About
I’ve been involved with media and technology since using Basic to program “Hey Jude” into a Radio Shack TRS-80 with audiotape drive more than 25 years ago. The resulting beeps lacked the emotion and timbre of real music, but they made me a believer and a seeker of better ways to publish information. After years as a publisher of magazines and books for such companies as Rodale and McGraw-Hill, I found my way into electronic publishing and digital advertising technology beginning around 1990. In 2007, I was with Right Media when it was acquired by Yahoo!, and also held a few shares in TACODA, where I’d worked for three years, when it was acquired by AOL. And most recently, acerno was acquired by Akamai.
If you’re doing business on and with the internet, there is no longer a useful distinction between media and technology. Professor McLuhan had it right when he wrote in Understanding Media in the sixties that the medium is the message. He described film and radio as hot media that extend “one single sense in ‘high definition’,” which is “the state of being well filled with data.” In other words, these media leave few details to be filled in by the audience. They are, in today’s parlance, low engagement media.
Cool media are “low definition” because they require active participation by the audience to fill in the blanks. Good examples of cool media are cartoons and speech and, of course, the web.
I hope you will find Media Tech Business to be medium cool and you’ll join the conversation.
Bennett Zucker
