Key concepts in New Media
A tutorial
Content Editors and Librarian Subject Specialists: Maria
Carpenter and Julie Jersyk
What is New Media?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
I. Simple uses.
1. With sing. and pl. concord: new means of mass communication considered
collectively; spec. electronic means such as the Internet, CD-ROMs, etc. Also: the
profession of working in such a field of mass communication.
1960 Jrnl. Econ. Hist. 20 567 The decision maker who must deal with globally gathered
information, moved at electronic speeds, is impelled to acquire a more interrelated and
overall type of knowledge concerning the operations in which he is involved. The new
media, in management that is to say, have been directly responsible for the rise of
management training centers. 1984 Japan Econ. Jrnl. (Nexis) 26 June 31 Now we are
on the threshold of history's fourth technological reform era. Electronics, new media,
new materials, biotechnology, etc. 1992 Wall St. Jrnl. 4 Nov. A16/3 In his campaign,
Mr. Perot vowed he would take the new media to new heights if he were elected
president. What he had in mind was an ‘electronic town hall’. 2000 Times 7 Aug. II. 5/2
A self-respecting BYT [sc. Bland Young Thing] will only have a job that did not exist 50
years ago: new media, management consultancy, advertising.., headhunting.
II. Compounds.
2. General attrib.
[1972 N.Y. Times 5 Dec. 94/3 There has been a great deal of talk, but very little practical
exploration, of how the new media technologies can be used to benefit the arts.] 1987
Los Angeles Times (Nexis) 13 Dec. 4 That will allow crucial contributions..coming from
the new-media electronics and video to enter the mainstream and no longer be
marginal. 1996 Sci. Amer. July 21/1 Not all new-media enthusiasts eschew TV
altogether. 2000 N.Y. Times 15 Oct. III. 16/1 Last month, Artisan set up a $50 million
venture capital fund, called iArtisan, to invest in start-ups working on new-media
plumbing like streaming video and digital compression.
--http://oed.com
As defined by Wikipedia:
New media usually refers to a group of relatively recent mass media based on new
information technology. It is based on computing technology and not reducible to
communication in a traditional sense. Most frequently the label would be understood to
include the Internet and World Wide Web, video games and interactive media, CD-ROM
and other forms of multimedia popular from the 1990s on. The phrase came to
prominence in the 1990s, and is often used by technology writers like those at Wired
magazine and by scholars in media studies.
The term has garnered negative connotations due to techno-utopian claims by newmedia proponents about the revolutionary social and personal benefits of new media;
the claims of revolutionary transformation of people's lives were widely seen as
unjustified. All the same, new media have only grown in popularity, and their current
ubiquity is slowly causing social changes; their initial proponents' error may have been
in the speed with which they claimed media would transform society, rather than the
prediction itself.
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media
The two definitions vary and are influenced by their
source medium, arrangement, and history.
The Oxford English Dictionary is an authoritative source on the
evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It traces the
usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of
English language sources. The OED is a historical dictionary. For each
word, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological
order according to the quotation evidence. The OED has traditionally
been produced in print format and is now available online. Content is
researched and entries written by professional lexicographers. It takes
years of training and practice for a lexicographer to be able to
encapsulate a meaning accurately in a single sentence.
--http://0ed.com/about
Wikipedia
is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by
anyone who volunteers. Wikipedia's volunteers attempt to uphold a policy of "neutral
point of view" under which views presented by notable persons or literature are
summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth.
Due to its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are constant problems in Wikipedia.
The status of Wikipedia as reference work has been controversial. It has been praised for
its free distribution, editing, and diverse range of coverage; it has been criticized for
systemic bias, preference of consensus to credentials, and a perceived lack of
accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia
articles have been regularly cited by the mass media and academia. Thousands of people
have contributed to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Question to consider: Which source would you lean toward citing, and
why? Or would you use both?
Forms of New Media
• Can you think of some forms of new media?
Examples of New Media
• Feeds
• Blogs
• Voice over Internet
Protocol
• Podcasts
• PDAs, handhelds,
blackberrys, phones with
wireless internet access
• Webcams
• Tivo
• Community portals (e.g.
Facebook, Myspace,
Friendster, online dating
services)
But what about
• Cassette tapes
• Record players
• Tape recorders
• Telegram
• Telephone
• Digital cameras
• Cable television
• Diaries
Are these examples of new media?
Is new media new?
What are some historical considerations?
Media History
An important strand of media history argues that media are not fixed
natural objects, but develop as complex formations of habits, beliefs,
and procedures.
To understand what is meant for old media to be new is to come to
recognize that through history, the meaning of any new media is up for
grabs: its social role, who can make use of it, who will organize its
distribution, etc.
This approach is intended to make us think critically about any
argument along the lines of “the internet has changed the world.”
