Digital communication: the long way toward a proper “format”

Digital communication is the most recent ring in a long chain, starting from non verbal communication and gesture, over languages, signs and writing, to print, broadcasting and other media and formats. The idea is to look at the past in order to find out a proper format for the new digital media. New technologies enabling new media and formats, such as virtual reality or multimedia, provide a good opportunity to find out new ways of communication and especially to bring to new life some “lost” formats. Some technologies are (re)enabling (new) communication formats. Today people have the possibility to create digital objects, which is a new class of objects from the ontology point of view, and they can use multimedia technologies and Internet, both providing some powerful tools for communication, but which are not yet very well developed and used. Virtual & enhanced reality also represents a powerful tool for the transfer of information and knowledge, because it allows to transfer information from the usual symbolic way (i.e. reading books) to the possibility to touch nonmaterial things or concepts. By doing so, we will transfer our way to approach information from symbolic to experimental, hands-on. Nowadays, there are different models, different opportunities, and various kinds of communication, e.g., asynchronous and synchronous, mono- and bi-directional, one to one and one to many, many to many, location dependent and independent, immersive and non immersive, interactive and noninteractive, with log and without log, wired and wireless. It is a mixture of different ingredients and we have to reassemble new recipes in order to develop more effective communication. Up to now there is not a proper way to use technological tools, in order to exploit the real advantages of ICT in communication. The only sector, that has probably developed a proper way, is the entertainment and video game sector. This sector found the best way to use technology in order to entertain and to transfer content. The situation we found : a digital world completely empty and dead, looking at some technologies our society is still facing a “library without books”. Introduction Digital communication is one of the key factor today; email and other internet services, mobile phones, radio-television, imaging, movies and more are based on digital content. Even driving our car we enjoy digital communication both amongst different devices such as ABS, ESP, ECM and between the car and the driver or passengers (cockpit , navigation system, car phone, etc). In the universe of digital communication broadband communication is the New Frontier, BB promises new added value services and a real revolution for end users. BB will enable or empower e-health, e-government, e-learning, e-culture, e-commerce, e-work and last but not least e-entertainment. We hope this new step will even facilitate e-inclusion reducing the gap usually called digital divide. In the year 2000 on the occasion of the World Wide Web conference, held in Hong Kong, the CEO of DoCoMo1 presented a unconventional vision on the near future2, five years, customers will be in large majority non-humans, machines, computers. Large part of transactions will be performed directly care of computers such as our car paying highways toll with tele-payment systems or personal transponders automatically looking after access to different resources. Within this scenario integrated solutions enabling information exchange between devices thanks to common interfaces3 are offering incredible opportunities to unleash creativity and start-up new services, let us consider smart phones, digital imaging devices, e-books, musical devices and computers. Software applications managing text, sound and visual content supporting creativity are becoming a de facto standard enabling “citizens” to create their own digital “communication” objects4. Technology to create and transfer digital content is available nevertheless until now we didn’t found the proper way to exploit such opportunities. The use of different media and technology tools seems to be limited to a trivial use trying to reproduce in digital format traditional “objects”, like it was at the time of early cars reproducing traditional coaches or inflatable boats trying to replicate wooden motor-boats. For quite a long period of time multimedia titles were the simple “porting” of paper based publications in digital format without any relevant added value. From writing to printing, to radio-television, to virtual and on-line world, the path followed by the communication passes from the textual description to the combined use of text and pictorial or photographic images in order to reach the movie or the so called audiovisual created joining together slides and audio / soundtrack. The communication modalities change and assigns always greater care to the visual part of the content, it happens that a communication based on the combined use of audio and video has one effectiveness more than double with regard to the same communication `single-channel' (i.e.writing). The convergence towards a new type of communication determined from the action of a series of new technologies: hypermedia, digital images, virtual reality, telecommunication networks and other again determine the need to redefine the roles on the market by creating new poles of aggregation between software, telecommunications and the entertainment industry. The "virtual funnel" usually called digital convergence and the evolution of communication are closely related; hypermedia, telecommunication and virtual reality are the basic components of the funnel merging different industrial sectors such as information technology, telecommunications, and entertainment. This paper analyzes the historical path of communication even in order to identify some bias that influenced and still have relevance in communication and related formats, issues related to the transmission of structured complex information, the perceptive aspects and the qualities of the new digital products not neglecting the ontological aspects and accompanying the reader in the consultation thanks to some examples.