Communicating with new technology

One of the ironies of taking a class about new media technologies is that it is taking something that is inherently an individual activity (browsing and participating in the internet), and making it a group type thing.

This week (and part of next week) we are presenting to the class on a range of topics, picked by each of us a few weeks ago.

What we are discovering, or at least what I am discovering, is that while blogs, wikis, and web technology makes a cool new way to communicate between people across the internet, they don’t do much to the science of presentation.

Blogs are designed to work between individuals sitting at computer screens. So are web sites. It’s difficult to adapt a medium designed specifically to engage on an individual level to become an effective presentation tool.

In other words, web communications work when you want to reach a large number of people on an individual basis. If you want to reach a large number en masse, there are better tools out there.