The Dawn of the Multimedia Age
The early digital era—our very recent past—has been about transplanting offline material online. That's in the process of changing. Jeff Stanger, founder of the Center for Digital Information, says many of us use the Internet to deliver the same kind of content we've generated for generations—it just so happens that we're transmitting them electronically. We write documents, possibly add a few graphic embellishments, save them as Word, PowerPoint, or pdf files, and then post them to a website or send them through cyberspace to another destination as an email attachment. When the receiving or requesting party opens the document, that person gets a static document—like any other document produced over the past several hundred years…it just happened to have been sent electronically—not by mail or messenger. The Internet to date, says Stanger, has been largely used by content producers as a delivery mechanism, but “now we're at an inflection point to a native digital era.”
The Internet can do so much more than just help us do research and transmit documents. There's an exciting world of opportunity for communicators to find new outlets of expression, and we've only just scratched the surface. Whether delivered on a website, through social media, or as an enhanced e-article or e-book, Internet-powered applications can help us see new details or gain a better perspective on subjects that would otherwise have remained opaque. Today's adventure into a new communication frontier starts with a fresh look at how we view content development. Most of us automatically think “document” when tasked with originating content. New tools and techniques, along with new attitudes, are changing all that. “Digital natives,” those individuals that thought leader Marc Prensky describes as “native speakers of the digital language,”2 are starting to express ideas and explain complicated subjects to others through more dynamic means. Digital natives are also called “Millennials,” the generation making its passage into adulthood at the start of the new millennium. Confident, expressive, and open to change, these fluent speakers of the digital language take to multimedia with great ease.3 They grew up with computers. Many of the changes underway are being driven by this demographic group. But digital native or not, it's time for you to explore multimedia's benefits if you haven't already started.
THE INTERNET IS REWIRING OUR BRAINS
Quantitatively speaking, we are the most informed generation in history. As trillions of bytes of information in cyberspace wait for us, ready to pulse through our fingertips at the command of a click, we are actively rewiring our brains. Stimulation, the kind we're getting from our daily data feasts, is changing our brain structure through neuroplasticity. The Internet is, in fact, changing our brains; this isn't an urban myth, but scientific reality.
There's no need to worry about changes to our brain from a physiological standpoint, but understanding its evolution is essential to anyone who communicates. As writer Nicholas Carr points out, our “calm, focused, undistracted linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts…”4 In a short span of only a couple of decades, the Internet has turned careful, deliberate readers into information hunters. Like hungry predators, we charge forward into our devices demanding an instantaneous fix only to lurch away moments later searching for more prey. This is very different from a generation ago, when people sat passively in libraries carefully reading books uninterrupted from start to finish.
Words printed on paper have always facilitated concentrated and sustained attention and thought. We were like content sponges soaking up knowledge like a puddle on the floor. We read in a linear manner, from left to right, and reflected on the content. Our role was passive; we sat, read, and pondered. We discussed content with classmates or colleagues, but would rarely interact with the author him or herself. Our brains got very comfortable over a half millennium or so with this static means of acquiring and sharing information.
The story of the singularly focused scholar, however, is quickly, and, most suddenly, becoming ancient history. The Internet encourages “a more distributed and plastic form of thinking,”5 leaving us new ways to experience information. Power scanning, instead of deep reading, is something we all do. Even academics confess to engaging in selective reading. Networked journal articles, rich interactive representations of current scientific knowledge, for example, enable academics to pursue “rapid and high-volume strategic reading.”6 This would have been unthinkable a generation ago among the academic elite. But with so much content readily available online, who has time to read through everything thoroughly? We've taught ourselves how to search and edit information at a glance with amazing efficiency. We go online, get what we want…and we get out.
While the rewiring of our brains is already having an impact on today's researchers, the greatest changes are occurring among the people who will be presiding over our burgeoning digital kingdom in the near future. Hyperconnected digital natives will reap the rewards of the Internet's bounty as they hopscotch from one idea to the next, fueling their creative pursuits. As they come to regard the Internet as their external brain, experts tell us, today's youth will not only be more expressive but will also be “nimble analysts” and effective “decision makers.”7 But all is not perfect in our digital future; there are downsides to an Internet-powered brain. These same experts warn us that our constantly connected youth will more likely jump to make quick, shallow choices in their constant quest for instant gratification.
Digital Native or Not—Jump on the Bandwagon
Carole Al-Kahouaji is a curriculum development pro and a grandmother. She knows that you need to embrace new digital means of expression to remain relevant, regardless of your age. As head of school at Rock Creek International School in Washington, DC, she pioneered programs to engage students in multimedia at a tender young age. Grammar school students built websites and developed digitally driven presentations—often in two languages—as homework assignments. The young people, she notes, take naturally to the new digital tools, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should become digital slackers. “It may not be as intuitive to older people, but it's still necessary,” she says. “Keeping an open mind and keeping up with what's out there is essential,” if you want to communicate effectively in the twenty-first century.
Al-Kahouaji is not alone in her observation. Communicators need to comprehend and apply new tools and styles to remain current. “Having a quick, snappy, powerful way to convey information is an imperative these days,” says Lee Rainie, who studies the habits of Millennials and other digital age citizens at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. “Lots of professional organizations are moving toward short crisp videos…two or three minutes with a human face and some simple infographics…It's another way for knowledge-based businesses to disseminate complicated information.”
For more information on Pew's Internet & American Life Project please visit: http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Demographics/Digital-Divide.aspx?typeFilter=5.