NEW
MEDIA IN ORGANIZATIONS
The
once dominant image of an office building filled with people sitting in front
of their PCs, is inadequate to capture life in contemporary organizations. The
spatial organization of work is evolving rapidly. While a company mainly
located in a monolithic corporate center is still common, workforces are now
increasingly mobile and distributed in a anytime anywhere work style. The
‘corporation’ may be composed of completely mobile sales and knowledge service
operatives; networks of retail outlets; flight crews; or ad hoc project-based
constellations of independent agents (for example, in a film shoot or special
event).
Furthermore, telework has also become pivotal
to the operations of global corporations. Employees are expected to virtually
cross time zones, and require increased flexibility in work arrangements to
manage international connections and services. Moreover, there is a renaissance
of interest in the use of corporate tele centers as a viable alternative for
both employers and teleworkers in the face of urban problems and pandemic security risks.
In
short, the evolution of agile and distributed new media is arriving to
complement the evolution of the agile workforce and distributed organizations.
points out that this communications evolution is driven by three technological
developments: inexpensive online storage; inexpensive and widely available fast broadband access to
remote sites; and a proliferation of inexpensive digital devices that can
capture audio and visual data. Yet, a shift towards an agile distributed nature
of content itself is also evident in the structure of the information being
communicated. The cutting edge of new media is found in Internet applications
such as YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, and social networking
sites such as My Space and Facebook. points out that: Where discussion
previously focused on the consumption of digital information, as individuals
accessed information provided by organizations, these popular new Internet applications
enable sharing of information amongst users who are now individual information
providers.
There
is good empirical evidence that the Internet is, decreasingly, a means by which
corporate information is provided to users than a means by which user-generated
information is shared amongst other Internet users. This collection of
applications enables individuals to share information (including videos,
photos, news items, and audio footage) and create virtual communities on the
web. The previous growth in the amount of information in digital form has been
replaced by growth in the communication of that digital information.
New media are evolving into a recombinant
form. Mash ups (web applications that combine multiple content sources and
distributed processing modules) are a good example of this trend, but so too
are Google Maps, which provide a simple interface to navigate geographical maps
available to everyone (a process dubbed ‘neo geography’), and Amazon.com, which
complement their online bookstore with user generated reviews.
The
secret to this success is due to the fact that each new iteration adds
communicative value for users. In other words, these new media enable a world
of networked creation, which contrasts strongly with the hierarchical structure
of the one to many broadcast paradigm still predominating in much of corporate
communications
By Minzi Catherine L.
BAPRM 42616
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