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When one thinks about the future of books, magazines and other paper-based media products in general, it’s easy to imagine a world of digital screens dominating. It’s inevitable and will happen in spite of romantic ideas about the sensory experience associated with reading a real book or the joys of collecting and displaying physical media objects made of paper. However, this doesn’t mean that paper-based media storage devices will go extinct in the evolutionary battle to survive in a digital future. Paper based books, magazines, games, etc. will most likely adapt by finding new ways to engage users by exemplifying the unique qualities that only a tangible medium can bring.
One such promising example I recently came across is the research being done by Etienne Mineur and Bertrand Duplat, which focuses on the relationship between reading, the physical handling of books and new technologies. Their work tries to bridge the gap between tangible paper-based media objects and digital media; demonstrating creative (and harmonious) new uses of paper and pixels.
Here’s a great example of one of their projects (a Board game with an iPhone). Visit this link for videos of some of their other prototypes in this area.
So, how rapidly is the Digital Universe expanding?
Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.
This explosive growth means that by 2020 our Digital Universe will be nearly 50 TIMES AS BIG as it was in 2009. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars.**
What will your job, business, social life, privacy and security look like in a world where all media, knowledge and culture is digital, online, semantically interlinked and in the hands of various data custodians?
THINK ABOUT IT.
**For more information, check out this interesting video by market intelligence firm IDC.
“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd in her riveting keynote at the WWW2010 conference. She makes some excellent points about Big Data, privacy and the importance of context in this highly recommended read.
So if data is digital air, what does it mean for the future of media? We’ve seen some monumental shifts in the industry during the last few years and we’re currently in the midst of an epic struggle between media and technology companies for control over a fragmented digital media universe. No one has a true monopoly over user attention on the Internet. In fact, content is now abundant and attention is scarce, so how do you find an audience in a media landscape in which no one is truly only consuming, but also creating, sharing and interacting?
By filtering the digital air supply — by aggregating and curating digital media and building better tools for consumers to create, access and share the media they want. That’s how you can attempt to capture audiences. And in a world where consumers have more choices than every before, the only way you can hope to keep their attention is by building trust.
As Danah Boyd points out. “Privacy is not about control over data nor is it a property of data. It’s about a collective understanding of a social situation’s boundaries and knowing how to operate within them”. In other words, privacy is all about trust and not violating user expectations around their data.
If Data is Digital Air, User Data is Digital Oil. It’s the data that fuels the Internet economy, but it’s also a scarce natural resource that is dependent on the ability to build and maintain user trust. Like oil, user data needs to be managed in a responsible, sustainable manner. If you violate user trust, you run the risk of turning away users and the data that comes with it.
You love the way every new medium for creating, consuming & communicating media that has emerged in the recent past (from email and instant messaging to social media and smart phones) has all seamlessly managed to transform the way you live to the point where you’ve seriously started to doubt if you could survive without any of it. I ask myself that all the time. Here’s the dilemma — Are we sure if all this technology that we love so dearly is in fact making us more free, productive, connected, informed or just cloaking your perception of reality with an endless stream of information & digital distractions?
I’m not sure either. It’s probably a bit if both, but how often do any of us sit and reflect upon what traits and values the brand new iPhone or Facebook and Twitter are actually adding or taking away from our lives? I’m not suggesting you do that because the answer will rarely, if at all, be in absolutes. Nevertheless, these are important questions that don’t get asked often enough. Most of us blindly accept and embrace technology as it is thrust upon us assuming more information has to be better than less, faster connectivity ought to be better than slow and all that is new is obviously better than what’s old.
At one end, thetechnophobes mourn about the speed of progress & risk being left behind, while at the other end, the technophiles eagerly march towards techno utopia. However, the very notion that we’re all either technophiles or a technophobes is firstly as ridiculous as the idea that we can only have either right or left wing political ideologies. Who can disagree that what we really need in politics (theoretically at least) is a midpoint between extremes? But I digress…in terms of technology, this balance cannot be achieved by passing judgments on media and communications technologies. However, we need to start asking the right questions — by observing technology’s current and potential impact on human needs and values with a view to nurturing traits that are beneficial to individuals and society in general.
So where do we begin? I’ve spent the past few precious minutes of my life typing this post on my iPhone, rather than killing zombies in my favorite iPhone game. I’d say I’m off to a good start.…back to the game now.
“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd 