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 • Video • Excerpts from TED Talks

Your thoughts on “new media”

• Broad, interactive relationship with viewers and audiences - Brittany• Everything is built off of what came before it – Jordan• Changes the user’s experience from something linear to something

dynamic – Jesse• Media that has to have the ability to evolve and update – Josh• The process through which we receive our information is not only

faster, but completely different and interactive. – Monique• To categorize any one “thing” as new media makes it immediately

obsolete! – Lydia• An idea, program, technology, process, … as long as it’s new, it will be

new media. – Veronica• Taking the legacy media – things like TV, radio, newspaper – and

integrating the computer and Internet to allow for interaction – Dale• Anything that is any kind of interactive media - Lesley

Your thoughts on “new media”

• Given media consumers an interactive relationship, allowing them to instantly access content anywhere, at any given time – Taylor

• Those institutions and innovations that will continue to evolve and help us make some sense of what would otherwise be overwhelming – TC

• I know it when I see it – William

• Media is “new media” when the medium is still evolving, when its impact on the present and future is not understood or known, and its power and influence cannot even fully be fathomed – Jennifer

• “new media” are distinct in that they facilitate more direct interaction between content creators and content – Whit

• better technology – Ryan

• Of new media–whatever new technology and techniques I have at my disposal to get my story and my ads to my audience as cheaply and quickly as possible - Trey

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 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

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.

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

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 author’s 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