Let go of linear thinking and join the digerati

Masthead, The,  Summer, 2008  by Lois Kazakoff

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Diving into the digital media world requires more than knowledge of some basic digital tools. It requires a new way of thinking.

This became dear to me on the third day of the Knight Digital Media Center seminar when the twenty-four of us broke into groups of four to prepare PowerPoint presentations on what we had learned. We came to the job armed with a raft of new tools and buzz words--we would Twitter our editorials; we would geotag to build commentary by community; we would exploit locative media and spread the word via widgets. We would post, riposte, interact, and interdict trolls. In short, we would wield our knowledge like the hippest of the digerati.

But talking the talk isn't walking the walk. As the only Baby Boomer in my presentation group, I had to learn how to think the way the digital world does.

My younger co-presenters--Tyson Wheatley of CNN.com, David Mastio of BlogNetNews, and Gina Acosta of The Washington Post--instinctively approached our presentation as threads--some textual, some visual. Like the digital world.

The group started its brainstorming while sitting outside in the warm Los Angeles sun, then, moved into the hotel bar to tackle the heavy lifting. I was taking notes as we talked to work up talking points. Gina was emailing an array of friends while assembling the PowerPoint. Tyson, in between phone calls and texts, was grabbing visuals for our talk from a half-dozen Web sites after brief consultations with David.

I was still trying to spin a tale--something with a lead and a nut paragraph. "Couldn't we just storyboard it first?" I asked, single-mindedly trying to discern a clear line of reasoning amid the mass of maps, charts, and graphics.

Print media is linear: Information is conveniently organized into pages and columns. It's read from front to back, left to right, top to bottom. It is contained.

Digital media is anything but. It is topical, relational, and diffuse.

Print media is a carefully wound ball of string; digital media is a tangle of threads--or a rich tapestry of information.

And that is its power. GenX members and Millennials, who have grown up in its embrace, understand how to exploit digital media. My Boomer mind still struggles with the vastness of the new digital landscape, but I and the rest of my generation will learn to sift and sort through it, too.

COPYRIGHT 2008 National Conference of Editorial Writers
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning