Thinking about Media Change

Are all new media just building on old media?


The world wide web hasn't been around for that long. It builds on the memex from 1934, and since then it has carried on developing. Once this had been developed, Ted Nelson underpinned WWW dot with hypertext in 1960. 

Old media these days is referring to news papers, books, radio whereas new media is more the internet, video games, DVD's etc. New media doesn't include feature film, magazines, television programmes and books unless they contain some form of digital interactivity. 


'In recent years the 'newness' of new media has attracted an increasing groundswell of rebellion against using the term at all' 

Sue Thomas, 2006

The 1960's showed the new buzzword 'multimedia'. This then lead to remediation (moving from one media to another). There are different types of remediation strategies:

- (Transparent) immediacy = window into reality

- Hypermediacy = applications that present multiple medias using hypertextual organisations. 

But why would there be a difference between 'old' and 'new' media? There are other ways to think about digital media. Conceptual tools needed to think about current changes in the media:

- Digitization

- Convergence

- Interactivity

-Remediation 

Digitilization makes media files: 

'Highly amendable to manipulation by a computer' 

Wise, 2000

As the technology developed, digitilization lead to the media introducing green screens & compositing, for example Jurassic Park used this.

'Digitilization inevitably involves loss of information. In contrast to analog representation, a digitally encoded representation contains a fixed amount of information' 

Lev Manovich , The language of new media (2001)

Convergence has probably had the largest impact on the media industry. Many institutions are now combining media platforms to reach a larger audience. For example, the internet on a mobile phone; it is now faster than ever to check the weather in Greece whilst on the move. 

Internet allows for

“Interconnectivity: the capacity to easily connect interactions across different networks

Interoperability: the capacity to access all forms of information and media content using different operating systems”

Flew, T. (2008) New Media: An Introduction

“We call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media”

Bolter and Grusin, 1999

So how do all these ideas link? Do they all exist in 'new media?

Will there always be new media?

The more people buy into this new wave of new media, the more old media will die. Google Tv for example incorporates television with the internet. 

(What is google tv?)

The more technology develops, the more popular new media becomes. Shouldn't we stick to what we know best and stand by old media? As a generation who thrive off technology, this may not happen.