Ideally, the equipment or products used to spread words and images would create micro-environments where news can flourish. Wired-up homes, a big opportunity for online journalists, create a space where news undergoes cognitive processing, to use research talk. Studies indicate that audiences prefer content when both the media environment and delivery mechanism match the natural or biological capabilities of the consumers.

Evolution is not necessarily a remote theory. Whether news is sent via print or through TV or computer screens, earplugs, baby-faced mobile devices or trained-pigeon messages, its success may depend how the delivery engages human sense organs and minds formed by millennia of biological development.

The TV screen, floating in a space where humans can either focus or interact among themselves and ignore it, has had a lot going for it. The movie theater, a dark space redolent of unhealthy candy, butter and popcorn, inhabited by strangers who seem more and more to get on each other’s nerves, has been waning in a culture absorbed by interaction. IM fits the needs of teen organisms. Radio hitches itself to the fertile Internet and draws a global audience seeking to escape broadcast boundaries. Music lovers migrate from CDs to the mobility and flexibility of iPods and cell phones. Each medium makes use of heritable human traits, like curiosity, mate searching and a preference for mobility. The losers are anachronistic.

This train of thought brings into question assumptions about the usefulness of displays, formats and delivery systems that have decidedly non-evolutionary origins – like engineering compromises chosen to get commercial products off the ground at a set deadline. Many news websites were pushed into the public sphere by senior editors and executives out of panic, not planning or calculated resource allocation. What success journalism has had in new media often seems more accident than design.

As the wonders of the “smart home” unfold, this might be a good time to re-examine assumptions about how electronically delivered news is used. The developing space for news in the home represents the opposite of what happened when Macs and PCs came through front doors in the mid-‘80s. The devices went into dens and separate bedrooms for single-station use; personal privacy and segmented content within the home became the norm. Gender, marital and age gaps were allowed to squelch domestic discourse –sometimes with unfortunate results.

That may not be true now. The creation of info-nodes, wide screens and hybrid TV-Internet-games platforms for the home has the potential to change news consumption from isolation and segmentation into a more communal dynamic where family members actually talk about what they learn, are amused by or share in common. They can interact among themselves, as well as within the virtual worlds they enter. It is not just mixed but multiple use, where the physical and virtual co-mingle.

Game designers are putting these tools to good use. Military and aerospace trainers have developed extraordinary simulators. Medical innovators are making important use of telepresence in surgery and remotely monitored therapy. But news providers are only beginning to offer access to space imagery, panoramic perspectives, 3-D and immersive delivery formats. Even though the ability to combine virtual reality technology and interactive immersive environments has been available since Howard Rheingold brought it to public attention in the early 1990s, the potential of virtual reality (VR) as a news conveyor has lagged behind developments in other fields.

And like phylogenic trees, media trees tend to diverge and channel. Military and entertainment needs moved VR development in directions that haven’t been much help to journalists. Bendable worlds, exotic avatars and complex battle scenes don’t fit well with journalists’ need for accurate, timely, verifiable and in-depth information. But delivery tools need to be thought of separately from content.

As wired-up homes open their doors, journalists will have to give more thought to how they want to be received and how they will make use of not just wide screens but of local wireless networks, surround sound systems, laptops and games technology – haptic devices that convey physical feed-back, intuitive controllers (think Wii news) and sophisticated head-mounted displays, which are also becoming cheaper, more powerful and accommodating (even for adults).

Taken together, these developing technologies have the possibility of making broadband news delivery a different experience, more like the ‘60s family gathered before the TV, but with 21st Century feistiness and a taste for global connections based on common interests. News content can be shared both within the physical group in the home – on networked devices, if not physically together – and within alternative worlds.

Take a crass example: The smiling guy with a beer behind home plate who’s waving to the family at home and talking with them on a cell phone. “Right, I’ll buy that team shirt on the way out, don’t worry.” This is a complex event, involving media crossover and telepresence or intervention in a parallel reality. Crass, but a mustard seed. Computer scientists and engineers are working to develop layers of reality and multiple paths for audience intervention.

