Page 167 - Mediapedia Mobile

PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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This third part of Mediapedia gets down to work in a different way. Chapter 5 bundles all the design elements of the first four chapters and turns them into a perfor- mance. Chapter 6 is about packaging what you make and about letting others see it. Chapter 7 provides a jump start for more ambitious projects in personal media.
able array of glittering media screens. The first screen was the silver screen
WELCOME TO
of cinema. The second screen was the “boob tube” of television. The third screen is the computer screen, showing files we create and files we browse on the Internet. The fourth is the “small screen” of mobile communications forms. It is poised for an explosive impact on the other screens and will in time become a thing all its own.
THE FOURTH SCREEN
Media guru Marshall McLuhan observed years ago that it takes a while for a new medium to discover what it is uniquely good at. Thus it’s unlikely that today’s world of the internet will look the same
in the future. Take rich media, for ex- ample. It wasn’t until 2006 that you could easily and inexpensively upload videos with streaming images and accompany- ing sound tracks. The term rich media summed it up well: unless you were rich in resources or rich in technical knowledge, what you could share over the internet was limited to words and still images.
What will that thing be? No one knows yet. If pressed I would guess that the fourth screen. The fourth screen will become a place where personal media reigns because of its relevancy and im- mediacy. There is a meta trajectory that points in just this direction. The content of film is the story while the content of TV is the character. The computer screen is different from those that came before it because its content is essentially that of interaction. The fourth screen—the small- est one in terms of size—will carry stuff that you program for it, not the other way around. The fourth screen is about per- sonalization. It will be made up of bits and
Today it’s a new game. Everybody reading this book has access to a remark-
PARTIII