Introduction to New MediaWhat is “New” Media?

intro to new media

New Spaces of Interaction and Encounter

Lecture notes posted toMS1304 module blog

• http://ms1304.blogspot.com/

Aim of the lecturesTo provide context to new spaces of interaction

To introduce students to models, theories and concepts relating to new media

To apply these models, theories and concepts to the subject of new media

To build an intellectual platform from which students can contemplate, contextualize and discuss new media

YOU

Aims of Today’s Lecture

• New Media not just about unquestionable technological invention and progress

• New Media about people, culture, societies, economics

• Helps determine, to some extent, what people can and can’t do

• Plays a role in the distribution of social and personal power

What is “New” Media?

Where do we start?

Where do we start?Structure

1. Definitions & claims2. Historical perspectives & narratives 3. Analysis – The essay

Definitions & claims

What is this thing we have encountered?

Old definitions of new media (technical descriptions of multimedia date back to

1960s, but proliferate after digitisation in the 1990s)

• The ‘sum of its parts’

• "Any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video that is delivered by computer"

• “Multimedia is the seamless integration of data, text, images of all kinds and sound within a single, digital information environment"

Feldman, T (1997) An Introduction to Digital Media, London: Routledge

Vaughan, T, (1993), Multimedia: Making It Work (first edition) Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw-Hill.

From multimedia to the “new”

• … “New media” came into prominence in the mid-1990s, usurping the place of “multimedia”… it portrayed other media as dead or old… it was not mass media, specifically television. It was fluid, individualized connectivity, a medium to distribute and control freedom… an interactive medium’

• Wendy Chun (2006) New Media/Old Media London & New York: Routledge, p. 1

Ways of thinking about the term “NEW”

• “New” impossible to describe – moment it comes into being it isn’t new anymore.

• Yet “new” is used to describe an encounter…

• The “new” categorizes and prescribes the encounter.– The wonderful new

• Something that should be treated differently from the old– New media, the New

World, New Labour– Forget the past, this is

different• Wendy Chun (2006) New Media/Old Media London &

New York: Routledge, p. 3

Definitions & Claimsonline and offline

Definitions & Claimsonline and offline

• ‘The new media are a combination of offline and online media, such as computer networks and personal computers… a combination of transmission links and artificial memories (filled with text, data, images and/or sounds) that can also be installed in separate devices.’

• Jan van Dijk (2006) The Network Society. London: Sage, pp. 4-5

Being Online

• Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) The Exploit, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press p. 126.

• We have traditionally thought of ourselves as either online or offline

– Dial-up culture

• This is a changing circumstance

• In work we are online (accountable) offline (unaccountable)

• Broadband, wireless, mobile connectivity make us increasingly online – in the bathroom, unconscious

• Bots run all day and night – text messages, online gaming – 24 hours online culture

New Experiences

• ‘The body becomes a medium of perpetual locatability, a roving panoply of tissues, organs, cells orbited by personal network devices.’

• Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) The Exploit, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press p. 126.

Social MediaFacebook nearly as large as U.S. population

What happens to a population when it goes online?

A new form of collective intelligence and sensation

• ‘Digital media technologies… are revolutionising our sensory perceptions and cognitive experiences of being in the world’

• Everett and Caldwell (2003) , New Media, London & New York: Routledge, p. xi

Too Much Connectivity

Information Commodity Overload, Spam and Social Contagion

Ubicomp

• The Internet of Things

• Makes the point that whereas once the user interacted with a system, it is now the user that becomes the subject of interaction

New Creative Tools(Create Mediascapes)

New Area of Creative Pursuit

A Work of Art

• ‘Computer programming, graphical human-computer interface, hypertext, computer multimedia, networking… have actualized the ideas behind the projects by artists.’

• Painters, composers, sculptors have been usurped by the new media artist.

• The web itself is a vast work of art.

Lev Manovich, 2000 The Language of New Media

New Spaces of Interaction• Websites• CD-ROM• DVD• Audio visual• Games

• Installations• Interactive television• Interactive toys• Mobile phones (GPS)• PDAs• Simulations• Ubi-Comp

A Brief History of the “New” Media

When did the “new” begin…

New media the result of the convergence between

• modern media • the computer

Analogue media

– Photographic camera (France 1839)– Cinema (France 1895)– Radio (1901 - UK)– Television (1920s)

• Mass dissemination of information (output)

– Texts– Images– Sounds

• Computing

• Charles Babbage (London 1833)– The Analytical Engine

• George Boole (Oxford 1854)– Boolean logic

• Turing machine theory (Cambridge 1936)

– Theory of computable numbers• Von Neumann (1940s in the US)

– Processor/memory

• The processing of mass information (input)

– Votes– Records

The Cold WarAnd Counter Culture

New Media Politics

Modern Computing and its Cold War (1945-1989) Origins

Bush - 1945As We May Think - 1950-60s

Licklider - 1960Human Computer Symbiosis

Baran – 1961Packet switching

Engelbart - 1962Interactive tools

State funded/commercial development of

The Microchip

The Internet

1930s – Turing

the theory of computable numbers

1940s -

von Neumann the architecture of the machine

Shannon the bits and bytes of information

Packet switching(a network able to withstand nuclear attack?)

