What, exactly, is emerging media?

First, lets explore the words emerging and media.

Emerging: coming to maturity; coming into existence; being born or beginning; yet to be or coming

Media: the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely

So, it can be concluded that emerging media is forthcoming communications.

Is it media that hasn’t yet been invented? Is it current media that is still in a state of evolving?

The answer is Yes! It is all the above and then some.

“The most commonly applied ‘shorthand description’ of emerging media is that it is communications – of all types – based on digital technologies, and increasingly with interactive components. Among definitions designed to transcend user jargon, is that offered by Neuman (1991) more than a decade ago. He argued that what we define as emerging media will a) alter the influence of distance, b) increase the volume and speed of communications, c) enable interactive communications and d) permit the merging of media forms” – American Journal of Business

Google Glass is the prefect example of emerging media:

What is Google Glass?

“The core of Google Glass is its tiny prism display which sits not in your eyeline, but a little above it. You can see what is on the display by glancing up. The glasses also have an embedded camera, microphone, GPS and, reportedly, use bone induction to give you sound.

Voice control is used to control the device; you say ‘ok glass’ to get a range of options including taking pictures, videos, send messages using speech to text, ‘hang out’ with people or get directions to somewhere. You access these options by saying them out loud.

Most of this functionality is self explanatory; hang out is Google’s video conferencing technology and allows you to talk to a people over web cam, and stream them what you are seeing and the directions use Google Maps and the inbuilt GPS to help you find your way.

The results are displayed on the prism – essentially putting data into your view like a head up display (HUD). It’s potentially incredibly handy. Also rather nifty is the potential for automatic voice and speech recognition – and Google has given its Glass project a big boost by snapping up specialists DNNresearch.” Tech Radar

Think of emerging media as the cool stuff that Science Fiction writers and readers could once only dream of but is now on the brink of reality.