When talking about what ads appeal to us in our Intro to Digital Communications class on Tuesday night, the one thing that I saw in common is that we all now expect something back from advertisers for our time in viewing/interacting with ads.

Whether it’s a quiz, free song, or just the ability to click through the ad, we all are attracted to ads that give us a benefit, however simple or small.

The days of the static ads in newspapers and magazines, or even multi-media ads on television, are gone. We don’t want to sit back and have the ad delivered to us. We want to participate.

The smart, young future ad exec will realize this and target an audience who is accustomed to interacting with media: swiping, touching, clicking, responding. That’s our culture today, that’s how we consume media. We interact with it.

By creating ads that are interactive, that mimic what we’re doing in our everyday lives, advertisers are appealing to our new comfort zones. They are delivering ads that grab our decreasing attention spans and hold on to them for a bit, giving us a reward and hoping we’ll see their message in the process.

Ads have become part of the convergence, bringing their message to the digital realm and delivering a sensory experience to multiple platforms.

I rambled on a bit in our Intro to Digital Communications class about the past, but maybe ignored the future.

The future for journalists is bright, no matter the state of printed papers, magazines and all the other media impacted by the internet and digital media over the past couple decades.

During my ongoing ramble, I mentioned the competition from other newspapers, websites and blogs over the past 15 years, and some mistakes we made in trying to comply with the urgency of the internet. What I didn’t say — and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging — is that we learned to do the task at hand well and watched several sites go out of business or stop trying because they couldn’t compete with us.

Why? Because we’re good at what we do. We know how to tell stories. We know how to be watchdogs. We know how to be fair. We know how to uncover the truth. We know how to make good pictures. We know how to cover the news. We’ve been doing it for 125 years, and we don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

The startup sites challenging us couldn’t do any of that well. They may have been able to get a story up quickly, but when people wanted to know what the real story was — what all the angles were and what it meant for them, they turned to us. Because we’re good at what we do, and take that very seriously.

Good news — good reporting — will never go out of style. Integrity and dependability will never go out of style. Good storytelling will never go out of style. Good reporters will never go out of style.

I’ve watched many ‘revolutions’ in the media business — digital instead of film photography, color on front pages, digital pagination, to name a few — since I was a cub reporter oh so many years ago, thrown out into the world with nothing more than a pencil, a pad and an old film Nikon, and they’ve all made us better reporters, better news-gatherers, better storytellers. Convergence and the Internet have done the same.

I see young reporters come into the business and they’re sharper than I ever was at their age, they have huge toolboxes and great skills. We add to those by teaching them about ethics, fairness, good reporting practices and by imparting our collective years of experience. And they teach us about the latest phone apps and social media platforms.

I’m hopeful about the future of journalism, which at its core will remain true, in whatever medium it’s displayed. There will always be a need for it, reporters willing to fill that need, and readers waiting (not as long as they used to) to consume it.

Even though I took a nonchalant position in a personalization versus privacy video debate in this week’s Introduction to Digital Communications class, our class discussion did prompt some concerns.

While I overall still feel that the advantages of big data collection and utilization far outweigh privacy and other concerns, the digital explosion and growth of big data applications still need to be kept in check — like everything else in life, I guess.

Part of our discussion had to do with health care, and the growing trend of centralizing health care and fitness records. Perhaps someday, they will all be kept on the cloud somewhere, accessible to any health care provider treating an individual.

The benefits of that would be innumerable. No longer would the left hand not know what the right hand was doing when it came to treatment, prescriptions, insurance, etc. It could eliminate confusion and guarantee that all of one’s health care providers were on the same page.

But at the same time, it could pose a very real threat to some people. A group of employees of a company I’m familiar with were all asked to fill out an annual health survey if they participated in the company’s group health insurance, as a way to show, over time, that some healthy initiatives were having a positive effect and potentially reduce the company’s rates.

While the employer promised that the results of the survey would remain anonymous and not effect health coverage, many employees were concerned. What if the health insurance provider somehow broke the confidence of the employees and provided the employer with confidential information detailing certain health risks — smoking, overeating, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., and the employer decided to fire those employees to save on rates?

As a former smoker and someone who sees a physician regularly, it’s a daunting scenario. But does the risk outweigh the advantages of all my medical providers being able to share information and come up with the best health care plan for me collaboratively? I think not, but I’m going to be careful nonetheless.

It comes back to caution and personal responsibility. As a society, we need to be diligent about protecting privacy and rights as much as possible and ensure that there are penalties in place for those who would abuse our rights. There will always be abuses, but awareness and scrutiny will help keep those in check.