Here are examples of barriers that threaten to keep news websites in a state of perpetual anachronism. They are drawn from current discussions in the computer science, communications and media design literature:

1. As VR technology becomes more accessible, the tendency is to think of it as a “home theater.” That’s not a good metaphor, since theaters are dying. Journalists should be moving away from the lights-out, no-talking tradition of passive theater experience. If what is happening in research labs is an indication, the future lies in cooperative tasking in mixed reality.

2. VR’s capability to simulate real environments, which should be a plus for journalists, can also inhibit graphic imagination. News and information can sometimes be best told in non-literal ways, as designers at the more forward-looking print publications have discovered. If print has become comfortable with abstractions, why does online journalism, with its vast capacity for animation and collage, lag behind?

3. VR worlds tend to function in isolation from one another, a legacy of audience segmentation. It’s hard to traverse multiple worlds, when scale, navigation, sound and avatar portrayals have little standardization. No rules exist on what may be accurate or authentic vs. fanciful content. This may be keeping news organizations from thinking creatively about VR news applications that would fit into the ecology of the smart home. Indeed, coming to grips with VR technology could be an expensive, difficult task, but think of the alternatives.

4. Screen-based personal computer displays have a fixed field of view and a concrete frame that limits interactions. It’s hard to collaborate when you have to do the electronic equivalent of peering through a key-hole. But that is changing, if the width of screens at Best Buy check-out lines are any clue. Expect homes to have multiple wide high-definition screens, panoramas of at least 180 degrees and user controls of perspectives that can free up the human eye to rove and make full use of peripheral vision.

5. Commercial virtual settings, including Google Earth, provide spaces where interaction can take place, but then what? It’s nice to navigate cities, buildings, landscapes, pyramids, veins and arteries, molecules, etc., and fiddle with mash-up information. But critics of shared virtual environments argue that often “there’s nothing to talk about within them.”

What an opportunity for bright, entrepreneurial journalists – converting sterile spaces into human places.

If that sounds like jargon, it probably is. Monday’s presentation at Annenberg, “Understanding the Gamer Disposition: What gamers can teach us about learning in the 21st century” was largely an obfuscated statement of the obvious… that gamers like those who play World of Warcraft (WoW) are early adopters of online communities and use them in unexpected ways.

Thomas has managed to create a research field for himself that allows him to do what he obviously loves: put in lots and lots of gaming hours. “At this point, I’ve played so much Warcraft that I feel like I should introduce myself as a level-70 warlock who plays a university professor on the USC server,” he quipped.

Thomas argues that WoW, Star Wars Galaxies, SecondLife and other massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) of their kind aren’t terribly useful as teaching tools of actual facts, but rather have a secondary market that teaches players how to learn and teach other players. Translation: secondary player-created resources, like ThottBot, a forum of quest strategies for WoW, spring up to allow players to share their experiences in game and synthesize new ways of playing.

“Players pass knowledge around, teaching others how to find information for themselves.”

However, Thomas seems to hold the belief that these objective-driven game environments give rise to an ethical community system. “Games can’t necessarily work as teaching tools, but they can teach ethics and civic engagement,” he said.

That’s the case in WoW, where the game design–by virtue of being an RPG (role-playing game)–has collaboration at the core of its architecture, but what about online games that don’t reward collaboration?

“The social life of a game exists outside the game,” he says. “The gamers define what constitutes citizenship.”

Fine for World of Warcraft, not so pleasant for online first-person shooters or games like Grand Theft Auto. Thomas believes that games are a “transitional phase” of massive online communities, with games easing our culture into the realm of the future, where online avatars represent us and interpersonal relationships are forged in a virtual space.

As a gamer, however, I find that is not always the case. If the game design rewards cooperation and being nice to one another as in WoW guilds, players will do it–not for altruistic reasons, but for self interest–and if the game does not reward those behaviors, like in Halo 2, where intimidation and threats may help you win, players won’t behave that way unless forced to by the threat of banning.

It’s scary to think that if games are to be these ethical learning engines that teach us how to act in the virtual space, game design inevitably rests in the hands of major media conglomerates that want to sell as many units as possible, with little or no regard to the kind of meta communities that emerge as a result.

