Introduction
"I didn’t get the memo."
Ever since you started using email, you’ve heard or said that phrase only with heavy sarcasm. Whenever something happens without you realizing it, you may be tempted to utter that phrase as a feeble excuse.
When new media tools began there was nothing to announce. Blogging, podcasting, mobile content, online video, and social networking were all launched in stealth mode as bottom-up, not top-down, forms of communication.
New media empowers consumers, offering improved media consumption choice and the opportunity to create content (a.k.a. “consumer-generated media” or “consumer created content”) with distribution potentially equal to major publishers.
Thanks to new media, we’ve collectively chosen to walk away from communal fixed-time media. No longer must we schedule our time around media and information in order to consume it. New tools allow us to easily produce, consume, and share information on our own timetable. Instead of someone we don’t know, like a newspaper editor or TV executive, directing our media consumption patterns, we have promoted ourselves to the title of Self-Directed Network Executive. Each one of us gets to determine for ourselves what we want to consume and when.
What continues in the next pages is my dissected view of the 12 principles of new media. This is my view today, early in 2007. It may change in a year. But for now, these principles are necessary elements you need to consider when embarking upon publishing in the new media space.
Accompanying each principle is a conversation video with
experts offering their divergent opinions on each of these 12 theories. I’ll be releasing a new video every week until all 12 are posted. Those interviewees include:
Brian Powley - iCrossing
Chris Heuer - Social Media Club
Chris Peterson - Chautauqua Communications
Chris Shipley - Guidewire Group
Colette Vogele - Vogele Law
Gary Bolles - Microcast
Greg Sterling - Sterling Market Intelligence
Samantha Muchmore - DRAFTFCB
While all the opinions you’ll hear and read are excellent, they’re not from the only experts. This is an open discussion for all. I’m eager to know how you, too, are developing and consuming new media.
Please read, watch, and respond.
- David Spark, Founder, Spark Media Solutions, LLC
