NEW MEDIA ???
The free Internet-based encyclopaedia, Wikipedia (see Chapter 1), itself a product of
New Media, defines New Media as the product of mediated communication technologies
coming together with digital computers. Before the 1980s the media relied
mainly on print and analogue models like newspapers, television, cinema and radio.
Now we have digital radio, television and cinema, while even the printing press has
been transformed by new digital technologies such as image manipulation software
like Adobe Photoshop and desktop publishing tools. Some technologies we might
therefore include as or associate with New Media are:
The Internet and World Wide Web
Digital Television
Digital Cinema
Personal Computers (PCs)
DVDs (Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc)
CDs (Compact Discs)
Personal Computers (PCs)
Portable Media Players (such as the MP3 Player)
Mobile (or Cell) Phones
Video (or Computer) Games
Virtual Reality (VR)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
New Media might not be an ideal term for such a range of technologies, but it is one
that is increasingly recognized internationally and one that is generally associated
with the technological transformations in communication that have recently taken
place. So, what are some of the major differences between digital and analogue
media? First, digital media surpasses analogue technology in that it is easily transferable
across distinctly different media platforms, it is easily manipulated and networked,
it can be stored and remotely accessed or distributed and is more resilient to
corruption during storage or transmission. Second, digital data is also easier to
manipulate, and the end result can be reproduced indefinitely without any loss of
quality. In short, digital material exceeds analogue systems in terms of speed, quality
and performance.
Sites like MySpace, YouTube or Blogger have each in their own ways changed the
ways users make use of the Internet and the World Wide Web. They are part of some
broader transformations in the overall New Media landscape; transformations such as
convergence and multi-platform intertextuality (see Harries 2002). We might say that
the Internet and the World Wide Web have become ‘new-mediatized’ – they have
become a central part of a new way of ‘doing media’ (and ‘thinking media’, too); one
that unsettles or refuses age-old differentiations, such as those between producer and
consumer, amateur and professional, reality and fiction, as well as between ‘old
media’ platforms such as film, television, radio and the Internet (Marshall 2004).
Convergence refers to bits of media becoming indistinguishable – whether those
bits are bits of content, bits of the industry or whatever. Convergence happens when
media hybridize and recombine, as when movies are distributed over the Internet to
download, or podcasts of radio shows can be listened to on an MP3 player or via a PC.
So, there is convergence in terms of delivery and devices, in terms of the tools and
places we use to access content – such that watching a film on a computer screen is
no longer considered weird. But there is convergence in the content itself, for
example via the cross-platform intertextuality that binds a computer game to a movie
to a soundtrack to a commercial. Like the hyperlinks connecting web pages, these
intertexutal links form a complex web of associations of content (Harries 2002).
A site like YouTube (founded in 2005) is a perfect illustration of this content
convergence. Started as a site to share homemade video clips, YouTube’s millions of
clips now include user-generated content of virtually every imaginable type, perhaps
most famously ‘leaked’ clips of current television shows and homemade remakes of
film scenes, but also including seemingly random bits of webcam tomfoolery, home
video and found footage. So the site now offers clips of all kinds, with all sorts of
origin, without distinguishing on the basis of genre, production values, platform,
whatever. YouTube evidences new forms of content creation, novel ways of distribution,
and changing patterns of media consumption. Clips of television shows appear
on YouTube, officially and unofficially, as well as countless parodies and remakes, but
clips from YouTube also appear on television and regularly make the news (as well as
circulating over email in those endless ‘Have you seen this???!!!’ messages forwarded
worldwide). Searching earlier for catch-up information for a new television series that
I have so far missed, Primeval, I clicked between the station’s ‘official’ website, various
‘unofficial’ and fan sites, links to clips on YouTube, screenshots of key scenes, and off
into the labyrinth of more or less connected sites and pages. I could watch clips of
previous and future episodes, view interviews with the cast, watch spoofs and read
earnest discussions of what’s wrong with the science behind the science fiction. It
didn’t matter who had made what or whether sites were ‘official’ or not; all that
mattered was whether they grabbed my attention and answered my questions. And
there were countless opportunities for me to have my say, to comment, to link up
with other fans of the show or any of the actors in it. Mass media has become New
Media or, to use another current term, ‘me media’.
Convergence and cross-platform interextuality is also changing our experience
of media spaces, making a nonsense of any lingering distinction between the ‘real’
and the ‘virtual’. Experiments in ambient or ubiquitous computing, for example,
project the virtual onto the real, so that we encounter the Internet, say, not just on a
computer screen but on a street corner (Galloway 2004). And as access to the Internet
and the World Wide Web becomes more mobile, untied from the desktop, so we can
begin to experience and encounter cyberspace literally all over the place. Charting the
changing roles, meanings and experiences of what she refers to as ‘mobile digital
devices’, for example, Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) describes a key transformation
to the ‘interfacing’ capacity of such technologies: where the interface once mediated
between the user and the machine – as in the graphic user interface that we see on a
PC screen – mobile digital devices mediate a ‘social interface’ between users, and also
between users and the ‘hybrid’ (at once ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’) spaces they move
through. As she defines this new space, ‘hybrid spaces are mobile spaces, created by
the constant movement of users who carry portable devices continuously connected
to the Internet and to other users’ (Souza e Silva 2006: 262). So, convergence in terms
of devices (Web-linked phones) also brings divergence in terms of media (or cyber)
spaces, and in terms of reconnecting users via the interface. As with arguments about
other forms of social media, here we see a story of connectivity between users enabled
by new technology.
