Top Ten Media Revelations – Part One

For Rob William’s class in Electronic Media Writing we were asked to write about what we thought were our top ten revelations with media over the semester.


1. Free-Form Interview

My first revelation was to just how open and flowing a free-form televised interview is. I had always assumed that interviews were pre-scripted and conducted in a very controlled manner. And if they were not scripted, they were done with cuts in the footage. I never had any notion that there would be televised interviews that allowed the speaker to answer as they pleased.

It is interesting how much research in put into an interview to make it work. In a sense, the free-form interview isn’t really free at all but a series of calculated moves made to provoke predictable answers. This in itself is a revelation as well. The art of the interview is something that takes much practice to master. (Photo from news.softpedia.com)


2. The Promptness of News

News media is an interesting avenue. It is a revelation to me how the timelines of news from scripting to broadcast works. No other media has the need for such short timelines. This creates a different environment for news writers. The speed at which a script can be put together then slotted into the outline for a nightly show is amazing. From sum up to sun down intricate pieces are formed and put together to give you your nightly news. If I were to get into this field I think I would be quickly overwhelmed.

(Photo from illinoisloyalty.com)


3. The Breakdown of the Big Dogs

This revelation comes from the battle between the big media dogs and the small time pups. Mega industries like the movies and television are mostly inaccessible to the small dogs, but the internet has opened a new avenue for those lower on the totem pole. And the internet is just the beginning.

Valve, the company behind great games like Half-Life, and Team Fortress recruited a team of students who created a small game as part of their senior project. This game became the basis for the popular Portal game. In this way the small dogs were eaten by the large, but really this is not what happened. The team of students remained a team just as they were and were given the resources they needed to make a real game.

It is now becoming the case that as the big dogs are becoming less willing to take chances they are falling short to the innovations of the small dogs. Somehow the playing field has evened out a bit.
(Photo from buddiesboarding.co.uk)


4. The Medium Never Dies

While the statements that no mediums ever die can be contested, one of my revelations was that essentially every medium will continue to exist in some form no matter what happens. Newspapers have hit hard times, but in the end we will always have some sort of periodical. It maybe that we must give up the cheap oversized cuts of paper for friendlier forms, but that may not all be that bad. One of my biggest complaints and reasons I don’t buy the paper often is because those pages are just too unwieldy. I mean, really, who designed them to be so huge?

Retro mediums are all still around and have found places in niche markets. Many people will tell you that you cannot beat the audio quality of a vinyl record. Because of that, many new artists today sell vinyl versions of their CDs. The same will be true of books as the e-book gains ground. No matter how popular e-books become, there will still be a market for bound books.
(Photo from geekalerts.com)


5. The Social Network Medium

Everyone wants to talk about Facebook, or Twitter, or what’s going to be the next big social media, but a revelation I had was that they are all one entity. They do not function well together yet, but I believe the future is driving us to chare more and more and that means social media sites like Facebook and Twitter will have to be friendlier to each other more and more.

(photo from aflexworld.wordpress.com)

When you visit You Tube now, you get a list of ways you can share videos over social networks. The goal is to get you to chare what you see with others. There are also ways to get your posts in twitter to show up in Facebook as well. This blurs the lines between the two most popular social media entities.

Companies have already seen the power of these social networks and have become a part of them. The beauty of the businesses involvement is that they don’t do it through direct advertising, but through direct involvement. The companies are now social entities that we can interact with. These companies are no longer just advertising to us, they have become one of us.