BSU receives $20 million for novel approach

By Scott Robert Olson

Last year, Ball State University received a $20 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to conduct research on the design, creation, distribution, and effects of the converging digital media.  The grant was written by NCA member Scott Olson, Dean of the College of Communication, Information, and Media and Professor of Communication Studies, Beverly Pitts, Associate Provost and Professor of Journalism, and Phillip Repp, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology.  NCA member Jacquelyn Buckrop, Associate Dean of Communication, Information, and Media, served as Acting Project Director during the first year of the project.

The grant proposal was submitted with the notion of “iCommunication” as its unifying and controlling concept.  iCommunication provided a convenient slogan for simultaneously discussing the proposal’s focus on interactive digital technologies, the personal and individual rather than mass nature of such systems, as well as the innovative effects and consequences that can be generated by such systems.  What makes the iCommunication project different from most technology research is that the focus is on media content and communication processes rather than on the technologies themselves.  Content has changed as the technologies change, however, as part of the historic shift to a personalized media environment.  Mass media were aimed at a huge and homogeneous audience, but in the new media environment that mass audience no longer exists.  Demassification is especially clear on the Internet, where the experiences of individual users are personalized to a degree that approaches one-to-one communication. 

The project has three main foci.  The largest and most significant is the Center for Media Design, a research, development, and teaching center that links state of the art design technology to media and communications fields.  It does testing on the complex interactions between audiences and digital media content, and a number of major partners are lined up to support its work.  The Center, currently under construction, is scheduled to open in December 2002.  A second focus area is the Global Media Network, which links media design technology with global learning environments, creating the best media contexts for peer-to-peer student collaboration and providing a location for international professionals, scholars, and students to study and create international networks for learning.  A final area of focus is the Digital Media Studies Program, a curriculum initiative that will provide the opportunity for all graduates of Ball State to be accomplished in the development of digital media content.  In all, the project will spend about $8 million on digital technology and labs, $6 million on new faculty members working on digital media research, $1 million on the Global Media Network, and $5 million on research projects.

iCommunication needs to be researched to this dramatic extent because it has such dramatic implications for human communication.  Three areas where the impact is most immediate are in the decentralization, democratization, and capacity of communication.  The decentralization of media control is profound.  Digital technology creates an opportunity for aggressive and ambitious centers of independent media production to appear anywhere that talent, technology, and opportunity are assembled – the film, The Blair Witch Project, is evidence enough of that.

Simultaneously, access to and participation in the development of media content becomes more democratic.  Until quite recently, the mass media were essentially impersonal.  They did not and could not respond to each member of the audience, and there was no way for most media users to create media products.  The new digital media allow us to create content by ourselves and have it reach a global audience.  There have not been many times in human history when a single set of tools so broadly empowered the common person. 

Finally, content capacity – the amount of available information – is growing exponentially with the advent of digital media.   Lowering cost and increasing capacities are two hallmarks of the economics of new technology.  Consequently, it is easy to envision a scenario only a few years away when most Americans will be connected to each other by a few digital devices which they are as likely to use to create content as to consume it.

The history of the study of communication has been one of divergent paths that break off to follow the evolution of each new analog medium of communication.  As books were introduced, comp lit came into being.  The newspaper led to Journalism as a university department and field of study.  Movies brought about cinema studies, and broadcasting spawned Departments of RTF and Telecommunications.  In fact, whole organizations formed around the study of particular analog communication technologies: BEA around broadcasting and AEJMC around print to name just two.  But what do they know of each other?  These intellectual twains almost never meet.

As communication scholars we malign these distinctions and long for bridges that might transcend them and find common communication principles among the various strands.  The digitalization of communication technology makes such a bridging not only possible but likely.  Why?  The digitalization of communication is also the convergence of media devices, resulting for the first time in history of communication media the introduction of practical devices that enable multiple forms of communication, single boxes useful for interpersonal communication, small group communication, and mass communication.  A PDA like the Sony Clie, for example, is simultaneously an email station, telephone, MP3 player, digital camera, word processor, and video playback unit, and it fits in your pocket.  Is our fragmented body of theory ready to cope with a device like this?

We might call the type of human interaction made possible by the new digital media “iCommunication” as a way of setting it apart from the divergent technologies of communication we have been using up to now.  Unlike earlier media, digital media enable individualization, independent control, imagination, innovation, instantaneous feedback, internationalization, and integration of the media.  Earlier forms of media enabled mass communication, but not iCommunication.  The "i" of iCommunication also suggests personal control -- I communicate.

So as the media realign and open up in a digital world, so too must communication scholarship.  Our historical divisions into subfields unaware of the work going on across them appear antiquated when trying to cope with technologies of communication that transcend, ignore, and defy division.  Perhaps through the digitalization and convergence of communication technologies, the divergent paths of scholarship will show some convergence, too.

Scott Robert Olson is the Dean of the College of Communication, Information, and Media at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.