NEW MEDIA IN ORGANIZATIONS

The once dominant image of an office building filled with people sitting in front of their PCs, is inadequate to capture life in contemporary organizations. The spatial organization of work is evolving rapidly. While a company mainly located in a monolithic corporate center is still common, work forces are now increasingly mobile and distributed in a anytime anywhere work style. The ‘corporation’ may be composed of completely mobile sales and knowledge service operatives; networks of retail outlets; flight crews; or ad hock project-based constellations of independent agents (for example, in a film shoot or special event).

 Furthermore, tel work has also become pivotal to the operations of global corporations. Employees are expected to virtually cross time zones, and require increased flexibility in work arrangements to manage international connections and services. Moreover, there is a renaissance of interest in the use of corporate tel centers as a viable alternative for both employers and teleworkers in the face of urban problems  and pandemic security risks.

In short, the evolution of agile and distributed new media is arriving to complement the evolution of the agile workforce and distributed organizations. points out that this communications evolution is driven by three technological developments: inexpensive online storage; inexpensive and  widely available fast broadband access to remote sites; and a proliferation of inexpensive digital devices that can capture audio and visual data. Yet, a shift towards an agile distributed nature of content itself is also evident in the structure of the information being communicated. The cutting edge of new media is found in Internet applications such as YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, delicious, Digg, and social networking sites such as My Space and Facebook. points out that: Where discussion previously focused on the consumption of digital information, as individuals accessed information provided by organizations, these popular new Internet applications enable sharing of information among users who are now individual information providers.

There is good empirical evidence that the Internet is, decreasingly, a means by which corporate information is provided to users than a means by which user-generated information is shared among other Internet users. This collection of applications enables individuals to share information (including videos, photos, news items, and audio footage) and create virtual communities on the web. The previous growth in the amount of information in digital form has been replaced by growth in the communication of that digital information.

 New media are evolving into a recombinant form. Mash ups (web applications that combine multiple content sources and distributed processing modules) are a good example of this trend, but so too are Google Maps, which provide a simple interface to navigate geographical maps available to everyone (a process dubbed ‘neo geography’), and Amazon.com, which complement their online bookstore with user generated reviews.

The secret to this success is due to the fact that each new iteration adds communicative value for users. In other words, these new media enable a world of networked creation, which contrasts strongly with the hierarchical structure of the one to many broadcast paradigm still predominating in much of corporate communications.

BY KYEJU DIANA

BAPRM 42589