Digital Media - Characteristics

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Good summary by Franz Nahrada of why digital media are responsible for a major cultural shift.


Thesis: The digital medium is different from any medium that existed before; it is wholistic in its nature and vigourosly pushing into obsolescence any form of content that does not comply with this wholistic nature.


  1. You can tell any story using more than one medium; the textual begets the visual, the visual begets the acoustic and so on. Thus every story is a universe of mutual interpretations.
  1. There is no copy which cannot become a new original. Content can be multiplied and modified/mirrored algorithmically into eternity. Thus every content is potentially unvaluable.
  1. There is no content that has enough context; content can be associated indefinitely and so the content of the digital medium is the continuum
  1. There is increasingly no physical boundary to partcipate in the reception or production of digitised content. So anybody from any place at any time can potentially influence any content.

There four characteristics are more fully elaborated here: http://rechtsverlag.at/bookandsurf/html/digital_creativity.html