Digital Media

Before our first lecture, I felt I had a pretty knowledgeable impression of 'digital media'. The term brings to mind cell phones, Ipods, Photoshop – anything computer related. It also makes me think of the social networking phenomena that is Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and especially digital music. Through the Internet, digital media has promoted the sharing of information - be it our thoughts, music, art and so on. It's drastically changed the way we operate our everyday lives in the world, and is the reason we are now all unavoidably 'connected' to each other. We can now experience so much more – music, food recipes, clothing styles and a million other things with influence from all over the globe. It's forced businesses to adapt to a new, digitalized environment. It's posed new challenges for laws all around the globe... the list goes on. After our first lecture my initial thoughts weren't changed but I definitely saw some things I hadn't before. The building graffiti really caught my attention – I'd never seen stuff like that before. The lecture really just opened up my mind into whats possible with digital media, and got me excited to start making some things in class.

RTA students should be taking this digital media course because we have to. The future is digital. Everything is digital. Even if after this course I never take digital media again, it will for sure come up somewhere along the line either during school or in work. Lets say I'm producing a movie or trying to to build a record company. I will need a basic knowledge of how to build a website to promote myself, or at least know how much time it's going to take someone else to make one. And within that website I'll need some interesting logo and design, and have to understand what sort of styles and trends are attractive to the target audience. As digital media becomes more and more integrated into society, the more important it is for us to know how to manipulate it and how to use it to our advantage.

Yes, McLuhan was absolutely right. In this cyber-connected world we can learn about what our friends up to on an hourly basis, we can know a school, a phone number, a best friend of a total stranger at the click of a button – the effect is a more sociable environment. We know more private details about people than we ever could have in the past. But also with this new medium we become vulnerable to things like information overload, wherein our brains have trouble digesting the mass amount of advertisements, updates and so on and therefore the medium becomes ineffective. Another important part of studying and practising digital media is to learn how to make our work effective, so that the viewer is able to receive the message effectively and is not clouded by too much information.