Gone With The Digital

The social media era  may have scattered a lot of our job descriptions into the new unknown areas, but seems there’s not a discussion more heated then “When digital is going to kill the print word?”It was media baron Rupert Murdoch who started the whole thing in 1980, making the bold prediction that all news and advertising will eventually be delivered digitally. Here we are few decades later, and let’s face it, not only the media industry is undergoing profound changes, but so do our habits of consuming the information itself.

Serving the generation who is accustomed to have access to pretty much anything in the fingertip’s reach is a tough duty indeed. But the fact that young adults prefer to get their information online created quite a phenomenon, described by Ethan Zuckerman in his “Digital Cosmopolitans” : the information is accessible as it never had been, but now limited by our attention and often enough ‘who we know’ becomes  what we know, forming a sort of info bubble.

As advertising and media go hand-in-hand, when, say, a magazine steps into the digital realm, the way brands promote themselves changes too. When else could you imagine an ad for the TV series season premiere, disguised cleverly in the in-depth article of New York Times? On the other hand, the opportunities opener role of digital is undeniable and countless number of stories would have been told, if not for the digital era.

The number of magazines and newspapers folding or going digital-only seems to be speeding up with every passing year, and as credible publications with a history like “Newsweek”one after another join the digital crowd. The path to paperless media is the one of innovations and changes, but as we have seen with theater, books and other forms of entertaining arts, the worthy things don’t get killed by the tech, but make the best use of it.

社交媒体时代可能会分散我们的很多工作描述到新的未知领域,但似乎没有更激烈的讨论“新媒体何时取代纸媒？”这是传媒大亨鲁珀特•默多克(Rupert Murdoch)在1980年开始研究的事情,他做出大胆的预测,所有的新闻和广告最终会交付于数字。几十年之后,让我们面对它,不仅媒体行业正在发生深刻变化,我们消费信息本身的习惯也会变化。

为习惯从指尖获取信息的一代人服务确实是一个艰巨的任务。但事实上,年轻人更愿意在线获取信息。Ethan Zuckerman在他的《数字世界主义者》中说：如此轻松获取信息是前所未有的,但现在经常受到我们的注意力限制，那些“我们知道谁”变成了“我们所知道的”,形成一种信息泡沫。

广告和媒体密不可分,杂志进军数字领域,品牌宣传自己的变化。你能想象广告穿插在一季电视剧首映中,在纽约时报的深度文章中巧妙伪装？另一方面,数字的机会开拓作用是不可否认的,无数的故事在数字时代被讲述。

渐渐减少或电子化的报纸杂志数量似乎逐年增加，以及像《新闻周刊》这样的可信出版物相继电子化。无纸化媒体的路径是创新和变化之一，但正如我们看到的戏剧，书籍和其他形式的娱乐艺术，有价值的东西不被科技所杀死，而是被充分利用。