Defining New Media

1. January 23, 2008 Defining New Media

2. Issues in New Media • Questions • Blogs • Class Discussion Schedule • Post presentation to TRACS by 4pm under Resources, same time as blog post • News • Video • Excerpts from TED Talks

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

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

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

9. 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 body’s relationship to the technological media • New patterns of organization and production

10. Characteristics of New Media • Digitality • Interactivity • Hypertextuality • Dispersal • Virtuality

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. From Pencils to Pixels • Trace the stages of literacy technology for the telephone; computer; the Internet. • Do you agree with the author’s contention that “the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies?” • Media History Timeline

21. 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

22. 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

23. Principles of New Media • Discrete representation on different scales • Numerical representation • Automation • Variability