Transcript Defining New Media

Defining New Media
January 23, 2008
Issues in New Media
• Questions
• Blogs
• Class Discussion Schedule
– Post presentation to TRACS by 4pm under
Resources, same time as blog post
• News
• Video
• Excerpts from TED Talks
Your thoughts on “new media”
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New media is simply written media as we know it, digitized and
"glammed up" for faster processing and reception - Maira
Cutting edge technology that is being thought of at this very moment Cherie
When I think of new media, the first thing that pops into my head is
social networking sites- I think of myspace, facebook, all those sites we
all deny we spend way too much time on - Dee
I associate new media with updating computers and software and
things that we already have and that exist - Meagan
I confess, I've used the term "new media" a few times before without
really considering its definition - Fazia
My first problem with defining new media is that the word “new” is
always changing -Sunday
Symbolically, new media represents change - Shane
So in short, "new media" are just a phase were going through and will
soon grow out of - Chris
Your thoughts on “new media”
• To me, new media is an advanced medium for information that is
highly customizable, interactive, unique, and engaging - Scott
• It wasn't until I did the readings that I allowed myself to
contemplate that the word "media" isn't relegated to journalism Kerri
• So my definition of new media deals with how this information is
being conveyed from point-to-point. The digitalness of the
content if you will - Jac
• I'm not a fan of the term New Media - Michael
• Media today is all about the consumer, or end user - Theresa
• For me, new media is synonymous with the Postmodern epoch.
- Cooper
Communications Media
• Communications media - the institutions
and organizations in which people work
- press, cinema, broadcasting,
publishing, online
• Forms and genres of these institutions books, newspapers, films, magazines,
tapes, discs, Web sites
Defining New Media
• “New media” suggests something less
settled, known, identified
• Changing set of formal and
technological experiments
• Complex set of interactions between
new technologies and established
media forms
Change Associated with
New Media
• Shift from modernity to postmodernity
• Intensifying processes of globalization
• Replacement of industrial age by postindustrial information age
• Decentering of established and centralized
geo-political orders
• Seen as part of technoculture - a larger
landscape of social, technological, and
cultural change
Connotations of “New”
• New media as “the latest thing”
• Connotation of better, cutting edge, avantgarde
• Social progress associated with technology
• Broad cultural resonance rather than a
narrow technical or specialist application
• Some prefer digital media (digital binary
code, 0’s and 1’s), although that symbolizes a
clear break with analog media.
Kinds of New Media
• New textual experiences
• New ways of representing the world
• New relationships between subjects and
media technologies
• New experiences of the relationship between
embodiment, identity, and community
• New conceptions of the biological body’s
relationship to the technological media
• New patterns of organization and production
Characteristics of New Media
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Digitality
Interactivity
Hypertextuality
Dispersal
Virtuality
Digitality
• Data input converted to numbers
• Can be output to both online sources or “hard copy”
• Analog - all input data is converted to another
physical object
• Broadcast began conversion of analog to electronic;
but scale and nature is much more significant in
digital
• Symbolic realm of mathematics rather than physics
or chemistry
• Binary data - strings of on/off impulses
• Still, there are relationships to physical processes;
miniaturization limits, bandwidth; physical access
Interactivity
• Ideological - more powerful sense of user
engagement with texts; choice
• Instrumental - users’ ability to directly intervene in
and change the images and texts that they access.
• Hypertextual navigation
• Immersive navigation - visual and sensory spatial
exploration
• Registration interactivity - users’ ability to register
their own messages; bulletin bds, MUDs, MOOs
• Interactive Communication - ability of communication
to emulate face-to-face
Hypertext
• Discrete units of material in which each
one carries a number of pathways to
other units.
• A Web of connections in which the user
controls the navigation
• Vannevar Bush - As We May Think
• Ted Nelson - A New Home for the Mind
• Marshall McLuhan - Extensions of Man
Dispersal
• Consumption - large number of highly differentiated
texts; no longer simultaneity and uniformity of
messages received by mass audience
• Selectivity of users
• Accompanied by intensification of merger activities
limiting democratizing potential
• Production - craft skills of production becoming more
dispersed, less specialized
• Media production processes become closer to habits
of everyday life - PowerPoint, desktop publishing,
Web design, photo manipulation, etc.
• Concept of prosumer
Virtuality
• Immersion - environment of computer
graphics and digital video in which user has
some degree of interaction
• Visual, tactile experiences felt to be in one
place, while the body is in physical space
• Space - way of imagining the invisible space
of communication networks
• Adopt different identities; new associations
and communities
• Cyberspace - questions of embodiment
Nicholas Negroponte
• Born 1943
• MIT Media Lab
• Early involvement with Wired
Magazine
• Wrote Being Digital 1996 - ideas
from his many Wired columns
focused on predictions of the
effects of interactive media
• Most recently associated with the
One Laptop Per Child Program
Being Digital
• Difference between bits and atoms
• The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable
• Mass media will be refined by systems for transmitting and
receiving personal information and entertainment (Epic 2015)
• We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical
space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role
• Information superhighway is about the global movement of
weightless bits at the speed of light
• Bits and atoms often confused (book publisher in the information
business or the book production business?)
• Merits to digitization: data compression, error correction,
economy of bits
• Bandwidth - the number of bits that can be transmitted per
second through a given channel
Being Digital
• Better and more efficient delivery
• Bits commingle effortlessly - mixing of audio,
video, data - multimedia
• Bits about other bits - headers
• “If moving these bits around is so effortless,
what advantage would the large media
companies have over me?” (or you?)
• Potential for new content to originate from a
whole new combination of sources
From Pencils to Pixels
• Humanists not considered in tech loop
• Stages of Literacy Technology
– Restricted communication function; small number of initiates
– Adapted to familiar functions associated with an older
technology
– Decreased costs improves spread of new technology; better
able to mimic ordinary forms of communication
– New literacy; technology creates original forms of
communication
– Ultimately effects older technologies
• Pencil originally used for marking measurements
• Earliest forms of writing were to record business
transactions, not transcribe speech
From Pencils to Pixels
• Trace the stages of literacy technology
for the telephone; computer; the
Internet.
• Do you agree with the author’s
contention that “the computer is simply
the latest step in a long line of writing
technologies?”
• Media History Timeline
Lev Manovich
• Teaches new media art and
theory at Univ. of CA, San Diego
• Born in Moscow
• Studied fine arts, architecture,
animation, and programming
• Wrote The Language of New
Media, 2001
Manovich on New Media
• The ability to disseminate the same texts, images and sounds to
millions of citizens
• Assuring that they will have the same ideological beliefs was as
essential as the ability to keep track of their birth records,
employment records, medical records, and police records.
• Photography, film, the offset printing press, radio and television
made the former possible while computers made possible the
latter.
• Mass media and data processing are the complimentary
technologies of a mass society.
• Trajectories were distinct and parallel
• Ultimately the computer became a media synthesizer and
manipulator
Principles of New Media
• Discrete representation on different
scales
• Numerical representation
• Automation
• Variability