What would you do with your last 60 seconds? - What is New Media?
(Written by Yoram Schaffer, New Media expert and researcher)
David Suzuki ,scientist, a television and social activist, is a leading figure in another new media project from Canada - Testube. He explians in great humor why humanity is about to destroy itself, when in fact it has one minute until destruction . The term 'minute' is relative for humanity exsitence, so you can relax now, you have more than 60 seconds to live. 
So what would you do with your last 60 seconds?
The site visitors are asked to type a word that describes an action they would do if they had a minute to live. Then they are transferred to a screen where Dr. Suzuki explains in plain words what is exponential growth (strong growth) and why it causes humanity to commit suicide.
Economists keep telling us to aspire to maximum growth. But is this growth a positive thing? According to Suzuki, humanity doubles itself with alarming rate (exponential principle) and soon we will be left without space or food. It somewhat reminiscent the theory of Malthus, an economist of the 19th century who predicted the same thing about the food quota. Malthus was wrong because he relied on food production per acre, a theory that was true to its time. He assumed the production was permanent. Since than pesticides and hormones were added, materials that significantly magnify output per acre (but cause other problems)
With the end of Suzuki's speech, visitors are transferred to a screen wherea bacteria is floating in the air (not to worry, this is just animation) and we can see who is online right now as we select the same word, in another context to another platform. That is, the system scans the Internet in real time on Twitter and is looking for the word you have chosen.
I've chosen teh word - Love (pathetic I know) Oddly enough, nobody mentioned it on Twitter. Probebly twitter fans have no heart, and they are more busy all day with Justin bieber.
I believe Testtube is a great example how to enagage an audience for your new media project. I've encountered many of my colleagues who hold the wrong conception that in order to create a new media project it's enough to create a website, invite users, add their own materials, allow comments, open a forum and make linear films. Well, I'm sorry to say that's simply not new media.
Few people will attach materials to your site, certainly not video, unless you give them a real incentive (money or respect) Even if they do upload a video to your site, most cases the video will be in terrible quality. Few people will leave a comment because most chances nobody will take the trime to vist your site. There are billions of websites and the law of 80-20 will most likely work well here. What is the law of the 80-20? It means that %80 of people will visit at %20 sites for %80 of the time, the relationship became even wrost (95-5), since Facebook took over our lives.
So how new media is reflected in Dr. Suzuki project? First of all, he invites the visitor to express himself, but modestly, and then it does two "New Mediastic" things
1. Connects to databases of large organizations on the Internet, those who claim to represent a large volume of human thoughts, the so-called "the wisdom of crowds" (Twitter)
2. It does that it in real time.
Is Twitter really the window and appearance of human thinking? - Perheps the answer is no. In his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto author Jaron Lanier argues that we attribute too much power to mass wisdom (Wisdom of crowds). It seals destinies, crowns kings and knocks regimes. He may sound like a grumpy old man, but you have to give him credit: He was key developer of Virtual Reality.
Another example
If you want another example, I'll tell you about a talented young man Jonathan Harris , a digital artist, mathematician and programmer. He created together with Prof. Sep Kamvar a number of interesting projects that draw their appearance from information they absorb in real time from the Internet. The same information is displayed graphically, meaning they actually perform visualization of data (Data Visualization). One of their most famous project is called We Feel Fine. The project presents in real time all blogs that contain the word "feel" in real time. This is an area where artists are exploring endless possibilities, I wrote quite an extensive article on the subject of visualization and documentary and you are welcome to read it here, it contains more examples.
Last NEW MEDIA Example
Eric Whitaker a musician and conductor had a dream to conduct a mass choir. He recruited choir singers from the Internet, he than uploaded himself to Youtube conducting silnet notes that he made available for the choir singers. People from all over the world recorded the notes themselves and put it on Youtube. The result is a virtual choir of 183 voices, arranged in editing as if they were singers in a choir. This is another great example of audience-sharing project, where the audience have been given a precisely defined mission and the result is full-fledged cooperative new media project.
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