What is “New” Media?
intro to new media
New Spaces of Interaction and Encounter

• http://ms1304.blogspot.com/

Aim of the lectures
To provide context to new spaces of interaction
YOU
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

• New Media not just about unquestionable technological
invention and progress
• Helps determine, to some extent, what people can and can’t do
• New Media about people, culture, societies, economics
• Plays a role in the distribution of social and personal power

Structure
1. Definitions & claims
2. Historical perspectives & narratives
3. Analysis – The essay

What is this thing we have encountered?

(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"
Vaughan, T, (1993), Multimedia:
Making It Work (first edition)
Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw-Hill.
Feldman, T (1997) An
Introduction to Digital Media,
London: Routledge

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

• “New” impossible to describe – moment it comes into being it isn’t new anymore.
• The “new” categorizes and prescribes the encounter.
– The wonderful new
• Yet “new” is used to describe an encounter…
• Wendy Chun (2006) New Media/Old Media London &
New York: Routledge, p. 3
• Something that should be treated differently from the old
– New media, the New
World, New Labour
– Forget the past, this is different

• ‘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

• 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

• ‘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.

Facebook nearly as large as U.S. population

•
• ‘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

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

(Create Mediascapes)

• ‘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

• Websites
• CD-ROM
• DVD
• Audio visual
• Games
• Installations
• Interactive television
• Interactive toys
• Mobile phones (GPS)
• PDAs
• Simulations
• Ubi-Comp

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

New Media Politics

1930s –
Turing the theory of computable numbers
1940s von Neumann the architecture of the machine
Shannon the bits and bytes of information
Modern Computing
and its Cold War (1945-1989) Origins
Bush
- 1945
As We May Think - 1950-60s
Licklider
- 1960
Human Computer Symbiosis
Baran
– 1961
Packet switching
Engelbart
- 1962
Interactive tools
State funded/commercial development of
The Microchip
The Internet

(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.

(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).

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

• Stresses the
democratic potential of the computer and…
Counter culture relation with technology
• Computer as ‘spiritual and intellectual evolution’
• 60s-70s
– electric guitar
• 80s-90s
– the computer
Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction.
Routledge. London. Pp 25-41

• 60s-70s
– LSD
• 80-90s
– Cyberspace
Tim Leary (turn on, tune in & drop out) on W Gibson (Science fiction writer)
• Link with psychedelic and computer counter culture…
– High Frontiers
– Reality Hackers
– Mondo 2000
‘provider of the underlying myth of the next stage of human evolution’
– Grateful Dead
– Electronic Freedom
Foundation
Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction.
Routledge. London. Pp 25-41

Ted Nelson

• Old media tools and content were tied together
• There is thus a mystical authority established
• The models ‘worked’ on the audience
• Audience
• Broadcaster
Rushkoff, D (1994) Cyberia: life in the trenches of hyperspace, London: Harper Collins. http://www.rushkoff.com/cyberiabook.html

• New media gave the tools to the audience
• Thus the mystical authority is broken by interactivity
• the remote
• the joystick
• the application
• We have control over the pixel…
• The DNA of new media...
• the network

What do you notice about Dave?

• ‘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.

• Hypertext blurs the roles of author & reader
(Landow)
• Internet threatens established power structures

New Media Goes Corporate

Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook questioned over the English Summer Riots

Old paradigm (mass communication) = one to many -
sender to receivers
New paradigm (networked media) = many to many -
sender to receivers
???

mass passive linear user-inaccessible
interactive
(demassified) non-linear user-responsive networked

DIGITALISATION
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

(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.

• 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