When our means of communication change, we have to adapt and modify our language to the new modalities in use for content. The new method, thanks to the new adapted language, can be transmitted in a more fluid manner. 

The distribution of content through digital media determined new languages that are still very malleable today. Is the content really changing? Or are human beings still interested in the same stories? They react to the same emotional mechanisms created once by television?

As it often happens when we are talking about human beings, the truth is not one and only. The same way the means modify the language in use, the latter modifies the content. Nowadays, television is not the primary source of information and content.

The new and bigger aggregations happen in the social media. If in the past families used to gather around a television set in their living-room, sometimes inviting their neighbours who might not have owned a TV, and watch one of the few programs that would be showing on the main TV channels, today, this happens only on the web and the social media.

We could actually say that Facebook is now like a big TV network from the 60s. Everybody was watching at the time as everybody is now on Facebook. We are already moving one step ahead. On iPad, the Flipboard magazine is a simple social network aggregator. Nothing new there, we had already seen other aggregators in the past such as FriendFeed.com.

What’s different on Flipboard is that every user finds on his page content he shares with his social network as if it belonged to a single magazine. Comments, replies, tweets, pictures, video, list of friends, groups, subscriptions, events, shared videos, the “Likes”, to sum it up all of the contents/actions one shares on Facebook, Twitter, MSN Google, Skype, blog, become part of a dynamic flux of data with a perfect lay-out especially designed for it on Flipboard.com. Layouts able to organize texts, photos, personal profiles, videos and interactions. Using iPad’s geolocator as well.

We realize that in the mist of a revolution in communication and new means, content is moving to new formats able to carry stories, information, emotional mechanisms that once belonged to television, to new usable digital platforms and aggregations. Not only: the same platforms contribute in creating new formats and modalities that we once thought unthinkable on TV. Flipboard, although it’s only a versatile container capable of storing different languages and types of content, is another step in creating new distribution modalities and elimination of the media.

 Flipboard will probably become a killer application on iPad and will mark the turning point on mass aggregations towards a single object. Flipboard is an empty magazine. Your life is there to fill it.

Watch a demonstration of the Flipboard application:

Read more on the iPad on Swide.com.

Text by Giuliano Federico

Notes from the author: Flipboard is available on App Store for iPad.  
iPad cases by Dolce&Gabbana.

Source: flipboard.com