My boss and some of Quinnipiac\u2019s interactive students did an analysis of the words in our course titles since the start of the program. I hadn\u2019t seen the results, and he asked me which word I thought had decreased the most in use.<\/p>\n
\u201cDigital?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, you are the word man.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was right.<\/p>\n
While the word \u201cdigital\u201d described a change in our culture, it never said anything about the effects of that change. Media is digital now. It\u2019s no longer analog, like magnetic sound tape or celluloid film or printed pages. So what?<\/p>\n
Calling everything \u201cnew\u201d media meant even less. That we term anything with new just illustrates how unaware every generation is of its own youth, or in denial it will become old. New can never last long as a description. Even \u201cNew York\u201d is losing its luster.<\/p>\n
\u201cMobile\u201d was also a change and not an outcome. So were \u201celectronic,\u201d \u201cInternet,\u201d and \u201conline.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1994, Ogilvy & Mather coined the terms e-business and e-commerce for an IBM marketing campaign<\/a>, the \u201ce\u201d standing for electronic.<\/p>\n Four years later, Steve Jobs introduced the iMac, the first Apple i-product, preceding the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. He said the \u201ci\u201d in iMac stood for Internet, and by extension, individual, instruct, inform, and inspire<\/a>. It was more marketing hype, but it was Jobs\u2019 marketing hype\u2014more prescient than most people\u2019s research.<\/p>\n Jobs was smarter than IBM to stress the Internet and particularly the individual over electronics or commerce to reach consumers, but the lasting result of his and all of these monikers is our interconnectedness.<\/p>\n Which is why the term \u201cinteractive\u201d persists in the Quinnipiac program course titles and our public conversation. It describes the effect created by the new digitization and mobility of media. \u201cInteractivity\u201d is responsible for almost everything in the headlines over the past few years.<\/p>\n The average person used to be an audience member, a spectator. Now we write, snap, tweet, and make\u2014making us more cognizant of our realities as we edit and design them.<\/p>\n Individually, each of us sees the Web, our smartphone, and mobile digitization as an extension of our self, but all of these rendered personal narratives must go somewhere. We are all, suddenly, just as much audience members to one another as we are all on stage.<\/p>\n