Defining New Media

January 23, 2008

Issues in New Media

Questions
Blogs
Class Discussion Schedule
Post presentation to TRACS by 4pm under
Resources, same time as blog post

News
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Excerpts from TED Talks

Your thoughts on new media

New media is simply written media as we know it, digitized and "glammed
up" for faster processing and reception - Maira
Cutting edge technology that is being thought of at this very moment - Cherie
When I think of new media, the first thing that pops into my head is social
networking sites- I think of myspace, facebook, all those sites we all deny we
spend way too much time on - Dee
I associate new media with updating computers and software and things
that we already have and that exist - Meagan
I confess, I've used the term "new media" a few times before without really
considering its definition - Fazia
My first problem with defining new media is that the word new is always
changing -Sunday
Symbolically, new media represents change - Shane
So in short, "new media" are just a phase were going through and will soon
grow out of - Chris

Your thoughts on new media

To me, new media is an advanced medium for information that
is highly customizable, interactive, unique, and engaging - Scott
It wasn't until I did the readings that I allowed myself to
contemplate that the word "media" isn't relegated to journalism
- Kerri
So my definition of new media deals with how this information is
being conveyed from point-to-point. The digitalness of the
content if you will - Jac
I'm not a fan of the term New Media - Michael
Media today is all about the consumer, or end user - Theresa
For me, new media is synonymous with the Postmodern epoch.
- Cooper

Communications Media
Communications media - the institutions
and organizations in which people work
- press, cinema, broadcasting,
publishing, online
Forms and genres of these institutions books, newspapers, films, magazines,
tapes, discs, Web sites

Defining New Media

New media suggests something less
settled, known, identified
Changing set of formal and
technological experiments
Complex set of interactions between
new technologies and established
media forms

Change Associated with

New Media
Shift from modernity to postmodernity
Intensifying processes of globalization
Replacement of industrial age by postindustrial information age
Decentering of established and centralized
geo-political orders
Seen as part of technoculture - a larger
landscape of social, technological, and
cultural change

Connotations of New
New media as the latest thing
Connotation of better, cutting edge, avantgarde
Social progress associated with technology
Broad cultural resonance rather than a
narrow technical or specialist application
Some prefer digital media (digital binary code,
0s and 1s), although that symbolizes a clear
break with analog media.

Kinds of New Media

New textual experiences
New ways of representing the world
New relationships between subjects and
media technologies
New experiences of the relationship between
embodiment, identity, and community
New conceptions of the biological bodys
relationship to the technological media
New patterns of organization and production

Characteristics of New Media

Digitality
Interactivity
Hypertextuality
Dispersal
Virtuality

Digitality
Data input converted to numbers
Can be output to both online sources or hard copy
Analog - all input data is converted to another physical
object
Broadcast began conversion of analog to electronic; but
scale and nature is much more significant in digital
Symbolic realm of mathematics rather than physics or
chemistry
Binary data - strings of on/off impulses
Still, there are relationships to physical processes;
miniaturization limits, bandwidth; physical access

Interactivity
Ideological - more powerful sense of user
engagement with texts; choice
Instrumental - users ability to directly intervene in
and change the images and texts that they access.
Hypertextual navigation
Immersive navigation - visual and sensory spatial
exploration
Registration interactivity - users ability to register their
own messages; bulletin bds, MUDs, MOOs
Interactive Communication - ability of communication
to emulate face-to-face

Hypertext
Discrete units of material in which each
one carries a number of pathways to
other units.
A Web of connections in which the user
controls the navigation
Vannevar Bush - As We May Think
Ted Nelson - A New Home for the Mind
Marshall McLuhan - Extensions of Man

Dispersal
Consumption - large number of highly differentiated texts;
no longer simultaneity and uniformity of messages
received by mass audience
Selectivity of users
Accompanied by intensification of merger activities limiting
democratizing potential
Production - craft skills of production becoming more
dispersed, less specialized
Media production processes become closer to habits of
everyday life - PowerPoint, desktop publishing, Web
design, photo manipulation, etc.
Concept of prosumer

Virtuality
Immersion - environment of computer graphics
and digital video in which user has some degree
of interaction
Visual, tactile experiences felt to be in one place,
while the body is in physical space
Space - way of imagining the invisible space of
communication networks
Adopt different identities; new associations and
communities
Cyberspace - questions of embodiment

Nicholas Negroponte
Born 1943
MIT Media Lab
Early involvement with Wired
Magazine
Wrote Being Digital 1996 - ideas from
his many Wired columns focused on
predictions of the effects of
interactive media
Most recently associated with the
One Laptop Per Child Program

Being Digital
Difference between bits and atoms
The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable
Mass media will be refined by systems for transmitting and receiving
personal information and entertainment (Epic 2015)
We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will
be irrelevant and time will play a different role
Information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless
bits at the speed of light
Bits and atoms often confused (book publisher in the information
business or the book production business?)
Merits to digitization: data compression, error correction, economy of
bits
Bandwidth - the number of bits that can be transmitted per second
through a given channel

Being Digital
Better and more efficient delivery
Bits commingle effortlessly - mixing of audio,
video, data - multimedia
Bits about other bits - headers
If moving these bits around is so effortless,
what advantage would the large media
companies have over me? (or you?)
Potential for new content to originate from a
whole new combination of sources

From Pencils to Pixels

Humanists not considered in tech loop
Stages of Literacy Technology
Restricted communication function; small number of initiates
Adapted to familiar functions associated with an older technology
Decreased costs improves spread of new technology; better able to mimic
ordinary forms of communication
New literacy; technology creates original forms of communication
Ultimately effects older technologies

Pencil originally used for marking measurements

Earliest forms of writing were to record business transactions, not
transcribe speech
Writing was considered cumbersome, expensive
Written documents not considered interactive
Validity questioned

From Pencils to Pixels

Trace the stages of literacy technology
for the telephone; computer; the Internet.
Do you agree with the authors
contention that the computer is simply
the latest step in a long line of writing
technologies?
Media History Timeline

Lev Manovich
Teaches new media art and
theory at Univ. of CA, San Diego
Born in Moscow
Studied fine arts, architecture,
animation, and programming
Wrote The Language of New
Media, 2001

Manovich on New Media

The ability to disseminate the same texts, images and sounds to
millions of citizens
Assuring that they will have the same ideological beliefs was as
essential as the ability to keep track of their birth records,
employment records, medical records, and police records.
Photography, film, the offset printing press, radio and television
made the former possible while computers made possible the
latter.
Mass media and data processing are the complimentary
technologies of a mass society.
Trajectories were distinct and parallel
Ultimately the computer became a media synthesizer and
manipulator

Principles of New Media

Discrete representation on different
scales
Numerical representation
Automation
Variability