WHAT YOU WANT IS WHAT YOU SEE

We are a product of our environment. As a product of the first television generation, and as a parent of the next, it is impossible to ignore the impact that television has had in shaping our lives. We carry much of this baggage with us when we make the decision to become content creators, as I did in 1963, at the highly impressionable age of 15. You cannot be a digital content creator without first understanding your role as a content consumer. And, hopefully, as a content creator you’re teaching kids (yours or someone else’s) to be media-literate; it gives a whole new meaning to the concept of responsibility. Having lived and worked through four decades of revolutionary change in the process of creating television and, now, digital media content, it is humbling to recognize that the most dramatic changes in the way we create and consume content still lay ahead. And it is daunting to realize that the process of learning our craft can never stop. The digitization of media has enabled the opportunities to create and proliferate content to grow exponentially. Although the principles of good storytelling have not changed in thousands of years, the tools for expressing those stories are evolving at an ever-accelerating pace. (Incidentally, practically all content involves some kind of storytelling, from the shortest clip to the longest movie.) Thanks to digitization, itself driven by an exponential increase in digital processing power, these tools are becoming evermore affordable and accessible to the next generation of content creators.


The evolution of digital media is far from complete, but the directions in which it is taking us are already apparent. The days of limited choice—What You See Is All You Get—are ancient history. Media today is characterized by abundant choice, but control still rests in the hand of the privileged few. Driven by the technologies of the digital revolution, we are rapidly converging on a new media paradigm: What You Want Is What You See (WYWIWYS). A key element of this new paradigm is the shift from synchronous (real-time) consumption of media content to asynchronous consumption. To fully appreciate how liberating this can be, consider the role that e-mail has played in enhancing our ability to communicate with one another on a global basis. By forwarding and storing messages, it is not necessary for two people to link up in real-time. And unlike the conversations that finally take place after a game of phone tag, the content of the message is preserved. It can even be shared by forwarding it to others, and large groups can converse by broadcasting messages and responses to everyone on an e-mail list.