What's in a Name? Part 2- Industry Identity Crisis

In the process of setting up my blog, again I asked the question, "what's in a name?" This time it was in choosing the subtitle that I would use to describe what my blog was about.

Why was this so difficult? It wasn't lack of creativity. It wasn't the lack of a focused vision for what I wanted my blog to be about. It wasn't even the title, KwazyArk.com. That was a no-brainer given it's my web site. However, the issue was what to call the industry that I've worked in for over fifteen years.

So what terms describe the A/V industry? A/V, that sounds too dated. Multimedia also sounds too 90s. You could call it streaming media. Or you could call it dynamic media. That would cover most of the content that gets posted to the web. But even that's only a part of it.

What about the other side of the industry, the non-media side. There's video conferencing,web collaboration, event production and installation. How do we classify these?

It seems like the industry as a whole is going through an identity crisis. To call it "A/V" seems too old school. This is not your uncle's A/V industry. As everyone knows, IT is now a huge part of A/V. So are IP cameras, networked projectors and High Definition video conferencing. Almost anything can connect to a computer, be controlled from a computer or just is a computer. That bus left at least a few years ago. If you not on it yet, it's only a matter of time before you get run over by it.

Working with this technology, you need to be conscience of things like vlans, IP addresses, and network bandwidth. These things were almost foreign to A/V even just a few years ago. If you don't deal with these things directly, you most likely have to deal with your IT department. You need to at least have a working understanding of what those things are. This is essential so that you can speak the same language as your IT department and lobby for the technology and services that you need. With things like web collaboration and enterprise video conferencing the reliance on IT will only continue to grow

So what do we call this industry? In my mind that is still up for debate. I'm hoping that a suitable term can be found. I'd love to hear your ideas on the subject.

As for my blog, I settled on "dynamic content creatation and collaborative technologies." Maybe that will stick. ;-)


-ARK