-- Robertson, Craig
For Discussion:
•
•
•
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Do new technologies change how we access
information?
The type of information upon which we rely?
How we communicate with each other?
Does new media limit or expand our personal
freedom?
Let’s consider the world of Blogs
Is blogging the most revolutionary breakthrough in communications
since Gutenberg, or the worst case of overhype since cold fusion?
Actually it is both. By making it easier for anyone to publish his or her
thoughts to the world, blogging has ruptured the media landscape,
giving millions of ordinary citizens a chance to write about their own
lives and obsessions and to talk back to power. Yet traditional
journalism remains crucial for informing us in an accurate,
comprehensive, and neutral manner.
--Kennedy, Dan, The Blogging Revolution
Another form: Gaming
•
The process of playing is a process of production. Although not a free-spirited
form of production, the gamer is producing results within the ecology of the
program. Like other new media, electronic games move the individual to the
center of cultural production: the gamer is the subject and the agent of the game.
He or she enacts a role and makes the decisions within parameters of what that
role entails.
•
The cultural experience of how gamers make the game is not lost on the industry
itself. Gameplayers are regularly employed to beta-test games before they move
to the open market, to eliminate glitches and to improve the connection to the
core players. The integration of players into the economic structure of game
manufacture also heralds shifts that are occurring in other media and in other
industries. The game tester is a role that goes well beyond previous efforts to
have strong feedback marketing loops with audiences.
--Marshall, David, New Media Cultures
And finally, community portals and personal websites
Public display of private lives
The internet has simultaneously heralded a new age of
voyeurism, narcissism and exhibitionism, all within its various
forms. Surveillance has also exited the world of internet
webcams to become the organizing narrative of reality television
around the world. Via the internet, the everydayness of personal
and intimate images that are perpetually accessible has
transformed the cultural discourse of what is public and what is
private, who is the performer and who is the audience.
-- Marshall, David, New Media Cultures
Do new technologies provide ease over quality of information?
•
The Web produces a massive surplus of content that may not
actually be useable as information. When we use the Web, one of
the principal frustrations is getting to a source that may advertise
itself through a keyword that in the end has used that word purely
to attract web traffic via the search engines.
--Burnett, Robert and Marshall, David P., Web Theory
•
When people send text messages via handhelds, is it okay to have
typos or shorthand? In business contexts? Personal contexts?
Who owns new media?
It is often easy to assess the current array of media as just extrapolations of what
has already developed – political economic analysis rightly points to the
continued and increasing concentration of media ownership.
Five recording companies, themselves part of larger conglomerates, control the
production of popular music. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation continues to
expand its influence through the acquisition of satellite services, satellite
channels and an array of cable-delivered television super stations beamed to all
continents on the planet.
The Internet, for all its diversity, has still seen the emergence of the same large
corporations as the most popular websites. Indeed, whenever there is any
successful web-based start-up company, it is usually the major media players
who are the key investors. A consortium of major entertainment corporations, as
we have seen, supported Tivo. Blockbuster films are clearly a strategy that is
connected to maintaining an industrial hegemony for the leading film studios
and production companies.
--Burnett, Robert and Marshall, David P., Web Theory
New Media Cultures has charted a somewhat different course
while acknowledging the significant forces behind maintaining
the centers of cultural power. The newness of new media has to
be seen as a cultural challenge that whilst revealing the efforts of
industrial consolidation and transnational strategizing, it also
betrays the elixir of cultural change, transformation and the
uncontainability of these strategies.
These new cultural apparatuses of connection and cultural
exchange need to be understood as a transforming echo with the
populace and as forms of popularity that often herald larger
transformations in contemporary culture......
--Burnett, Robert and Marshall, David P., Web Theory
Interactivity: a means to empowerment
With the advent of digital media, the tension between the hope
that advances in media technology will produce a healthier
democracy, and the concern that the commercial organization of
electronic media is eroding democratic values has increasingly
been articulated to an expectation that new media should
somewhat paradoxically mediate less. The demand for what Paul
Duguid calls “transparency” has come to define interactivity as a
form of empowerment. As people have the ability to be media
producers, we are surrounded by numerous claims about new
media that celebrate the perceived progressive aspects of
interactivity.
--Robertson, Craig
Concluding thoughts
•
How are we affected by new media? How about you personally? Has
having access to an MP3 player or cell phone changed your daily life?
Your perceptions? How you inform yourself of the world around you?
•
“Information and communication technology shapes our perceptions,
distributes our pictures of the world to one another, and constructs
different forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our
sense of who we are and our world. The instant we develop a new
technology of communication – talking drums, papyrus scrolls, books,
telegraph, radios, televisions, computers, mobile phones – we at least
partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities
for reflection, perception, and social experience...”
--Burnett, Robert and Marshall, David P., Web Theory