Defining Emerging Media
“Story does not exist until it has been heard.”
— Tabitha Jackson, Director, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program
Stories live in our communication architecture. An experience, emotion, thought, or idea that exists in one person’s mind is not a story until it has been transferred to another person. Whether in the form of oral storytelling, images on a cave wall, printed text, radio waves, computer games, or augmented reality experiences, story comes into being through the media we use to communicate with each other.
[E]merging” or “new” media means media spaces that are fundamentally exploratory. I wrote a short essay about this topic years ago called First Word Art / Last Word Art. First-word art, by definition, deals with emerging or new media, and last-word art is with preexisting, known media, and the differences are marked. In emerging, or first-word media, there are no rules yet. That makes it quite a challenge for evaluation, critiquing, and so on, whereas [in] last-word art media, the rules are well known. [T]hat makes it virtually impossible to label any emerging media piece virtuoso except in retrospect, but I could be wrong about that. — Michael Naimark, VR and interactive media pioneer and scholar
So, by definition, “emerging media” are communication formats or channels in the process of becoming known as part of a long evolution of our communication architecture. That process involves an interplay between the following:
- Creatives (i.e., artists and scientists), who imagine an experience they want to communicate in a particular manner that cannot be done with existing media;
- Investors/Funders, who decide which ideas will be resourced for exploration;
- Technologists, who invent and iterate on tools (i.e., hardware, software) that facilitate the communication of the imagined experience;
- Marketers, who figure out how to persuade people to use the new medium;
- Audiences, who participate in the experience and provide feedback;
- Stakeholders, who use the audience responses to innovate further.
One individual can play any or all of these roles and the process can be re-ordered in many ways. Additionally, it can take decades before this process results in an established medium and, even then, the new medium is often in a constant state of refinement and innovation. For example, virtual reality has been emerging for 40-plus years.
A new medium doesn’t exist in isolation — it requires networks to circulate, evolve, and gain audiences. “What are the new networks?” asks interviewee Adam Huttler, the CEO of Fractured Atlas. “How is the modern world changing the dynamics of media as an industry? And even more generally, how do people get information? I think about dynamics like the fragmentations and echo chambers on Facebook. I think to understand emerging media you have to look beyond the specific technology and look at it all together.”
A new medium does not necessarily replace older parts of the communication architecture as much as expands the infrastructure. Existing formats for recorded sound, moving image, live performance, and literature continue to be in use, even when specific technologies become antiquated (i.e., printed books, phonographs, celluloid film) and others come into use (i.e., eBooks, streaming music, VR).
Sometimes evaluating changes in the media field through a lens of expansion, rather than replacement, can help prevent debates triggered by fear of change. For example, discourse around VR often devolves to comparisons between VR and film. How can VR replace the feeling of having the shared experience of watching a moving image in a theater? The reality is that VR will never match that experience, nor should it. VR innovators are discovering a completely different experience of story that has its own value. In fact, there is increasing proof that VR and film can be great complements rather than competitors (i.e., see Zero Days VR, Notes on Blindness, The Martian VR Experience).
Telling different aspects of the same story can meet multiple wants and needs of the audience — and in some cases, evoke new needs or desires. “We make sense of the world through stories, but we remember it through experience… And so what happens when my stories become experience? I don’t have the answer to this, but this is really what I’m interested in,” says interviewee Karim Ben Khelifa, a photojournalist and VR maker.
Why we are investing in this stuff? Why wouldn’t we? At each point in our evolution as human beings, story has to evolve with us. … I am never going to be that person that says theaters are going away. I think that is ridiculous. But I do think that we are going to naturally evolve into wanting to have, and wanting to explore, a story in a different way. — Diana Williams, Content Developer and Strategist at Lucasfilm
What media are emerging today? What do they promise? These questions were posed to every person interviewed for this analysis to generate a robust sense of how stakeholders in the field define the term.
