Overview
New media is a term of this century that entails all that is in relation between technology, images and sounds, and the internet. It refers to a on-demand access to content anywhere, anytime, interactive feedback, and creative participation. It also refers to the outlet in which writing is now taking place. Through new media, we can now write through video, aural, and visual mediums. With new media, our writing vocabulary and possibilities grew so much more. New media allows us to now communicate on different levels that sometimes can even be more effective than "traditional" writing (pen to paper).
Definition and History
New Media refers to digital technologies with characteristics such as networking capabilities, dense, compressible, interactive, and manipulative. New media does not include paper magazines, books, films, or paper publications because that is considered old media. New media allows hands-on digital interaction between the user and the content. For example, in the book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins, the author looks at a number of cases in which culture is shifting simply based on the intersection of new and old media. He explains how viewers of a Television based show come online to forums and blogs about the show to find out more about the show than they ever could individually. In his book, he not only claims that new media will replace old media, but it will also learn to interact with it in more complex ways he calls "Convergence Culture". New media can be characterized by the ways in which images, text, and sounds interact with one another; furthermore, it is this digital network of images, sounds, and text that is different from hardcopy, paper-print media such as a newspaper. New media is a continually growing concept as it does not yet have a concrete definition, but this conception of new media may only be a part of this revolutionary age of digital technologies and innovation.
Examples
One of the examples of New Media is Facebook. Facebook combines digital text, images and video with web-links, participation of users, interactive feedback from other users and more importantly, a community of contributors for the benefit of a data-driven society. Other examples include the internet, websites, computer media, computer games, etc.
Further Reading
Newmedia.org- This website is designed to give an extensive definition to the term, while also giving an analysis, research, statistics, and internet findings relating to the medium.
"The Language of New Media" by Lev Manovich- This text provides an analysis of the theory of new media and how old media has influenced the language of this new medium. He also examines the role that cinema, art history, and computer science plays in this medium.
"New Hollywood, New Millenium" by Thomas Schatz- This essay gives an understanding of the influence new media has on Hollywood films.
Pew Research Center: "How Social Media is Reshaping News" by Monica Anderson and Andrea Caumont- The purpose of this article is to examine the role that social media has on news reports. Being that social media is one of the major emergents in the new media genre, this is a crucial example of the role of new media in modern society. This is so because the news is the hub for all information, so as we see new media influencing this medium, it is crucial that we understand how so and why.
-New Media and Information Society-Current Assessment and Futuristic Landscape, by Rakhi Chakraborty- This text looks at the relationship between new media and society, and its implications on different ages of media and what new media will mean to society in the future.
Keywords
Citations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media
http://www.newmedia.org/what-is-new-media.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media_art
http://writingacrossmediacws.wordpress.com/bibliography/core-readings/