Gotta go, Amazon is telling me it’s time to spend some money.

We trust in the miracle of the digital age that has made all our lives so much simpler over the past couple decades, almost implicitly.

I enter my personal information, my credit card numbers my bank account info. I fill out student loan applications full of information that if it found its way into the wrong hands could ruin my life. well, maybe not ruin, but sure create a huge mess that would take years to clean up.

I see my friends post pictures of their kids and where they go to school. Friends and associates check in to places, leaving anyone with bad intentions an idea of where they are and when they’ll be home. There used to be warnings about about not posting to social media while you were on vacation because it let the burglars know you weren’t home. I don’t hear those warnings so much anymore.

The entire recording industry was almost brought down by Napster and sites like it providing illegal digital copies of music two decades ago, and if not for Apple, most likely would have. People are broadcasting movies, concerts and boxing matches on Periscope, sidestepping the rights of producers and promoters.

And the poor guys with profiles on Ashley Madison are shaking in their boots, praying that their significant others don’t read their name in an online article detailing their use of the site. It may be difficult to feel sorry for those guys because one may not agree with their ethical decisions, but their lives may very well be ruined.

So yes, there are dangers associated with the internet. Big ones.

How do we address those dangers? Is the heavy hand of government regulation the answer? Perhaps in small doses, when absolutely necessary, but it’s a slippery slope when when we start to allow the bureaucrats to cast a shadow on a technology–a culture–that has reached its tentacles into almost every aspect of our lives. We need to be very careful about what we allow. Especially when it comes to free speech and constitutional protections.

Perhaps much of the answer lies in personal responsibility. We try to teach our kids, successfully or not, about stranger danger, about the other dangers of life, and how to protect themselves. We, as digital consumers, need to teach ourselves more about the dangers of the internet and other media and not be so pie-in-the-sky.

In class, we’ve spoken a lot about the advantages and the power of the digital convergence,  about its impact on closed societies that become more open, more democratic. With any great change, there are going to be hitches, we need to be careful not to allow efforts to correct those hitches result in a lessening of our freedoms, and the ability to extend those freedoms, eventually, around the world.

Of course, there are situations that will require some form of regulation. People can’t be allowed to hack into private corporations and steal information. Intellectual property must be protected. Threats of physical harm should not be tolerated.

But instead of trying to “catch up” to innovation, maybe we need to slow down and make sure we understand the implications of any regulations we put in place, both nationally and internationally. We’ve all criticized foreign governments that censor internet use. Let’s not be one of them.

In our second week of our Intro to Digital Communication class for Communications@Syracuse, we read and discussed a rather pessimistic article from Newsweek circa 1995 by Clifford Paul “Cliff” Stoll an astronomer, author and teacher.

In the article, Dr. Stoll, in great detail, discounts the ability of the then-burgeoning Internet and e-commerce to make much difference in the world.

Turns out he was wrong–and he freely admitted that on BoingBoing in 2010: “Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler … Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff …”

But you can’t blame him for his cynicism 20 years ago, the Internet was still growing and technology was far from what it is today. Maybe, however, you can cite him for a lack of vision, for the faith that once the market got a firmer hold on the growing technology, things would improve dramatically–as they did.

As much as six years after Dr. Stoll’s piece, I remember, on September 11, 2001, trying to get current video and reports and what was going on in New York while sitting at my desk at work, and not being able to because the strain on the web was too great and every site claiming to offer real-time news was crashing or so stalled that all you got was revolving circles.

“They’re going to need to fix this if this thing is going to work,” I thought. And they did soon after. Maybe that was a turning point.

Dr. Stoll points to a number of not-quite-there-yet technologies that he believed at the time would never pan out: telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, multimedia classrooms, virtual communities, e-commerce and electronic books, to name a few.  He also describes the Internet as a “wasteland of unfiltered data.” Right again–at the time.

My point is that the commercialization of digital media corrected all those shortcomings. Broadband solved my concern–streaming media is second nature now, it can be watched on a phone without a second thought. Amazon developed the Kindle and Apple came out with the iPad to make reading e-books better. Skype developed the technology making virtual meetings possible. Pay-Pal made shopping secure.

Anything is possible, and if enough people want it, someone out there will sell it. And in the end, that’s how technology advances. The digital convergence wouldn’t have been possible without the dissatisfaction expressed by Dr. Stoll–and a public willing to pay for the future.

Is the web Nirvana? No, it’s not–Dr. Stoll’s point about a lack of human contact was prophetic. But  it’s pretty darn close, closer at least than he gave it credit for.