Recently Kevin Kelly from Wired, gave a pertinent presentation about the changing digital world, namely how content is closely related to how the digital world molds itself. Kelly has broadly identified six verbs that encompass the changes the digital landscape is currently undergoing:
- Screening: According to Kelly, “We are no longer people of the book, we are now people of the screen.” Screens are pervasive, they are everywhere in our daily lives. Nowadays music, movies, images are converging, meaning they have moved from varying media sources to one single large media, on one screen for all.
- Interacting: There are strong user expectations about interacting, so now it is requisite to provide readers with interactive content that better engages an audience’s interest.
- Sharing: The internet/web is based on sharing, no data exists in isolation. The cloud is a prime example of data sharing and of course social media content is the largest example of sharing. What’s interesting about sharing today is not merely its occurrence, but the equation that exists between transparency and personalization. The more transparent people become, providing information about themselves, the more personalized their content can be as providers know more about them and their tastes and preferences.
- Flowing: As wee entered the real-time era, we have moved from PC to Cloud, from Today to Now, from Me to We and from Items to Data. This is the reality of the new media, it is always on.
- Accessing (not owning): Here is where Kelly gets to the heart of the matter. In this world, where any content is always there and always on, we have shifted from ownership to access. Proving Cleeng is right, it is now time for just-in-time buying!
- Generating: Kelly points out that since the Internet is a sort of a big copy machine, the challenge remains to create content which is not easy to copy but easy to pay for. To make content hard to copy, he explained that:
- People are paying for immediacy rather than content
- People are paying for personalization
- People are paying for “authentification
- People are paying for “findability” aka they go on Amazon to find a piece of content quickly and easily
- People are paying for interpretation, meaning that people may download a free software, but are still willing and ready to pay for the manuals explaining how the software works.
Well, a big thank you Mr. Kelly for reminding us that we are moving in the right direction, providing content creators with a solution to give consumers immediate access to their unique content and to pay for it in a blink of a eye!
To view the video of Kevin Kelly’s presentation, click here: http://fora.tv/2011/06/22/Kevin_Kelly_The_Future_of_the_Digital_Media_Landscape
