The new purpose of media isn’t to act as single stand-alone pieces but as a “symphony” of connected sources. Google News is a perfect example of this, being able to display 1000+ sources for a single story. Or, being able to categorize 10s of thousands of pieces around a single subject. By doing so, invaluable resources, such as Google, are creating an environment of organized choices. Thus, media is beginning to take on the form of a space all in-of-itself. We will call that space, “Connected Media”.

To connect one piece of media to another means to find a relationship between the two. Whether it is opposites attracting or birds of a feather, the future of media is the creation of advanced narratives. By this I mean that instead of media existing as isolated pieces, there will be means of weaving information together. Today, this takes on the form of technology such as a wiki tags.

While researching for this post, I ran across a post from Daniel Bachhuber who seems to be in agreement with me about the importance of organizing information and media. In his post, Daniel addresses the use of tags as organizational tools for his data. He also refers to his data being something as, “infinitely reusable”. These two elements, organization and access are important to the success of connected media.

In May, I wrote an post titled, “Customizable News Streams“. In that article I outline an idea for creating customized “streams” of News (information). That stream would be delivered as a linear story; moving from one segment to the next. To advance that idea I would like to propose that the delivery of information should represent the nature of information, which is anything but linear.

Raw information is environmental by nature. Having access to more than just a single source of information, in-fact a limitless supply of sources, allows for creativity and learning to take place. This in-turn invents new media, which is how we are continuing to expand our ability to communicate.

The very verbs that we use to describe our relationship to information needs to change. Today, we commonly use words such as consume, read, watch and listen. Words such as organize, collaboratively, design and share are gradually being introduced into our culture’s lexicon. It is exciting to see this happen as it shows progress towards a much deeper relationship to information.

The world is gradually changing and I believe it is for the better with things becoming much more flexible and transient. Connected Media is just one example of how one industry might behave. It would be interesting to learn how other industries of production are developing.