Join us, and track the future as it happens today

Digital technology, once considered exotic and of limited utility, has become as pervasive as air.

At a rapid clip, the media of communication — print, graphic arts, sound, music, photography, video, film — are being digitized and becoming part of the datastream. Once fundamentally different, when digitized they become fundamentally the same: They can travel down a wire. They can be stored on a disc and combined in ways not previously possible. They can be altered, copied a million times, preserved forever, destroyed in a heartbeat.

This concept is not new. It’s the stuff of which science fiction has been made for decades. But it’s happening now, and it changes everything.

The move to a world of all-digital media is progressing so quickly that each of us will soon be able to own all the tools to produce our own videos, publish our own books, record our own performances — that is, to make fundamental changes to text, images and sound in way that was impossible even five years ago.

Applications for digital technology will cut to the quick of the industries upon which our society is based — publishing, computing, entertainment, consumer electronics, multimedia, information delivery, telecommunications. These applications will open vast new possibilities and raise troubling ethical questions about the integrity of information and the people who “process” it.

Digital Media’s mission is to serve as a vehicle to understanding this powerful transition. And we’re confident that no matter what we write about — the computer business, video, telecommunications, broadcasting, virtual reality — we will prove valuable to you.

The shape of those insights will change along with the world of digital media. This issue, for example, covers a recent spate of seismic activity in the world of interactive, computer-based multimedia. We expect that the Multimedia PC Marketing Council (page 17), Apple’s QuickTime extensions to its operating system (page 14) and Sony Electronic Publishing’s entry into the interactive software market (page 3) all will have a potent effect on the movement of media-based products into the home and business.

Yet we also cover video compression, telecommunications, the European Community’s HDTV follies, and the early development of a 40-inch flat-panel display — the long-awaited TV of the future that you will be able to hang on your wall. These are just a sampling of topics Digital Media will address each month.

This is no small undertaking. As far as we know, we are the only publication attempting to ride these wild horses all at once yet keep a broad perspective.

That perspective — from philosophical concerns to the very practical problems of how to create and sell products using digital media — is critical to anyone who must understand or use these technologies. The surrounding issues are pressing, and they will affect every business, industry or relationship where people need to communicate with each other through time and space.

We encourage you to subscribe to Digital Media. Join us as we chronicle the future as it happens.

- Denise Caruso, Editor