THIS IS NOT A MASS MEDIUM
Multimedia is special info for special audiences

David Shefrin is principal of New York-based Shefrin & Associates and founding chairman and recent past president of the Interactive Multimedia Association. A longtime television producer, writer and executive, and a member of IBM’s corporate communications management, Shefrin played key roles in the development of the Ulysses and Columbus multimedia projects. He is now focused on multimedia and visual information for education. One of Shefrin’s many claims to fame is buying the first video cassette machine in the world from Sony’s Akio Morita.

The television and mass media frame of reference is important to understanding what is happening in multimedia development. The industry focus, until recently at least, seems to have been on which technologies and tools can be developed and sold.

In the scramble to create alliances and strategies to develop multimedia, those hoping to make the new business happen have been thinking and planning without much vision. And from the focus on technology and tools has come the overwhelming idea of multimedia connected into the home — far before anyone knows how to make a product work in that context.

This focus has to do with the industry’s obsession with the merging of computer and television as they have been used to date. This may represent a necessary and important view of how to make progress. But it is a limited view of multimedia as a product for people to use. Multimedia’s promise lies beyond computing and beyond television.

IN-DEPTH INFORMATION, SPECIAL INTERESTS

In the larger context of communications media, multimedia has a new and different role from that of mass communications. Its powerful mix of multiple media allows individual direction and control of how information is used. It multiplies the attention factor and deepens the learning process and provides a new means to explore information in-depth to meet special needs and interests.

The question is, how are we meeting the opportunities of multimedia in this context? How does today’s thinking and planning by entities and individuals help to define the intersection between technology and content?

The answer is that it does not. Observers, analysts and researchers have taken up prematurely the entrepreneurial point of view that a mass market for multimedia exists, and are going after it hammer and tongs with the computer/television model firmly in mind. In fact, there is a need to move away from the broadcast-like, mass-media approach to communications. Multimedia requires a new and different “information” approach to special, focused audiences for education and communication. What multimedia can deliver is special information for special audiences — a significantly different experience from that of existing media — and this is not recognized.

We live by means of visual information but have not much understanding yet of what that means, neither in the think tanks nor among communications practitioners. And now comes multimedia to provide a powerful new means for individuals to use and understand visual information.

In the vision of multimedia as the next level of communications, we see publishers of books, magazines and newspapers, movie studios and broadcasters, cable and telephone companies and other utilities planning to emerge into the world of digital communications.

As they do, they must be careful not to follow the lead of many multimedia developers today, who in my opinion hold many parochial views of newspapers, magazines and broadcast communications as “mass media.” They seem to believe that all media are similar, and the common goal of huge sales is the right goal. But the scattered experience of television is not magic for people who require more than the visually appealing and want focus and feedback instead of fleeting image. Some of us doubt that what Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” wants to know is necessarily what individual people really want to know.

To miss this point is to ignore the trends of the past 20 years in magazine and newspaper publishing, as well as in the use of television. Magazines were first to suffer as general-interest, mass-circulation publications such as Colliers, Look and Life began to fold. Over the past 15 years, magazines have reconfigured their approach to readers. They’ve become more specialized in editorial focus, and advertising frequently uses regional inserts directed to markets based on geographic areas or niche readership.

This decline in mass appeal is happening in television, too. The networks are crying about a great decline in audiences — up to 40 percent, by some counts. Where are the people going? One place they’re going is to cable, where among other things they can find programming designed specifically for their desires: Cable News Network, ESPN for sports buffs and plenty of movie channels.

PICKING THE WRONG PARADIGM

Are these limited views changing now? I don’t know. What I do observe about the burgeoning new alliances between new and old media companies is encouraging on one hand because resources are being mobilized. But it is not encouraging to hear about some of the prospective partnerships thinking in terms of a broadcast television, motion picture, video game and pop music paradigm of what multimedia is or can be.

So what happens when a new medium comes along and amalgamates the individual power of the media that have gone before and puts them all in one bag? How do you use the power they generate — do you duplicate what’s been done before? It does seem rather wasteful, yet that so-called “mass market” is what multimedia developers are talking about.

Yes, everyone will have a piece of multimedia. But that’s not the main aim. The goal, really, is to find out what these tools can do better and differently from other media over the years. Their power is apparent. We need simply to put them to work.

As multimedia business opportunities are defined, intellectual property, or program content, will become the common thread of interest. After all, the standards issue will eventually be resolved either by agreement or by some de facto accomplishments. I wonder if this will be recognized as we try to go beyond computing and beyond television to create multimedia products that will be useful to people and, therefore, successful.

The arrival next year of a number of personal digital products will suggest a new emphasis on message communications, as will the growing use of multimedia business tools. As these improve the means and cost of manufacturing and spread the word about multimedia, everyone will benefit.

But this promise also suggests a critical decision point. Will there be sufficient energy applied to making the content-based products that can best define multimedia as a unique way of presenting and using information?

David Shefrin