• The rapid transmission of small blocks of data over a channel dedicated to the connection only for the duration of one packet's transmission. Each packet can take a different path from sender to receiver. By contrast, most telephone systems still use a circuit switching model, in which all data travels along a continuous dedicated path between the sender and receiver.

D is for Defence (Defence) Advanced Research Projects Agency

“When in the late 1970s, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) changed to DARPA, the D standing for defence; it meant finally that only projects with a direct military value would be funded from then on” (Manuel DeLanda, 1991 p.169).

Counterculture

Counterculture

1. High tech military spending concentrated in the Bay area in San Francisco

2. Centre of counter culture movement in the 60s…

3. Now the site of Silicon Valley

Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.. pp 25-41

Counterculture

• Stresses the democratic potential of the computer and…

• Computer as ‘spiritual and intellectual evolution’

Counter culture relation with technology

• 60s-70s – electric guitar

• 80s-90s – the computer

Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction. Routledge. London. Pp 25-41

counterculture

• 60s-70s – LSD

• 80-90s– Cyberspace

Tim Leary (turn on, tune in & drop out) on W Gibson (Science fiction writer)

‘provider of the underlying myth of the next stage of human evolution’

• Link with psychedelic and computer counter culture…

– High Frontiers– Reality Hackers– Mondo 2000

– Grateful Dead– Electronic Freedom

Foundation

Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction. Routledge. London. Pp 25-41

1965

Ted Nelson

Counterculture_a DIY media

• Old media tools and content were tied together

• The models ‘worked’ on the audience

• There is thus a mystical authority established

• Audience• Broadcaster

Rushkoff, D (1994) Cyberia: life in the trenches of hyperspace, London: Harper Collins. http://www.rushkoff.com/cyberiabook.html

counter culture = A DIY media

• New media gave the tools to the audience

• the remote• the joystick• the application

• the network

• Thus the mystical authority is broken by interactivity

• We have control over the pixel…

• The DNA of new media...

Control over the Pixel?

What do you notice about Dave?

Control over the pixel

Photoshop as a political tool?

New Media Paradigm

• ‘A new media that is not necessarily constrained by the dominant characteristics of mass media’ (Jankowski and Hanssen, Contours of Multimedia 1996)

The actor Alec Baldwin has boycotted the Emmy awards after the event's broadcaster, Fox News, refused to air a joke he made about the phone-hacking scandal at News International.

The End of Authority?

• Hypertext blurs the roles of author & reader (Landow)

• Internet threatens established power structures

New Media Goes Corporate

New Media Contagions

Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook questioned over the English Summer Riots

New communication paradigm?

Old paradigm (mass communication) = one to many - sender to receivers

New paradigm (networked media) = many to many -

sender to receivers???

masspassive linear

user-inaccessible

interactive (demassified)

non-linearuser-responsive

networked

mass media? new media?

New Media Field of StudyDIGITALISATION

COVERGENCE

INTERACTIVITY

MODELS OF INTERACTIVITY

NON-LINEAR COMMUNICATION

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

INFORMATION SPACE

INFORMATION AGE

HYPERSPACE

HYPERTEXT

HYPERMEDIA

HYPERFICTION

NAVIGATION DESIGN

INTERFACE DESIGN

VIRTUALITY

NETWORKS

SIMULATIONS

ONLINE COMMUNITY

CYBERCULTURE

HACKING

SPAM

OPEN SOURCE

TACTILE MEDIA

CODE/SCRIPTS

MOBILE

UBICOMP

USE

THE USER EXPERIENCE

SOCIAL MEDIA

NEW MEDIA POLITICS

NETWORK ECONOMY

SOCIAL POWER

CONTAGIONS

AFFECT

COGNITION

Analysis of New Media(unpicking/breaking down problems)

theories/concepts/models/methods

• 1. Is the new media really ‘new’?

• 2. ‘Is the experience of a virtual community any different from the experience of a real community?’

• 3. ‘How does interactivity change the way in which we communicate with authority?’

• IS THE NEW MEDIA REALLY ‘NEW’?

• Things to consider in your answer… What does ‘new’ mean in this context? What are the arguments put forward concerning a paradigm shift in media history? What examples help to either support or undermine these claims? Is new media over hyped or is there really something ‘revolutionary’ about it?

• IS THE EXPERIENCE OF A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY ANY DIFFERENT FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF A REAL COMMUNITY?

• Things to consider in your answer… Ideas concerning what community means. How can we define ‘virtual’? What are the differences between belonging to a community based on physical proximity and those that are linked ‘virtually’ like Facebook? Use examples of both virtual and real and compare and contrast.

• HOW DOES INTERACTIVITY CHANGE THE WAY IN WHICH WE COMMUNICATE WITH AUTHORITY?

• Things to consider in your answer… models of communication, models of interactivity, examples of interactive experiences in which individuals communicate with authorities, for example, local government, the police or any institution that has an element of control over an individual’s life. Does interactivity change these relations, and if so how are they transformed? Give consideration to communication through social media, email and mobile.

Prep reading for next week

• Reading and viewing the Global Village

• Marshall McLuhan's Global Village‘ By Benjamin Symes• Danah Boyd, (2007) Viewing American class divisions through

Facebook and MySpace • Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun (ed.) (2006) New

Media/Old Media (London & New York: Routledge, pp. 375-397