The answers were broad, thoughtful, and highly valuable. Some describe the coming frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and even synthetic biology as emerging, while others consider anything produced on or for the internet as still emerging — especially when considering the long-tail of innovation in mediums such as film, print, and theater:
- I would define [emerging media] as stories and experiences that are created in ways that are not mainstream. — Loc Dao, Chief Digital Officer at the National Film Board of Canada
- The word “emerging” is the essential word to me. …because it is not framed by some of the requirements of mainstream narratives, it’s flexible. It might look a lot of different ways. It’s a morph, but also it is doing fresh perspective work. It’s doing the work of generating new or different ways of thinking about all the ways that we’re creating media… One of the most exciting outcomes of emerging media is decentering legitimacy. This idea of: Who are the authorities of narrative? Who are the agents of story? Who gets to be the creator of history? That’s one of the most promising outcomes, shifting this trust we have in these larger corporate media structures and honoring the knowledge and complexity. — Morgan Willis, Program Director of the Allied Media Conference
- If you’re only following the trends, then you won’t be following storytelling, you’ll be following technology. You really have to follow the storytellers and designers who are digging deep over and over again in projects, because that’s where you’re going to see real development…I’m not that interested in the [cutting edge] tools to define emerging media. You can teach people interactive storytelling with free tools, like Twine…We [Game Innovation Lab @ USC] try to blend the creative impulse, the creative culture of storytelling, and a commitment to making media as culture. Even if we’re making it interactive or technological culture, we still feel that it’s about connecting with people and expressing ourselves. And I think that makes a difference. That’s why I’m so focused on stopping the promotion of innovation as being a de facto technology. It’s not about the technology. — Tracy Fullerton, game designer, educator and author
- The most exciting thing happening right now is the ability to reach consumers where they consume their media… When I was growing up, there were two places you told stories and reached people: At a movie theater or on a television. There’s been this massive transformation in terms of this democratization of distribution. Now, suddenly, you can reach people on their tablets, their computers, and their phones. To be able to create content that is even more specific to that audience is exciting. And there are such new ways of telling stories, with immersive storytelling, virtual reality, experiential storytelling, augmented reality… Through the digital landscape we can give people (in real time) a deeper understanding of the stories they hear and see… it’s incredibly effective. — Morgan Spurlock, filmmaker and digital storyteller.
- I think AI is big and will be big…and it’s not just hype. …There [are] so many social implications around it and all its different realms, it’s not just one thing… AI will be a part of the way you eat, how you commute, how you communicate. It’s everything! — Lauren McCarthy, artist, programmer, and scholar
- I’m thrilled that you’re using the term “emerging media.” I like it better than “new media,” because it’s less a focus on what’s novel than on what’s developing. Obviously, there are a number of different things that are actively developing right now.… Even though the first exhibition of computer art was in 1965, and computer art is older than acrylic paint – look it up — the art world is still very slow to come to grips with computation, and to a certain extent computers in general. So, new computer technologies play a big part of the landscape of what is currently emerging in culture, partially because they are, themselves, constantly changing. There are computer technologies that are emerging right now, such as the recent development of very powerful neural network techniques for doing artificial intelligence, and artists are experimenting with these in interesting ways. And next year it will be something else. There’s an even further horizon of emerging media, which is even more out there, such as bio-art, and so forth. — Golan Levin, Director, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon
Above is the tally of responses to the open-ended question: “What media is emerging?” Please note that the interview respondents defined these categories as of early 2017.
We provide further definition of these categories here.
Editor’s note: This article appears is the third in a series of articles by Kamal Sinclair, Director of the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program. Previously, Vantage has published Sinclair’s “Making a New Reality: Furthering Equality in Emerging Media” and “Categories of Emerging Media”.
These ideas emerged from her groundbreaking report Making a New Reality about social equality in emerging media, produced with support from Ford Foundation JustFilms and supplemental support from the Sundance Institute. Learn more about the goals and methods of this research, who produced it, and the interviewees whose insights inform the analysis.
