What is Interactive Media? Impact and Advancements
Interactive media takes digital media such as electronic text, graphics, and sound, and turns it into a structured digital environment that allows people to interact with the data. This type of media depends on the user’s participation to work as it is designed. Social media websites are easily one of the most recognized forms of interactive media, using graphics and text to share content, photos and information as well as chatting and playing games. Video games are also a form of interactive media, allowing the user to respond to sights and sounds generated by the game.
There is a fundamental difference between digital media and interactive media, the interaction. “Digital”, meaning content found on the internet or on a computer, is the medium that brings the interactive media to the consumer. What makes it unique its ability to react to the user. Conversations aren’t digital, they are interactive.
It has made many beneficial advancements in the worlds of journalism, advertising and websites. Before interactive media, journalism was primarily one sided. The writer wrote their story, the reader read it and moved on. Now there is an open dialogue between journalist and reader, giving the reader the opportunity to give input and receive it and the satisfaction of knowing their voice is being heard. Advertising has taken on an interactive role, with digital ads that allow the viewer to provide feedback on the content presented to them. The advertiser can track this feedback through web analytics and tailor their comment to be more of use to the viewers in the target market. Through the introduction of interactive media, even the common website has gotten an upgrade. Blogs are an amazing way for an average internet user to share content with the world and interactive with other like-minded individuals.
It has grown in incredible ways over the past 15 years. Some of the most amazing advancements in our society have come from various forms of interactive media and continue to shape the way we operate daily. Interactive media now allows a busy mother to order her groceries from an app, a young man away from home for the first time to play videos games online with his brother back home, and soldier stationed half a world away to video chat with his wife. Fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined any of this was possible, and especially not capable within the palm of my hand. It is hard to say where interactive media will take us in the future, but I look forward to what it will surprise us with.
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