Thomas did present a compelling profile of the so-called “gamer disposition.” With more than nine million players logging into World of Warcraft, this is a demographic that is becoming rapidly more important for media folks to understand.

He said that typically, (1) gamers are “hungry to be evaluated and scored” and that improvement and curiosity to see new things keep them playing, (2) gamers quit playing when they stop learning and (3) dissatisfaction with the status quo defines a gamer personality.

In WoW, for instance, players want to get better equipment and level up their guy for two reasons, the first being status, but the second, and more important, being the desire to see new and interesting things built into the game world. “Purple shiny pants let you see new things more quickly,” he said, cheekily summarizing the motivation for getting new equipment in MMO-RPGs.

In the end though, none of these attributes amount to altruism or actual ethics, which are the ingredients to real social world-building. But for the business world, the gamer disposition can be novel and advantageous. Thomas told an anecdote about a software exec who, when presented with a new project, instead of recruiting people and hiring resources to tackle it, simply assumed that the resources and people were already in his company and went out and explored the building to find them. When pressed about it, the exec, a gamer, said “Well, it’s like a quest, right, and I assume that the solution is built into the game environment.” Novel indeed, but not always correct.

Douglas Thomas sees a future where we all lead second lives, with an ethically culpable avatar representing us online. “By 2011, 80% of Americans will have some sort of avatar,” he said. He looks to games as the ushers of this new world order. “The first thing many Brazilians do when they log onto SecondLife is set up dance clubs. People hear the music, and start to talk to one another.”

The benefits of an altruistic, curiosity- and community-driven online realm seem nearly limitless. But to gamers like me who have heard 13-year-old boys with sniper rifles shouting things that would make a Hell’s Angel blush, that future seems a bit overly rosy. The future of the online world will probably look a lot like the present of the real world: there will be nice people, there will be jerks, there will be rewards and drawbacks to being either. Choose wisely.

What happens when users receive news? More to the point, why do Internet users not consume what is traditionally defined as news? Why do millions head to YouTube, MySpace and online games, including serious ones? Why to Petopia, Second Life or video blogs like Crooks and Liars?

If online journalists knew the answer, they might be offering more attractive and informative news sites. Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists—only two of many disciplines that give us insights on how digital technology impacts the senses—have conducted recent research and crafted theories, many of them tentative, on how the brain reacts to information. (For a dated yet excellent overview, see “Nature’s Mind; The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language and intelligence,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga, 1992.)

These findings can help us to understand how digital data is used—how the brain rejects or absorbs it, then meters it into the neural system. Researchers are looking at how online content can trigger emotions, including visceral ones, how the nervous and limbic systems, the reflexes, blood circulation and sexual organs all respond to the signs and icons of new media.

The latest research points to a general conclusion: online digital worlds like YouTube appeal to the whole body, from frontal lobe to the toes. This payoff from multimedia may be unique in communications history. The question is how can journalists put that understanding of a mind-body connection to good use.

But scientists have no monopoly on making sense of the rapid rise—the unprecedented global acceptance—of new media. A rich legacy of the study of theater, narrative and visual culture has already provided the groundwork for new media theory. An understanding of theories of art and art history and basic differences in presentation can help those who work in the digital world to know who they are and what traditions they draw from while engaging in the practice of digital convergence. In the words of one new media critic, Mark B. N Hansen at The University of Chicago, it enables us to grasp “the aesthetic newness” of digital media and “its resistance to capture by now dated, historical forms of art and media criticism.”

If a journalist deals with a 3D graphic, an immersive multimedia news environment or GIS mapping mash-p, he or she has reached fundamentally new territory. Hansen and others, drawing from scientific research, conclude that the way a person receives and absorbs mediated digital information is a mind-body process. And the online multimedia experience is more complete, more biologically compelling than previous forms of media, including cinema. As Hansen puts it, the new media experience is “qualitatively different from …the ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘illusion’ of the cinematic image.”

This also differentiates online news video from broadcast TV news practices, as journalists who work with online video photography have found through trial and error. This difference becomes more pronounced with the use of panoramic cameras and immersive perspectives.

