聊聊新媒体与传播（英文）

本文是我申请某港校新媒体硕士时准备的材料（因此采用了英文），在此和谐了相关的个人信息。文章主要想表达对新媒体及传播领域相关的一些个人思考，现在拿出来与大家分享。

正文如下：

Media and New Media

What is new media? According to Wikipedia, “new media refers to on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, and creative participation. Another aspect of new media is the real-time generation of new and unregulated content”.

This is not a satisfactory answer to me. Actually I think new media is a fuzzy concept. What is new and what is traditional, there is no clear boundary line. We don’t think radio and TV are new media but they really were decades ago. Internet and smart devices we call new media now may be traditional representatives in the future. The definition changes and evolves continuously. Subversion may be born at any time. So maybe we should first discuss something more constant and more basic: What is media?

Since the moment I came across this rather abstract term in my primary school’s Nature course, I have been always considering this basic question. The word has jumped out from nearly every corner: physics, chemistry, life science, computer science, and daily life. Media’s definitions and examples differ much in different disciplines, but in fact just various forms of media.

Assuming we have two characters: the sender and the receiver. If the sender wants to communicate with the receiver, it must sends some information to the receiver, and media are the tools that are used to store the information and deliver it to the receiver, and vice versa. In Communication Theory, the set of the sender, the receiver, and media can be described as a simple communication model. So media can be anything, even human beings, if only it can match this model.

So what are the differences between a medium and another? General performance criterions such as storage quantity and quality, and delivery speed and efficiency of information should be considered. In addition, to store and deliver information, interactions happen between media and senders/receivers, which are similar with concepts of encoding and decoding in Communication Theory. I think it is these unique properties that make different media differ and new media new.

New Media’s Influence

We may simply subdivide the value chain of content into three links: content creation, content communication and content consumption. All of them require media’s participation.

In the old days, people are always hungry for new messages because content’s creators were much fewer than consumers, and costs of creation, communication and consumption were high. However, the Internet’s appearance has made a big difference. Although creators are still fewer than consumers, the costs in the whole value chain has lowered so much that delivered contents from over the world can easily exceed an individual’s limited communication channel capacity and digestive ability. Moreover, valuable contents increase faster but occupy a smaller proportion. This, in my opinion, is the core problem of the Information Explosion.

In China, people discuss a lot about either the content (內容) or the channel (渠道) is the king of the digital world (in my understanding, the term channel may refers to website, blog or social network service, which can also be treated as sub-media of the Internet, the big medium). Content is still the essential value we need, yet without channels’ high-quality communication the value cannot be cashed.

During my work at Yihaodian and Qudian, I have been constantly puzzled by this problem. Especially at Qudian, one Internet service start-up, we have been often considering how to make the cold market start. Which task should be preferential: finding more interesting content or gaining more web traffic? Now I believe they are equally vital. In fact, these two factors interact on each other in a positive loop - one’s increase/decrease leads to another’s increase/decrease. But where is the tipping point of growth? It’s still a secret to be uncovered.

Why does this question arise now rather than earlier? It’s because that new media and the accompanying information explosion has intensified the competition between contents for the access to consumers and made the channel’s role much more important.

New Media has changed the content value chain, and also the content itself.

In the first part of this article, we have talked about media’s properties. Every kind of medium has its unique properties. If we want to make use of a medium, we have to first learn about these properties, then determine what kind of information it can take, and finally create suitable content. How to describe a chocolate cake using sound, text or video? There must be differences.

Newer Than New

Media and content application’s future is a core issue I have been curious about. After the Internet’s popularization, the development has come into a rather gentle pace. One trend is rich-media content’s popularization. Although the most valuable information is often stored by text, integrated content with multimedia (image, audio, video, etc.) can express more information and help consumers understand and learn something faster. For creators, rich media help they produce more abundant and expressive contents and distinguish them from their competitors in the market. This may be the reason why the New York Times’ digital feature piece Snow Fall won The Pulitzer Prize.

Another trend is value chain’s decentralization. Nowadays nearly all the new media we are talking about are tied to the Internet. The Internet and related technologies have encouraged double-directional and flat flow of information. Threshold for creators has got much lower and contents’ long tail has emerged. Consumers have been able to search and get content and communicated with creators with lower costs. Everyone can be a creator, consumer or communicator and link to each other thanks to new media. Barrier is vanishing and giant middlemen become smaller and smaller.

However, the next revolution is still in the cradle. I have mentioned properties of media earlier. They can be classified to those general performance criterions and those interactive abilities. In my opinion, the key to the revolution of media is just the interactive abilities. Human’s senses of smell and touch are not taken full advantage of, and there are a lot of secrets of man’s perception and cognition. Technologies, which can bring brand new interactions, like the Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, and Brain-Computer Interface are on the way to real maturity.

Newer media are yet in the future. As an individual and a newbie fascinated by the trend, what I can do is to keep watching, learning, thinking and participating.