing a world before the internet?
Elsewhere, other buzzwords have fallen by the wayside: Multimedia and Interactive Media became passé when it became obvious that everything online was interactive and multimedia and describing it as such was redundant. Indeed, ‘online’ will probably join them soon: the torturous process of accessing the internet via dial-up modems has long gone. Thanks to 3G phones and broadband, that there is no real ‘offline’.
A Digital Future?
As useful as the terminology ‘Digital Media’ is right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is usurped by some other shiny jargon in the near future. Part of the issue is that ‘digital’ has become ubiquitous: as illustrated in Digital TV, Digital Radio and Digital Rights Management, even ‘Digital Media’ has a dual meaning (CDs/DVDs are effectively audio/video mediums consisting of digitised data).
While all the above are all linked through the transformation of content from analogue to digital, the repetitive use of the word by marketers and advertisers means there a danger that the phrase could become over-used: ‘Digital’ may seem cutting-edge now but wait a few years and it’ll be very dated.
Maybe its better to go with the geeks and leave the buzzwords to marketers and advertisers, and instead just use retro-ironic labels like ‘Interweb’. By appropriating a phrase associated with people who confused ‘Internet’ with ‘Web’, not only does it serve as a broad equivalent of ‘digital media’ but also has a lingering aftertaste of smug satisfaction.