Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report may take place in 2054, but the futuristic world he constructed is built from modern experience. A think-tank of experts from fields as diverse as Advertising, Architecture, and the Military gathered during the film's pre-production to construct a plausible future. The end result is a world of communicative technologies, where interaction is personal and informative. Where mass communication can speak with a personal message. Interpersonal and Mass Communication evolve in the digital world to create a third medium ' The New Medium.

Can you recall the first time digital communication startled you with a personal suggestion? Your first Amazon.com recommendation, or a television show TIVO recorded for you, just because it thought you might enjoy it?

No doubt you sat for a moment pondering whether mass media had made you so mainstream that broadcasters could paint your personality with one broad stroke of their brush. More importantly, I can safely bet you wondered as well, just how your own company could learn to turn mass communication into a personal experience, reaching a broad audience with refined messages.

Someone was manufacturing crystal balls, and like every great entrepreneur and businessman you immediately wanted a coveted peak at the answer floating inside amid swirls of smoke, pixie dust, and strings of binary code.

The Medium has become A Medium?

The world of the 21st Century is not full of "squares." Quite the contrary, we live in a vibrant community of unique individuals. Reaching out and connecting with a broad audience today requires the sophisticated delivery of your message in countless variations. The "crystal ball" is not magic; it is the efforts of a talented and dedicated pool of marketing managers at defining the breadth of their client base and coming to an understanding of how to adapt their message and pitch to each group. Using a computer database, TIVO and Amazon.com are successfully able to deliver a custom pitch to their clients. The computer is no longer just a sales tool; it's a salesman!

The classification of Communication Mediums is important step in selecting the medium appropriate to your project. Interpersonal Media is a format for person-to-person communication. This type of communication is specific and personal, as it is direct correspondence between a known sender and receiver. Examples include letters, e-mail, the telephone, and instant messaging. Mass Media is a format for person-to-public communication. Mass Media aims to send a message to a vast audience, reaching larges numbers with a single communicative stroke. Public oration, books, television, film, radio and Youtube are all prime examples of Mass Media.

In comparison, New Media builds upon the strength of these two Mediums by delivering personalized person-to-public communication. Through a defined client base, individualized marketing materials, and a refined method for sorting users, New Media can deliver a higher impact message to consumers while still benefiting from the reduced overhead of Mass Media. As you might have already surmised, the defining difference between the mediums is necessarily technological: both Interpersonal and Mass Media have existed since man's first cognitive exchange. New Media, however, is born of the digital age, a byproduct of the digital database.

New Media and Moving Images

As a scholar and contributor to the world of film and computer science, I am thrilled by the collision of the two worlds. Most recently the world of film has been revolutionized by non-linear, digital editing systems. On the flipside, the Internet has reached a highly publicized benchmark, dubbed "Web 2.0," through the introduction of virtual broadcast spaces, such as Youtube, which rely on user-generated content.

This history runs back further than most would guess, in fact, film and computers have been connected since the day the first digital computer ran a successful calculation! Like every great computer entrepreneur, German engineer Konrad Zuse built the world's first digital computer in his parent's living room in 1936. This hulking contraption of tubes drove calculations and stored the results. Like the computers which would dominate the next few decade, input and output came in the form of punched holes representing binary digits. However, unlike the future machines, Zuse's ran on a curious media: discarded 35mm film prints!

The creation of New Media brings Zuse's story full-circle as we now see the potential for film and video content to rely upon digital computers in order to communicate. Of course we see this reliance in many of the new digital media formats such as online media players, ipods, DVDs, etc; however, these examples of new Mass Communications do not take full advantage of the digital computer's ability to analyze, interpret, and deliver specialized content. Through the incorporation of database structures in a communication delivery network, Mass Communication content can be created and appropriately distributed. It shouldn't be a stretch of the imagination by this point to envision your current marketing campaign reaching a new level of personalization through a multimedia CD-ROM or web application. With New Media you are encouraged to leave the broad paint brush behind, and begin to reach out to more refined divisions in your client base, touching each on a much richer level than you would at the traditional broad level. What's even greater is the same act that lets you analyze your client will let you establish a communication with them...this is the personal side. With digital video formats hitting new performance peaks, personalized, media rich communication is primed to be the next leap.