But whiz-bang devices are only the experimental edge or mega-toys of the Internet. The medium’s unique tactile experience can easily be appreciated by clicking a mouse, tapping the keys or interacting with audio-visual displays. This is another world from turning pages or flipping through channels.

From a historical approach, the push to expand new media over the last decade to meet the demand of a voracious and adoptive audience can be looked at as the joining together of rival ways of creating illusions that have developed over many centuries.

For more detailed discussion of art and theater traditions, readers can go to the works of theorists such as Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin. These trailblazers have helped today’s media critics conceive of a multimedia family tree that has two main branches: One starts with Greek drama and wends through Tudor theater and the rich tradition of outdoor spectacles and illusions that invite audience participation. The second branches off from Baroque theater into increasingly sophisticated indoor presentations aimed at passive audiences.

Both Greek amphitheaters and the open-air Tudor theaters of the 1590s are believed to have offered an intense and pleasurable communal experience. London’s theaters at Shakespeare’s time are considered to have been the most popular form of entertainment of that era, drawing people of every class to form enthusiastic and often rowdy crowds of up to 2,500. The Shakespearean-era theater experience had multiple layers, from the cerebral to the hair-raising. The narrative was propelled by magical effects – trap doors and winches, painted canvases, fake hangings and beheadings, fireworks, thunder, drums, gunshots, hoof beats and lots of pigs’ blood.

This is a tradition of outdoors public spectacle—a lineage of fairs, markets, freak shows, street performances and exhibitions, parades, bandstands, songfests, dances and sporting events. Opportunities for audience interaction expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries with panoramas representing famous battles, museum tableaux, expositions and world’s fairs. Viewer-run motion-picture and three-dimensional photographic inventions in the 19th Century required manual production of movement, such as spinning a stroboscope, flipping a flip book, or changing slides in a stereoscope – and debating among friends about which slide should go next. These pre-cinematic devices provided hands-on, shared, communal entertainment.
The rival tradition of the immobile audience began in the more politically correct indoor theaters of Europe’s 16th and 17th centuries where architectural controls divided performers from the audience. Histories of drama indicate that the use of intimate playing spaces on stage emphasized “actorly effects.” Political and social satire displaced the spectacular and magical. Illusion became tightly framed, emotional manipulation more structured and audiences consigned to immobility, if not censorship, both state- and self-imposed. (For an overview of that transition, see “The Theatrical World,” a forward to the plays in the Pelican Shakespeare Series.

It’s possible to see how these controlling practices led to the industry of the Silver Screen, Broadway producers, Big Media, and teams of screenwriters, studio vice presidents for creativity, ego-driven directors and superstar actors. (Not to mention a commercial cult of personality driven by advertising, marketing and public relations.)

The tradition of audience mobility went in another direction, leading to the development of the all-enveloping panorama in 18th Century England and its subsequent use at national exhibitions and for morale-boosting propaganda. Heads of state and entrepreneurs created large panoramic battle and other patriotic scenes and some were taken on tour in Europe and later in the United States.
Needless to say, the concept of outdoor illusions, life-like tableaux and thrill rides became the staple of 20th Century amusement parks and traveling carnivals. The middle of the century saw media corporations bend the free-wheeling, bordering on outlaw tradition of amusement parks and “carnie shows” back into branded commercial control with the advent of theme parks.

Technology—the use of electricity, applied engineering skills and lens developments—drove much of this growth in both traditions towards more sophisticated applications. But media theorists avoid notions of determinism. They observe that participants in websites like YouTube take over the technology and use it in ways that can’t be extrapolated or predicted. Computers empower the creation of online virtual spaces, which, by themselves, are not the medium of communication. Virtual environments like those proliferating now on the Internet, are “the context within which a variety of image and sound-based media operate,” says Vancouver media critic Ron Burnett.

At one level, this seems quite straight-forward: Build an electronic field of dreams and the videocam fanatics and their audience will show up. But the research indicates something much more profound is going on at the YouTubes and MySpaces.

