What is Interactive Media

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Interactive Media 3000 Word Essay

Francis Nicholls

What is Interactive Media?

I am going to begin my essay with a brief definition of the phrase Interactive Media;

“Interactive media is the integration of digital media including

combinations of electronic text, graphics, moving images, and

sound, into a structured digital computerised environment that

allows people to interact with the data for appropriate purposes.

The digital environment can include the Internet, telecoms and

interactive digital television.”

In the simplest of terms, Interactive media is any type of media that you can interact with. Whether it be a mobile phone, television or a website, as long as your interacting with a piece of digital technology, it then comes under the phrase Interactive Media.

How is Interactive Media Developing?

Interactive media is vastly developing each year, not only in the amount of users but also the amount of creators, inventors and developers. The scale of young people opting to take further education all around the world in areas such as media, means potential for new ideas and concepts which are already rapidly evolving and emerging every day, is going to be greater. Also with large media companies ever expanding and developing, not to mention newer and smaller companies starting every week, the demand for talented individuals with new ideas and up-to-date knowledge of software is becoming bigger and bigger. Which also leads to more people deciding to take courses such as Interactive Media in the first place. Interactive Media is an ever-expanding aspect of our ever-expanding society, and I strongly believe that certain people shouldn’t be so ignorant to the fact and the world needs to advance further, especially in medial advances and research.

Being left wing myself and also a big consumer of digital technology it is still very hard to say just how advanced we may be within the next 100 years. My opinion, looking back on the advances in a little as 20 years, how computers have advanced, how telecommunication has advanced, video, camera, web and many mode modes of interactive media, I think within the next 100 years our whole civilization will be dominated by the digital revolution. I think people may become lazier as a result, more and more things will become easier via digital processes and computers will be capable of much more. I also feel that jobs will become more scarce increasing unemployment due to the simple fact that machines and computers can operate more precisely than a human being and that they are also more reliable.

Also something I wouldn’t find too far fetched, is the idea of highly advanced technology, which could potentially be used in employment to take over the mundane rolls (maybe even unnecessary if technology were capable) such as factory workers and working on supermarket checkouts. Humans would normally do this, but being replaced by this newer technology would definitely increase unemployment, but maybe then people can be used in more important and useful jobs. Even if you look now, you will notice supermarkets are already introducing ‘self-service’ checkouts, which do not require and person-to-person contact.

Also factories already base most of their processes through the use of machinery even though there are still thousands of factory workers employed every year to do jobs technology will eventually be able to do alone.  Even more farfetched, and a long way off is the classic idea of flying cars. I do think that may cause a lot of extreme issues due to safety and such and if not thought about properly – ideas such as this one, which sound crazy now, may actually be possible in the future.

One of my reasoning’s for this is quite simple but fair; when you look back at quite a few old films which are set in the future, I have often thought to myself that their expectations of what they thought the modern day would be like are way off.  In many cases I have felt we are much more advanced than their expectations were. I also feel that in the rate that we have advanced in such a short space of time cannot just suddenly stop. I think we will carry on exceeding expectations and people will be discovering and creating more and more new inventions that may eventually be the downfall to our existence.

And although I haven’t read into the theory much, I find the idea very intriguing that maybe eventually computers/robots will become so highly advanced that they will be able to think for their selves and make their own decisions. Maybe even so advanced that they can be programmed to feel emotion or to learn, in which case I would feel very uneased about what could occur from such a perfect non-human stronger race. There are also references to ideas like this in films such as Blade Runner and iRobot.

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Sector of Discussion

This leads me on to talk about and discuss the area of interactive media that I have chosen to discuss. The area I have chosen is telecommunications and the development of mobile phones.

The reason why I have chosen to talk about mobile phones is that it is probably one of the fastest changing areas of interactive media to date, along with computers. It is an every day part of most peoples lives in the UK leaving a high demand on mobile technology development. Mobile phones in the last ten years ...

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