What is “New” Media?
intro to new media
New Spaces of Interaction and Encounter
Aims of Today’s Presentation
• 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
What is New Media?
Any form of media with the following characteristics:
• Interaction is defined by Many:Many
• Provide on-demand access to Content
• Anywhere (not bound by geography)
• On any digital device
• With interactive user-feedback
• And creative participation & community formation
around media content
3
Forms of New Media?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Internet
Mobile Phones
Games Consoles
Digital TV
DVD
DV Filmmaking
MP3
The Internet
• Central hub for a number of digital media
• The Internet has been responsible for a
change in the way different media are made
and distributed
• No other form of mass media has allowed
such widespread participation before
• Allows users to “become the media”, creating
their own web site
MP3
• Alters the way music is produced and distributed
• Developed as a way of exchanging music files via the
internet
• Became popular at first due to the success of Napster
• Popularity of format has led to hardware being produced
to play files away from computer
• Became increasingly common and cheaper to buy than
CDs
• Offers new and unsigned artists the chance to reach a
global audience
• Format has the potential to empower an artist as record
companies could become obsolete.
Digital TV
• Benefits of choice?
• Interactivity
• Development of digital hardware to
replace VCR e.g. TIVO, Sky+
• “Walled Garden” access to internet
Convergence
• The coming together of two or more
technologies into one device e.g.
Playstation 2.
Game Consoles
• Huge growth area – generates more
money than Hollywood
• Crossover between film and computer
games – spin off games and spin off films.
• Convergence is increasingly common.
• Involvement of huge multi-nationals e.g.
Sony & Microsoft
The Evolution of Media
Media is always new
J.Gutenberg’s
Print-Press
193
0
ARPANET
1923
Motion Picture –
Charlie Chaplin
1914
Television
Cross continental
1830 1843 1895
Telephone
long distance
electric telegraph
line by S.Morse
Moving Picture
1st Photograph
1455
1st
1st
Computer Sold
1951
The US release control of the Internet
Lumiere
Brothers
Home
Compute
r
1969 1976
W
W
W
was
born
1994
Interaction defined by: 1:1 and 1:Many
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The Revolution of Media
Media is always new
Web 2.0
W
W
W
1994
Web 1.0 45million Users +
250,000 Websites
Web 0.5
BBS
Characterized by bulletin board systems,
brochureware, digital duplication or
versioning, interactivity, read only web
1:Many
Truly interactive, 2-way
digital Many:Many
conversation, Read and
Write Web
11
Augmented
Reality
12
•
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
What happens to a population
when it goes online?
The Implication of New Media
• A gradual fading away of geographic boundaries making
physical location less significant for social relationships.
• Users have evolved from just being consumers to participators.
• Democratization of the creation, publishing, distributing and
consumption of media content.
• The rise of the amateur class as a result of the lowered bar of
entry and transaction cost
• The birth of pseudo-cultures and online paradigms. For
example, the fact that information wants to be free.
• Cannibalization of traditional media.
15
Too Much Connectivity
Information Commodity Overload,
Spam and Social Contagion
• 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 Media in Business
Regardless of media, good business comes down to a simple
process of :
• Identifying customers
• Learning what they want or need
• Feeling their challenge
• Learning how they communicate with one another, and
• Observing how they discover and share information
• Keeping their attention by keeping your brand top of mind –
Attention Economics
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Understanding the Consumer
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A Brief History of the
“New” Media
When did the “new” begin…
New media the result of
the convergence
between
• modern media
• the computer
• Computing
•
•
•
Analogue media
– Photographic camera (France
1839)
– Cinema (France 1895)
– Radio (1901 - UK)
– Television (1920s)
•
Mass dissemination of information
(output)
–
–
–
Texts
Images
Sounds
•
•
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
Counterculture
1. High tech military
spending
concentrated in the
Bay area in San
Francisco
2. Center 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
DIY media
• 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
DIY media
• 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 network
• The DNA of new
media...
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
New communication paradigm?
Old paradigm (mass
communication) = one to
many - sender to receivers
New paradigm (networked
media) = many to many sender to receivers???
mass media?
mass
passive
linear
user-inaccessible
new media?
interactive
(demassified)
non-linear
user-responsive
networked
Current Statistics are staggering
1new member joins
Social gamers buy over
$6 billion in virtual
goods; movie goers
buy only $2.5 billion in
real goods
LinkedIn every
The Ford Explorer
second
launch on Facebook
generated more traffic
than the Super Bowl
million people
If Wikipedia were
made into a book it
joined G+ in the first
would be almost 4
week
million pages long
If Facebook was a
country it would be
e-readers have
surpassed book sales
the rd largest in the
world
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New Media Field of Study
DIGITALIZATION
VIRTUALITY
USE
COVERGENCE
NETWORKS
THE USER EXPERIENCE
INTERACTIVITY
SIMULATIONS
SOCIAL MEDIA
MODELS OF INTERACTIVITY
ONLINE COMMUNITY
NEW MEDIA POLITICS
NON-LINEAR COMMUNICATION
CYBERCULTURE
NETWORK ECONOMY
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
HACKING
SOCIAL POWER
INFORMATION SPACE
SPAM
CONTAGIONS
INFORMATION AGE
OPEN SOURCE
AFFECT
HYPERSPACE
TACTILE MEDIA
COGNITION
HYPERTEXT
CODE/SCRIPTS
HYPERMEDIA
MOBILE
HYPERFICTION
UBICOMP
NAVIGATION DESIGN
INTERFACE DESIGN