Now that we’ve identified seven core elements as organizing aids to all that needs to be understood for quality and best capabilities in DLE, we’re starting a series of posts on this. We’ll just number them in chronological order for the series, but they can be on any relevant part of the Core Elements.
Understanding Media in the Mobile Age is, like all the core elements, just the heading under which much pertains. The first task of anyone who would design and create DLE online, is to realize how the media being used “work” as part of human consciousness and perception. We take “the extensions of man” for granted, at least those we are born into, but this doesn’t mean we truly understand “what they do to us” while we are using them.
Marshall McLuhan did make forays into helping us “understand media”…and he used a more general reference for that phrase, including such inventions as the wheel as being an extension of the human foot. Each such invention caused dramatic changes in what a human civilization is, or how it works, as well as impacting the lives of the individuals involved, the nature of their consciousness, their perceptions, and their thinking and feeling
We live in a time of innovation in extensions of man…mobile technology being one that is currently disrupting and changing an ever wider and ever broader portion of our present civilization. There is much to understand about how using this technology changes us, or “mediates” our experience.
But for purposes of focus, we might do well to simply note that we live in an age of overwhelming choice of mediated activities. Our imagination is under siege, and is captured as we multitask from minute to minute, and screen to screen, and headset to speakers to microphones to watches to glasses. Thus the key question for those creating DLE that has to be answered in the best way possible:
How does our DLE offering in this world of choice manage to compete successfully with the other choices demanding attention in the user’s world?
The answer is that DLE must contain and use media elements in the ways the most attractive other media options use them. Wherever they come from; including “low brow” culture such as “infomercials”, which do capture imaginations in mass numbers.
To the extent it cannot be as attractive as other media options, DLE will have to have other strong motivations that can overcome those weaknesses. This also means we need to understand what works in the media competition for eyeballs and hearts. What techniques are being used?
For example, if there’s a game that captures attention and “won’t let go”, we need to understand how that happens, and be able to deploy similar elements in our overall DLE package.