Digital media

Media is the plural of the word `medium' meaning `in between' or in the middle. A medium, then, is in between communicators, carrying the encoded message from sender to an intended receiver. The air that carries our verbal utterances is a medium; a clay tablet with impressions marking the number of head of cattle is a medium. Communication technologies are media with a long history and are used to create inventory and portability of information via the senses, primarily of what is seen and heard (McLuhan 1964).

Digital media are media stored as codes by computational devices in a numerically binary series that are then represented electronically through on-screen pixilated images, electro-magnetic sound and text, constituting multimedia - the simultaneous availability of electronic media forms. This ability to absorb other media as digital sound and light representations has brought about what is known as convergence (Dijk 2004) where tele-communication, data communication and mass communication merge due to the ubiquitous nature of digitisation. Multimedia representations as sign systems also converge when digitised. The convergence created by the digitisation of media, then, is both potential and hindrance: as potential, the free flow of information reaches previously inactive zones of communication; as hindrance, the easy transferability of data causes forms of media to blur, rendering them often unintelligible.

Digitisation of media also allows interaction to occur, enabling the user to continue the process of authoring, encoding the medium at any given point in time, making what was once a static artefact into a dynamic experience. Digital multimedia interaction beckons the invention of new sensory combinations to resolve the problem of convergence in communication technologies research.

References

Dijk, J. V. 2004, `Digital Media', in Sage Handbook of Media Studies, ed. J. D. H. Downing, California.

McLuhan, M. 1964, Understanding Media, McGraw Hill, Toronto.

Summary Written By

Roman Danylak

Creativity and Cognition Studios

Faculty of Information Technology

University of Technology, Sydney