1. Defining New Media

2. Issues in New Media Questions Blogs Class Discussion Schedule News
Post presentation to TRACS by 4pm under Resources, same time as blog post
News
Video
Excerpts from TED Talks

3. Thoughts on “new media”
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

4. 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

5. 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
Other definitions of media?
Terms - multimedia; mixed media; transmedia

6. 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
From New Media: A Critical Introduction
Despite these differences, singular term is applied unproblematically

7. Change Associated with New Media
Shift from modernity to postmodernity
Intensifying processes of globalization
Replacement of industrial age by post- industrial information age
Decentering of established and centralized geo-political orders
Seen as part of technoculture - a larger landscape of social, technological, and cultural change
Postmodernity (also called post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is a term used to describe the social and cultural implications of postmodernism. The term is used by philosophers, social scientists, art critics and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th century and early 21st century life. These features include globalization, consumerism, the fragmentation of authority, and the commoditization of knowledge (see "Modernity").
Modernity is associated with social progress, Industrial Age, Age of Enlightenment

8. Connotations of “New” New media as “the latest thing”
Connotation of better, cutting edge, avant- garde
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.
Digital seems purely technical
Interactive media - single, ill-defined contentious quality
CMC - computer-mediated communication - limitation to one set of machines and practices
All problematic
New media has broad cultural relevance - recognizes big changes, technological, ideological, experiential…general and abstract

9. 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
Pg.12

10. Characteristics of New Media
Digitality
Interactivity
Hypertextuality
Dispersal
Virtuality

11. 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
Doomed - extraordinary fluidity and promiscuity of form
Pg. 16
Media texts are dematerialized in the sense that they are separated from their physical space, photograph, book, film
Data compressed in small spaces
Accessed at very high speeds in non-linear manner
Easily manipulated
case - page 18 - question of authorship; authority of electronic letter; interpersonal implications

12. 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
Critical questions
Problems of interpretation, definition, producers, p. 22

13. 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
Bush - novel methods of storage and retrieval; will read for next week; memex; storage by association rather than by alphabetic or numerical indices
Nelson - Non-sequential writing
Hypermedia - Bolter and Grusin- references to McLuhan - rich sensorium of human experience.
Hypertext referred to more in literary realm, interactivity more in computing and communication
Two trajectories in hypertext scholarship - 1)return to previous works that challenged linearity, pg. 27
2) Hypertext scholarship as the technological embodiment of a particular moment in literary criticism. Reference Foucault, Barthes, Derrida post-structuralist- fragmentation, non-linearity, intertextuality, death of the author.

14. 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
Pg Critical and satirical journalism flourishes; fans get a chance to participate in the realm of media celebrity, and independent film-makers begin to organize new alternative distribution networks.
Craft bases and apprenticeship systems breaking down.

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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?”

18. 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

19. 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

20. Principles of New Media
Discrete representation on different scales
Numerical representation
Automation
Variability
Discrete representation - modularity - can be sized, combined, but still hold separate properties; object oriented
Numerical
Image/shape can be describe by a mathematical function; subject to algorithmic manipulation - media becomes programmable
Automation
Automatic correction - low level, removes human intention from creative process; artificial intelligence - high level; improved access - search capabilities- handle over abundance of information
Variability
Perfect copies and different versions- often created by computers (data to Web pages example, via templates) - values individual over society - everyone can make their own version
Transcoding
turn media into data - cultural layer vs. computer layer - will influence culture via organization - influence each other.
These build upon one another