Is cross-media dead?

It was a festive week. My daughter celebrated the first 5 years of marriage. It reminded me of the crazy situation five years ago: the day after the wedding, an EU call for projects was to close. A small project team had worked for more than two weeks on a proposal with telephone calls from hotel rooms to our office. On the day of the wedding the proposal had not been finished yet. So, the night after the wedding, the proposal fine-tuning continued with one person sitting in a hotel room in Rome and I am working from my study. The next morning at seven in the morning the proposal was finished and the last version approved. So the printing could start (and the printer did not fail). By 9 o’clock my partner was on her way to Brussels to deliver the proposal before the deadline. And we made it.
By September we had a contract with the EU for the ACTeN project, an almost 1 million euro project with 10 European partners, fully funded by the EU.

The project has run its course in the meantime. Roundtables have been held, summer schools were run, conferences were organised. Presently there is still a site up, containing reports of the roundtables, logs of the summer schools, books of the conferences and a final report. The project partners went even further than the EU assignment by setting up a series of special reports on:
- Scientific Publishing;
- Paid Content;
- Mobile Games;
- Digital Media Service Business;
- Online Storytelling;
- e-Learning;
- Interactive Digital TV;
- Cross Media;
- Experience Machines.
At the end of the project the reports were re-edited and were published in the book E-Content: Technologies and Perspectives for the European Market, ed. Peter A. Bruck e.a.; (Springer, 2004).


I will have to re-write the paper on cross media over the coming weeks as I have been invited to present a lecture at the CMID 07, The 1st International Conference on Crossmedia Interaction Design at Hemavan in Sweden from March 22-25, 2007. Key note speakers are Professor Liam J. Bannon from the University of Limerick, Ireland and Ms Christy Dena from the university of Sydney. I will be looking forward to the conference. But first I will have to re-write the paper, posing questions about the discipline (is cross media a disciple?). I recently visited a college, where they have a cross-media minor. It was interesting to see that they had 30 students taking that course. Yet in 2005 a Finnish scientist posed the question when cross media would fade out as a term, c.q. discipline. I love this type of questions. It is like a theologian stating that God is dead. So my statement most likely will be: cross media is dead.

Blog Posting Number: 675

Tags: content, cross-media