Bridging Media: A Translation of Two Languages
Posted by ericahargreave on April 14, 2008
Hello All,
Been enjoying reading everyone’s posts on Bridging Media! Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts! I think one of my favourite quotes was Meg and I being referred to as ‘digirati darlings’ in Jordan Behran’s blog posts. Never been called a ‘digirati darling’ before!!! Quite liked it!
Another note in Morten’s blog that hit a chord with me was the mention that one of the obstacles in building a bridge between traditional broadcast and digital media is that the two communities speak two different languages. It is this point that I want to address in this post. Megan and I realized in the process of building towards the inaugural Bridging Media that one of the areas that creates misunderstanding between the broadcast and digital communities is in the use of ‘terminology’. I myself am guilty of this. As Meg and I were building to the event, I referred to the digital media community as the ‘tech community’ or ‘techies’ and Megan after looking at me strangely on more than a few occasions finally clarified this misconception of mine. ‘Techies’ are ‘technical people that work with technical things, like lighting and sound equipment’ or within the digital community they are ‘the people that code and build things on drupal’. She, a social media consultant, is not a ‘techie’. The term we should be using for this community was ‘digital media’ or ‘digital experts’.
Photo by James Sherrett
Similarly we were most fortunate at the inaugural Bridging Media event as the event was attended by a fairly even mixture of individuals from these two communities - approximately 66 individuals from the broadcast community, 63 from the digital media community and a handful of others. As Bridging Media grows we hope to address more and more of the individuals from both these communities and clarify more language misconceptions as we encounter them, allowing us to gain understanding and appreciation for each others crafts, so that we can strive to speak the same language with one another as we build the future of media together.
