The collision of technology and media is having profound effects on a more modern ecosystem. Media are becoming democratized, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production - used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive. Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged. The internet is a global platform, and the most important one for the future. The democratization of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed or cursed with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.

Dan Gillmor said in his interview with BBC news that we can take a look at several of the most important tools in today's evolving media sphere:

Blogs

Blogs, short for weblogs, are getting the most attention, and for good reason. They are all about a web that is "read-write" as opposed to the mostly "read-only" medium of the 1990s.

The most important aspect of a good blog is its humanity

What is a blog? Nothing more than an online journal in reverses chronological order on the page, that is, where the most recent updates are at the top. They typically have hyperlinks, or web pointers, to other sites. Many blogs also solicit comments from readers. It has a distinctly human voice, even if a group instead of an individual is doing the postings. The conversation is an essential part of the process.

Wikis

A wiki is a website on which anyone can edit any page. This sounds like an anarchy, but it doesn't have to be: the Wikipedia project - an online encyclopedia with more than a million articles in a number of languages - is far from perfect, but it's a remarkably valuable addition to the reference universe.

Wikis may turn out to be most useful inside networks, such as at corporations, where people can work together on project planning and other common interests.

Podcasting

The word "podcast" is a combination of two concepts - broadcast and the Apple iPod music player that represent portable and compact.

Circuit board projected on hand

Podcasting is about the ability of almost anyone to create audio content that typically has a small audience for any individual program, and then sending it to any digital device, portable or not. The actual human voice has its own power over the written word. We get different nuances from audible speech, and they can often tell us things the printed page cannot.

Web Mashups

In Silicon Valley, the current rage is called "web 2.0" - a reference to the web as a computing platform in its own right.

As more and more companies give third parties a way to combine their web-based data and services with other companies' data and services, clever folks are mashing things together in remarkable ways. For example, check out ChicagoCrime.org, which puts government-provided crime data on Google maps and lets people drill down into detail.

Now add to this the idea that everyday folks can start annotating maps and other kinds of information on their own. The possibilities seem endless.

The democratization of media creation, distribution and access does not necessarily foretell that traditional media are dinosaurs of a new variety. If we are fortunate, we'll end up with a more diverse media ecosystem in which many forms - including the traditional organizations - can thrive. The most exciting aspect of this change is in the emerging conversation. Bottom-up media tools are conversational in nature, even though they can be used in a top-down mode.

The lack of a person's absence and invisibility when a conversation happening at the moment as if it is replaced by interactions that comes with most devices of these present technologies.

This phenomenon raises a changing value in the level of human need for direct verbal communication.

Distance erased with a media information system of the present, which gained independence activities in cyberspace, making no restrictions to access or activities within it. This makes the media no longer have a line.

Then comes a question for us whether we would be stuck to just consume and lose nothing in it endless or use it to build for our better life and environment.

Welcome to YIVF # 5

Invisible Video! - Everything Connected