Text 4

1. Read and summarize the text “What is new media?”.

New media is a broad term that emerged in the later part of the 20^th century to include the amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices, and most importantly the Internet. New media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation, and community formation around the media content. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is now the digitizing of media content into bits, but the dynamic life of the “new media” content and its interactive relationship with the media consumer. This dynamic life moves, breathes, and flows with pulsing excitement in real life.

Thus, a high-definition digital television broadcast of a film viewed on a digital plasma TV is still an example of traditional media, while an “analog” paper poster of a local rock band that contains a web address where fans can find information and digital music downloads is an example of new media communications.

Most technologies described as “new media” are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, interactive, and impartial. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media is not television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity, such as graphic tags containing web-links.

History:

In the 1960s connections between computing and radical art began to grow stronger. It was not until the 1980s that Alan Kay and his coworkers at Xerox PARC began to give the power of a personal computer to the individual, rather than have a big organization be in charge of this. “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we seem to witness a different kind of parallel relationship between social changes and computer design”.

Until the 1980s media relied primarily upon print and analog broadcast models, such as those of television and radio. The last twenty-five years have seen the rapid transformation into media which are predicated upon the use of digital computers, such as the Internet and computer games. However, these examples are only a small representation of new media. The use of digital computers has transformed the remaining “old” media, as suggested by the advent of digital television and online publications. Even traditional media forms such as the printing press have been transformed through the application of technologies such as image manipulation software like desktop publishing tools.

According to W.Russel Neuman, “We are witnessing the evolution of a universal interconnected network of audio, video, and electronic text communications that will blur the distinction between interpersonal and mass communication and between public and private communication”. Neuman argues that new media will:

1) alter the meaning of geographic distance;

2) allow for a huge increase in the volume of communication;

3) provide the possibility of increasing the speed of communication;

4) provide opportunities for interactive communication;

5) allow forms of communication that were previously separate to overlap and interconnect.

What is new media? The New Media Reader defines new media by using some simple and concise propositions:

New Media versus Cyberculture – Cyberculture is the study of various social phenomena that are associated with the Internet and network communications (blogs, online multi-player gaming), whereas new media is concerned more with cultural objects and paradigms (digital to analogue television, iPhones).

New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform – new media are the cultural objects which use digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition, e.g.(at least for now) Internet, websites, computer or multimedia, Blu-ray disks, etc. The problem with this is that the definition must be revised every few years. The term “new media” will not be “new” anymore, as most forms of culture will be distributed through computers.

New Media as Digital Controlled by Software – The language of new media is based on the assumption that, in fact, all cultural objects that rely on digital representation and computer-based delivery do share a number of common qualities. New media is reduced to digital data that can be manipulated by software as any other data. Now media operations can create several versions of the same object. An example is an image stored as matrix data which can be manipulated and altered according to the additional algorithms implemented, such as color inversion, gray-scaling, sharpening, rasterizing, etc.

New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software – new media today can be understood as the mix between older cultural convention for data representation, access, and manipulation and newer conventions of data representation, access, and manipulation. The “old” data are representations of visual reality and human experience, and the “new” data is numerical data.

Globalization and new media.

The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. Globalization shortens the distance between people all over the world by the electronic communication.

New media have created virtual realities that are becoming extensions of the world we live in. With the creation of Second Life people have even more control over this virtual world where anything that a participant can thing of in his mind can become a reality in Second Life.

New media changes continuously due to the fact that it is constantly modified and redefined by the interaction between the creative use of the masses, emerging technology, cultural changes, etc.

2. Answer the questions.

1) What do you understand by the term “new media”?

2) What is the difference between new media and traditional media?

3) Give examples of traditional media and new media communications.

4) What characteristics have most new media technologies got?

5) Can TV be called new media of communication and in what case?

6) What were the early media relied on?

7) What helped to transform the old media into new one?

8) How will new media change according to W.Neuman?

9) What can you say about new media versus cyberculture?

10) How is new media constantly changed?

3. Summarize the content of the paper.