What is “New” Media?

intro to new media

New Spaces of Interaction and Encounter

Aims of Today’s Presentation

• New Media not just about unquestionable technological invention and progress

• New Media about people, culture, societies, economics

• Helps determine, to some extent, what people can and can’t do

• Plays a role in the distribution of social and personal power

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What is New Media?

Any form of media with the following characteristics:

• Interaction is defined by Many:Many

• Provide on-demand access to Content

• Anywhere (not bound by geography)

• On any digital device

• With interactive user-feedback

• And creative participation & community formation

around media content

Forms of New Media?

• The Internet• Mobile Phones• Games Consoles• Digital TV• DVD• DV Filmmaking• MP3

The Internet

• Central hub for a number of digital media• The Internet has been responsible for a

change in the way different media are made and distributed

• No other form of mass media has allowed such widespread participation before

• Allows users to “become the media”, creating their own web site

MP3• Alters the way music is produced and distributed• Developed as a way of exchanging music files via the

internet• Became popular at first due to the success of Napster• Popularity of format has led to hardware being produced

to play files away from computer• Became increasingly common and cheaper to buy than

CDs• Offers new and unsigned artists the chance to reach a

global audience• Format has the potential to empower an artist as record

companies could become obsolete.

Digital TV

• Benefits of choice?• Interactivity• Development of digital hardware to

replace VCR e.g. TIVO, Sky+• “Walled Garden” access to internet

Convergence

• The coming together of two or more technologies into one device e.g. Playstation 2.

Game Consoles

• Huge growth area – generates more money than Hollywood

• Crossover between film and computer games – spin off games and spin off films.

• Convergence is increasingly common.• Involvement of huge multi-nationals e.g.

Sony & Microsoft

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The Evolution of MediaMedia is always new

1455

J.Gutenberg’s Print-Press

1830 1895 1930

1914 1923

1st Photograph

Moving

Picture

Lumiere Brothers

Cross continental

Telephone

Television

Motion Picture

– Charlie Chaplin

1951 1969 1976 1994

1st long distance electric telegraph line by S.Morse

1843

1st Computer Sold

ARPANET

Home Compute

r

WWWwas born

Interaction defined by: 1:1 and 1:Many

The US release control of the Internet

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The Revolution of Media

Truly interactive, 2-way digital Many:Many conversation, Read and Write Web

1994

WWW

Web 0.5

Web 1.0 45million Users + 250,000 Websites

Web 2.0

Characterized by bulletin board systems, brochureware, digital duplication or versioning, interactivity, read only web 1:Many

Media is always new

BBS

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Augmented

Reality

Being Online

• Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) The Exploit, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press p. 126.

• We have traditionally thought of ourselves as either online or offline

– Dial-up culture

• This is a changing circumstance

• In work we are online (accountable) offline (unaccountable)

• Broadband, wireless, mobile connectivity make us increasingly online – in the bathroom, unconscious

• Bots run all day and night – text messages, online gaming – 24 hours online culture

What happens to a population when it goes online?

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The Implication of New Media• A gradual fading away of geographic boundaries making

physical location less significant for social relationships.

• Users have evolved from just being consumers to participators.

• Democratization of the creation, publishing, distributing and

consumption of media content.

• The rise of the amateur class as a result of the lowered bar of

entry and transaction cost

• The birth of pseudo-cultures and online paradigms. For

example, the fact that information wants to be free.

• Cannibalization of traditional media.

Too Much Connectivity

Information Commodity Overload, Spam and Social Contagion

• The Internet of Things

• Makes the point that whereas once the user interacted with a system, it is now the user that becomes the subject of interaction

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New Media in Business

Regardless of media, good business comes down to a simple

process of :

• Identifying customers

• Learning what they want or need

• Feeling their challenge

• Learning how they communicate with one another, and

• Observing how they discover and share information

• Keeping their attention by keeping your brand top of mind –

Attention Economics

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Understanding the Consumer

A Brief History of the “New” Media

When did the “new” begin…

New media the result of the convergence between

• modern media • the computer

Analogue media

– Photographic camera (France 1839)– Cinema (France 1895)– Radio (1901 - UK)– Television (1920s)

• Mass dissemination of information (output)

– Texts– Images– Sounds

• Computing

• Charles Babbage (London 1833)– The Analytical Engine

• George Boole (Oxford 1854)– Boolean logic

• Turing machine theory (Cambridge 1936)

– Theory of computable numbers• Von Neumann (1940s in the US)

– Processor/memory

• The processing of mass information (input)

– Votes– Records

Counterculture

1. High tech military spending concentrated in the Bay area in San Francisco

2. Center of counter culture movement in the 60s…

3. Now the site of Silicon Valley

Wise, R 2000. Multimedia: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.. pp 25-41

DIY media

• Old media tools and content were tied together

• The models ‘worked’ on the audience

• There is thus a mystical authority established

• Audience• Broadcaster

Rushkoff, D (1994) Cyberia: life in the trenches of hyperspace, London: Harper Collins. http://www.rushkoff.com/cyberiabook.html

DIY media

• New media gave the tools to the audience

• the remote• the joystick• the application

• the network

• Thus the mystical authority is broken by interactivity

• We have control over the pixel…

• The DNA of new media...

New Media Paradigm

• ‘A new media that is not necessarily constrained by the dominant characteristics of mass media’ (Jankowski and Hanssen, Contours of Multimedia 1996)

The actor Alec Baldwin has boycotted the Emmy awards after the event's broadcaster, Fox News, refused to air a joke he made about the phone-hacking scandal at News International.

The End of Authority?

• Hypertext blurs the roles of author & reader (Landow)

• Internet threatens established power structures

New Media Goes Corporate

New Media Contagions

New communication paradigm?

Old paradigm (mass communication) = one to many - sender to receivers

New paradigm (networked media) = many to many -

sender to receivers???

masspassive linear

user-inaccessible

interactive (demassified)

non-linearuser-responsive

networked

mass media? new media?

Current Statistics are staggering

1new member joins LinkedIn every second

10million people joined G+ in the first week

If Facebook was a country it would be

the 3rd largest in the world

The Ford Explorer launch on Facebook generated more traffic than the Super Bowl

Social gamers buy over $6 billion in virtual goods; movie goers buy only $2.5 billion in real goods

If Wikipedia were made into a book it would be almost 4 million pages long

e-readers have surpassed book sales

New Media Field of StudyDIGITALIZATION

COVERGENCE

INTERACTIVITY

MODELS OF INTERACTIVITY

NON-LINEAR COMMUNICATION

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

INFORMATION SPACE

INFORMATION AGE

HYPERSPACE

HYPERTEXT

HYPERMEDIA

HYPERFICTION

NAVIGATION DESIGN

INTERFACE DESIGN

VIRTUALITY

NETWORKS

SIMULATIONS

ONLINE COMMUNITY

CYBERCULTURE

HACKING

SPAM

OPEN SOURCE

TACTILE MEDIA

CODE/SCRIPTS

MOBILE

UBICOMP

USE

THE USER EXPERIENCE

SOCIAL MEDIA

NEW MEDIA POLITICS

NETWORK ECONOMY

SOCIAL POWER

CONTAGIONS

AFFECT

COGNITION