The Nature of Interactive Media - and where it's going

I originally intended this as a reply to Huanyan's comment to my "iwant2bfamous.com" entry... but it ballooned into an epic. Oh well, here goes:

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"My take is that, depending on what type of blog you are going..."

Hmm, that's a good point you raised up. Think that was something I didn't consider in depth.

Actually, what I was introspecting about was WHY do people love to keep on checking blogs? What are some of the 'push' and 'pull' factors that relate to blogs - especially as a form of interactive media?

What you raised up was a good point - we need to take into account the various types of blogs. Different types of blogs (or for that matter, let's generalise it to media in general) have different 'pull' factors that appeal to various audiences.

Hey, this is a very interesting topic... actually, I realise that I really enjoy investigating interactive media.

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Which would go on to another question that I've been pondering since yesterday - what is/are the current trend/s of interactive media as we interpret it?

This question was triggered off when I was chatting with a few JC students on their way to an interactive media workshop. You can see the increasing interest and public awareness - no doubt thanks to the massive moolah poured in by our good Gahmen ;) - as witnessed by MSN, the newspapers, etc.

I remember taking this module "Design of Interactive Media". In that module, we were stuffed with tons and tons of software tutorials... good stuff, yeah... like boiled vegetables. *bleah*

So I was thinking, currently, how academia and the mass media may see "interactive" as in "interactive media" would be to see it in terms of "you see/hear it, you click it/interact with it."

But that would be, I guess, the first level of interactivity - as in interacting with a toy. For we're now seeing the 2nd level of "interactivity" as in the profligate growth of "social media" - e.g. blogs, social spaces such as Friendster and MySpace, and photo-tagging websites such as Flickr, where users can add tags and so on to their photos.

And I'll like to add in the example of "Urban Dead" by Kevan Davis (a text-based game), as an example of interactive media. For graphics, it gets zero; for playability and interactivity, it scores pretty close to ten out of ten. Maybe that's because players can make changes to the landscape, coordinate attacks, just chat or talk on in-game "radio channels", or whatever. In other words, it's a MMORPG. Heh.

But what serves as the common denominator underlinking ALL these "social media" and "MMORPGs" and the like? I think it all boils down to two factors - words and the desire to build relationships.

Let's face it - we're social creatures by nature. Nobody, even the most introverted person, can live very well (physically or mentally) without interacting with another person. And drawing on linguistics, research (e.g. the development of Nicaguaran Sign Language in the 1970s) has already proven that humans have this inbuilt innate ability (supported by various linguists such as Chomsky) to communicate using words.

So, I think this is where the actual trend of interactive media would be going towards in the next few years - not so much based on flashy multimedia or intensive graphics... but simply as various manifestations of the humble written and spoken word.

Consider SMS versus 3G, consider radio - still around for a century - and the podcast is just another form of radio. Consider the blog, consider the phone. Consider MMORPGs - people type and type... consider photo-sharing sites with user comments and tags... even videos - youtube.com is popular, because people can TYPE in comments and share... (well, it helps that it's free haha) as compared to the less-popular Google Video.

So in conclusion, I guess the next "killer application" wouldn't be some "Flash"y website, but rather, a simple nifty application that enables people to type in their thots and interact with one another more.

Ha, just some thots... correct me if I'm wrongs. ;)