New technology enables unique multimedia perspectives that, in turn, open up new possibilities for story telling and may even be changing the way that humans process information. Digital technology, Burnett says, enables humans to “create the foundations for different ways of thinking. … Technology is as much about cognitive change as it is about the invention and the creation of physical devices.” (102)
Virtual reality has a “hallucinatory” dimension, Hansen says, that “explains the capacity for the VR interface to couple our bodies with (almost) any arbitrary space, and not just spaces that are contiguous with the physical space we happen to occupy or even spaces that we typically occupy.”
According to recent research on perception, this capacity of computer imagery to “make it real” occurs at a deeper, more biologically based level of human experience, one in which, to use Hansen’s words, “the embodied mind actually creates what it sees.”

The history of visual culture and the new findings of neuroscience, when combined, help us gain a better understanding of consciousness when a viewer clicks on video or enters a 3D or panoramic environment. How do these electronic spaces function? What is the connection, if any, between the physical and virtual world?

Researchers who work with advanced digital interfaces like “fog screens” and 3D helmets or high-speed game displays say the participants exist in both spaces simultaneously – what Burnett calls a “third space.” Others, such as Luciano Floridi, define this space as a mental zone between past and future.

Media critic Brenda Laurel calls it a shared or common ground, “a space of mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs and mutual assumptions,” an alternative reality that gets updated or revised moment to moment: In other words, a “whole” experience that extends the physical world, gives individuals an identity and invites entry into online communities, including virtual newsrooms, if editors would permit.

Once we enter the common ground of YouTube, MySpace or Second Life, we are empowered to live in another dimension, a psychological plane created by a combination of the cognitive ingenuity of software, the quality of content and the participating audience. Deep levels of code and data and the converting algorithms create the illusion of “being there.”

But the next step that researchers in various disciplines and by phenomenologists such as Hansen take is a reversal of perspective of almost Copernican proportions, one that could have profound implications for journalists. Researchers are finding that the human brain does not take in digital imagery as if it were an external geometrical space. Instead, visual sense-making is located within the body. Various sensory processes “generate a ‘haptic spatiality,’ an internally grounded image independent of geometrical space,” as Timothy Lenoir at Stanford explains in a forward to Hansen’s latest book, “New Philosophy for New Media.”

This body-brain connection has profound implications for new media because it downplays “an abstracted sense of vision as the primary sense in favor of the internal bodily senses of touch and self-improvement.” Hansen calls it “haptic vision,” or vision that is engaged with the sense of touch. It accounts for the sensation of flying through 3D environments, diving into satellite-generated images, the belly laugh from a Flash graphic or arousal from the erotic. Some applications are well known (infamous); others have just emerged. Therapists, for example, are beginning to use this tactile dimension to help stroke victims regain mobility and speech functions.

Instead of separating us from our senses by projecting virtual worlds, computers forge an internal body-brain link. “The source of the virtual is thus not technological, but rather a biologically grounded adaptation to newly acquired technological extensions provided by new media,” says Lenoir.

The body-brain experience inspires the user to act, since he or she is now at the center of the universe, as opposed to sitting passively in an audience. Multimedia presentations, especially versions that display with panoramic perspectives or 3D devices such as HMDs, or head-mounted displays , PanoChambers or CAVE virtual reality systems, place the spectator in a single, coherent space. The virtual world continues the physical space surrounding the spectator.

This is the opposite of the Renaissance perspective, which came down to us through photography, cinema and television. While this tradition emphasizes the realism of what is observed, it also splits the viewer’s identity between the physical space and the space of representation. Both cinema and TV confine the viewer to seeing “reality” through a rectangular frame. This is efficient and, as media critic Lev Manovich at the University of California, San Diego, has noted, gives us images that “are easily processed by the brain.” But it also restricts mobility, confines perspective and eliminates the experience of touch.

Hansen identifies the tactile or haptic dimension as the distinguishing feature of new media, requiring more involvement on the part of the viewer than the representational tradition provides. The goal of new media technology is not just to make the image more believable but “to bring into play a supplementary element of bodily stimulation.” Recent physiological research, he notes, shows that tactile stimulation functions as “reality-conferring.” It is an essential element of presence, which Kwan Min Lee at the USC Annenberg School for Communication calls “a psychological state in which the virtuality of experience is unnoticed.”

