Key concepts in New MediaA 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 new-media 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?

• Can you think of some forms of new media?

Forms of New Media

• Feeds• Blogs• Voice over Internet Protocol• Podcasts• PDAs, handhelds, blackberrys, phones with wireless internet access

Examples of New Media

• Webcams• Tivo• Community portals (e.g. Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, online dating services)

• Cassette tapes• Record players• Tape recorders• Telegram

Are these examples of new media?

But what about

• Telephone• Digital cameras• Cable television• Diaries

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:

• 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