Transmediality

Monday again, and the obligatory check of what Media Guardian offers. Emily Bell's opinion piece has warnings for any who are contemplating long-term content provision contracts or ten-year business plans in the media arena.

Jeff Jarvis is in fine form as always. His headline Ditch the broadcast tower has echoes of Adam Curry's clarion call "Transmitters? We don't need no stinkin' transmitters!" Read here and tremble.

An article in the Washington Post last Friday has attracted considerable comment. David Johnson on LostRemote asks questions and I attempt to give one answer.

"The Washington Post has a centerpieceon the back-and-forth of convergence content management and evolving business plans that says it is hard to tell if TV is moving onto the Internet or if the Internet is moving on to TV. Chicken and egg? Mission creep? Moot point?

My designer pals and I used to make a game of finding Web influences creeping into print and TV graphics (seriously, did you ever see a pipe character in print design before online?), but those were in the days when RealVideo G2 made us swoon. Today my PC has a remote control and my TV is a monitor that has a useless thing called a tuner because all the content is fed through a digital box into Channel 3. Now before I slip into my grumpy old man voice, how about some comments on the question."

WaPo has been reading Jeff Jarvis, Mark Glaser, LostRemote, Unmediated and, every Monday, MediaGuardian.The best of all of the above I re-blog for colleagues here in the Middle East.

I think one of the problems is our 'adult' mindset; we are of generations which like to have things perfectly defined, compartmentalized, unionized and monetized. The kids, the millennials, have no such expectation or even need; they are at home with multi-tasking, happy with niche media, ever ready to move on when today's hot thing morphs into tomorrow's.

Television, compartmentalized, is over. Look at the impulses coming from the Digital Signage sector, from people who don't see themselves as in the television business. Look at the publishers of eZines which include textual, graphical and audiovisual components delivering an increasingly rich communications and entertainment mix.

There is no single 'next big thing' we can comfortably define and ring-fence. Let's settle for radical discontinuous change, media flux, in a constant state of 'becoming'. And, above all, we need to have fun with it.