What's a MEDIA?

Are you noticing as you are LISTENing, READing, PRINTing, WATCHing, INTERacting, BLOGing, MYSPACEing,PODCASTing, REPORTing, WRITing, EDITing, SHOOTing, CELLPHONEing, TEXTing, EMAILing, IMing, TIVOing, HDTV shopping, ETALing? That nothing remains the same two days in a row?

Fun yeah, but tough on us who have been charged with the mission of sending students into the the world prepared to develop and influence the MEDIA.  HELP!

A desperate and confused Industry (?) has itself stolen a word to define its dilemma. CONVERGENCE.  We are all being sucked into a common mixing pot. We are having to subdue our animosities, and  actually chat with each other.  Every radio and TV station has a web site. Many of them have direct working relationships with newspapers, sharing reporters photos and video.

All newspapers have web sites that reveal just about everything you can get from picking up their paper on the front porch. Many of the newspapers are experimenting with pod casts, radio style newscasts over the internet.

While TV stations race to get transmitters up to broadcast HD TV?  Cable, Satellite and Telephone concerns are racing to make that form of broadcasting obsolete.

TV stations are hiring what they call backpack journalists. These are people who get paid by, but may never see the inside of a TV station.  They find their stories, shoot them with a digital camera, write them on a laptop, edit them on a laptop, and feed them back to the station via phone line, satellite, or other mysterious means.

Advertisers are non-plused. They have no idea where to put their money.  Politicians and influence purveyors are lost.  They don't know how to get a consensus. Everyone seems to be off in to his or her special interest.

You want to see me smile? Tell me about the person who knows exactly where this is all going to end up. I think maybe the alien RABBIT knows, but he ain't telllin'. He just wants to get back to his own planet before we implode.

I think the fun part of all this CONVERGENCE will be participating and watching the ways in which each media form redefines itself.

I notice one of the local dailies cutting costs with smaller print and going to a more tabloid style.  That's tabloid in printing style, not content.  They're also running a 33 day series following up on survivors of this state's deadliest highway accident. A daily series running that long is very unique. Anything to build interest. 

Finding large scale loyalty in any media form is going to be a fascinating process.  It will be interesting to see what we, as consumers, decide. We (consumers) are really the only earthbound beings who know how this will all end.  Trouble is we haven't all gotten together to share our thoughts, yet.

I can't say I'll never get this pompously philosophical and reflective again.  But it's not my plan. I don't feel the same sense of catharsis when I've been semi-serious this long.  I just needed to get it all out of my head.

But look, I gotta run. Beethoven is screaming at me on my cell phone. And I'm right in the middle of an online scrabble match.

Isn't it interesting what AOL's spell check will and won't accept?

Oh, wait.  I have to tell you this story.  I'm working out at an athletic club last week?  I hear some bizarre New Wavish music behind me.  I turn to see a lithe woman pulling her cell phone out of her bra.  Odd, but I get right back to my workout.

I finish a set of something and casually turn in the woman's direction again? She is bent over backwards on one of those huge plastic balls?  She is doing situps?  And the whole time she is doing the situps? She is holding her cell phone to her right ear and chatting away. I'm not sure what I was most impressed with, the fact she was doing it, or the fact she was capable of doing it.

Okay, I think that's it for today.