This bodily activity can be as simple as passing a mouse over a Flash button or as crucial as wearing a “digital glove” to perform surgery. Flight simulators and arcade games have long provided tactile feedback. Whatever the level of engagement, the research indicates that this body-mind link allows the virtual world to be synchronized with the physical world in a way that is grounded in the biological potential of human beings.

Other areas of research—such as biological anthropology, neurophysiology and zoology—deal with building a factual floor under a developing theory called mimetics. A collection of disciplines looks at thoughts as being not necessarily self-generated within the brain but as being acquired through the thoughts of others.

This topic is perhaps best articulated in the pre-Internet work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1970s, and by the recent work of British psychologist Susan Blackmore (“The Meme Machine”) and anthropologist Robert Aunger (“The Electric Meme”). The word “meme” has been popularized by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene”) to mean a unit of information that plays a social role analogous to genes. Aunger argues that once inside us, “these thoughts (memes) then go to work for themselves, pursuing goals that may be in conflict with our best interests. These ideas have their own interests by virtue of having qualities that make them like biological viruses.”

Aunger warns that the existence of memes remains to be established, like theorized subatomic particles or unseen planets. The concept also faces opposition from other disciplines, such as sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, who tend to equate memes with mysticism. From a journalists’ perspective, for now, it’s worth noting that some rather bright scientists believe that the transmission of news may function like computer viruses. The messages or memes—for example, “Islamofascists,” “NASCAR,” urban legends or Microsoft chimes—may replicate and move from one brain to another by means of signals or icons that initiate “the reconstruction of the relevant meme from materials located there.”

Note that this still-nascent theory seems to fit well with the work of Burnett, Hansen and other new media theorists. Mimetics and related disciplines may help identify how news engages the brain, becomes shared online and how it might influence public discourse, as well as subsequent voting behavior. If Aunger and others are right, daily news conferences, duplicated in thousands of newsrooms each day worldwide, may be acting like Petri dishes, assembling and unleashing digital signals over the Internet that can then replicate in billions of brains, sometimes almost instantaneously. Many is the virus that would envy this infection rate. (For a discussion of the “technology of memory” and how the memory functions in bodies, see “Tangled Memories” by Marita Sturken.)

Equally intriguing is the study of how a large percentage of incoming signals get rejected or filtered by the brain. The sensory input often fails to find an instant fit with an individual’s meme-building materials, such as stored memories, competitive instincts, survival strategies and the potential for empathy. If journalists understood that process better, they might be in a position to offer stronger news that is both intellectually and biologically relevant.

Online newsroom wisdom argues for more interactivity, rich local databases, concierge-like services, blog columns and user-generated content. But that may not be what’s called for. Often, a superficial fix substitutes for fundamental reform, such as arming notebook-carrying print journalists and SLR-equipped photography staffs with video cameras, or setting up a 24-hour rewrite desk run by people who can both write text and edit audio and video content rapidly as it is sent from reporters in the field.

The audience demand for both instant news and deeper forms of interactivity on websites can be seen in the online gaming world, with its forays into online competition, inexpensive pay-per-download services, low-resolution online games that owners can upgrade, personalized karaoke and controllers like batons that allow the user to lead an orchestra or ones shaped like tennis rackets.

Participants demand the tools for interaction, more controls and the ability to assemble forms of reality that matter to them. But Web traffic and extensive use of e-mail indicates that they want access to, and the ability to share, the reality of trained, experienced journalists who do the hard digging, ask the tough questions and shoot professional video, sometimes under hazardous circumstances.

No doubt, the more convincing forms of “presence” and body-mind involvement open new possibilities for telling news in compelling ways. Combining 3D immersive technology with GIS mapping techniques, for example, would offer content to compete with and draw audiences from the YouTubes and MySpaces.

Manovich says that the language of digitization is in an early stage, where cinema was 100 years ago. “We don’t know what the final result will be, or even if it will ever stabilize. … We are witnessing the emergence of a new metalanguage, something that will be at least as significant as the printed word and cinema before it.”

Larry Pryor is an Associate Professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. He’s currently researching the haptics and epistemology of digital news media.