New Media Has Old Roots

For some time now I have held a belief that the new media, as demonstrated by the World Wide Web is a continuously morphing conversation that has more in common with ancient oral traditions of storytelling than it does with books and journals.

Rather than being permanent and immutable, the web allows people to pick their way through information, change it, respond to it and create communications with each other. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this shifting intercourse.

A recent study done by John Foley of the University of Missouri supports my theses as well.

Foley says the new media follows the same traditions that used to happen around the campfire and at the local tavern, where stories, news and songs were shared, never the same way twice. "The stories could bend and morph and adapt depending on who was there and what the mood of the audience was, " he says, "And people weren't just the receivers of information, it was participatory, they were co-creators."

Sound familiar?

The old media, particularly newspapers are limited by their greatest strength: permanence.

From the storyteller's perspective, when stories are written down, they die. The book must be a monologue that must be absorbed sequentially, word after word, sentence after sentence. Put that way it sounds like a ploddingly dull way to get information. No wonder the under-25 generation is not interested in the old media.

Kids who function with ease in the hyperlinked, multimedia world of the Internet, find books a tough and boring slog.

It also explains why schools are struggling to teach print-based curriculum while the entire structure of human knowledge is being rewritten at the speed of light outside the classroom.

"Oral tradition is a technology of communications just as the Internet is technology of communications," says Foley. Print is technology too, but oral traditions and the Internet have more in common with each other than either has with print.

Foley postulates that "text is not the most natural way for humans to communicate."

It's not likely that books will disappear but people will have to develop multiple literacies to function in the future.

The traditional media is not aware of the ease with which the new media users can operate in a sometimes baffling electronic environment where every piece of information chosen leads to more choices and the experience of navigating is different every time.

"The new media users are native to the technology," says Foley.

On-line publishing techniques are now being used to bridge this gap.

The Pathways Project (www.pathwaysproject.com) encourages analysis and creation of oral traditions in new media by exploiting the greatest strength shared by ancient and modern information technology: open source content creation and interactivity.

Pathways includes a morphing book in a instant state of revision by the readers-users.

This interactivity is the key to the success of the new media. With the old media, the only interactivity we can have is writing a letter to the editor and hoping he or she will publish the carefully edited version of it in the next few days.

With the new media there is instant response and dialogue.

Editors of newspapers are recognizing this. For example, many papers now have their reporter take along a video camera to an assignment.
They shoot a roughly assembled video load it up on the newspaper's website and then follow this up with a detailed story the next day.

This, too, is in the tradition of oral communications but uses the new media to accomplish it.

Photo:  Rob Lee. Creative Commons License Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic