New Media: Concept & Characterstics

Published by Emil Abraham,



New Media is an umbrella term used to refer to a wide range of media platforms and technologies. Digital technologies that take advantage of computers and the Internet have led to products and services that provide information or entertainment. Social media, blogs, video games and online news outlets are typically referred to as "new media." These channels of communication have far-reaching implications for society, including in business and politics.

The term "new media" is a relative term. One hundred years from now the media that we label "new media" will be considered "old media" and others will be wrestling with the new media emerging in their time. For that reason some of the remarks made by Marshall McLuhan about the "new media" of his day over 40 years ago are useful for understanding our "new media." It should be noted that how prescient these remarks of McLuhan were that were made between 1955 and 1969. [The quotes cited were part of a collection that appeared in The Essential McLuhan edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (1997). The date of each quote and the page where it is cited by E. McLuhan and Zingrone follow each quote.]
  • "The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature." (1969, p. 272)
  • "Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression." (1957, p. 272)
  • "New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature." (1960, p. 272)
  • "It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame." (1955, p. 273)
  • "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." (1964, p. 278)
  • "As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of do it yourself (1957, p. 283)."

'New' in the new media
In everyday use the term ‘new’ has become bonded to consumer products, from fashions, to films to food, and, as a label, means simply the latest. In this case, we should resist any reductive notion of new media as novelty or fashion, in favour of the idea of new media as representing significant cultural and social change. Therefore, we also need to have an understanding of the historical and theoretical development of new media that emphasises the complex continuities in the technological developments associated with particular cultural uses of media, rather than understand new media as replacing what has gone before.
The invention and spread of the printing press in Europe from the 1450s led to the development of print culture. The spread of print media was the basis of new forms of reading and writing and the general diffusion of knowledge in a continuous process over the next 500 years. In the twenty-first century, long after print media could be considered as new, it continues to be a major means for communication of ideas, feelings and experience. Academic publishers still make their living from selling books, although they are interested in the possibilities presented by online publishing.
The old medium of books continues in a world in which more and more knowledge or data are stored, transferred and accessed electronically. Culturally, reading and writing cross and re-cross the old and new forms. This crossing of boundaries and convergence of forms is the territory we explore.
‘New media’ is becoming the preferred term for a range of media practices that employ digital technologies and the computer in some way or another. New media is also emerging as a key institutional term in education and culture. New media is the title of university departments and degrees and the title of a distinct canon of artistic practice. This makes new media an academic and intellectual subject as well as a practice. As such, a growing body of writing is emerging that constitutes the history and theory of the subject and its objects and practices in the wider world.
The term ‘new’, as we apply it to media, will refer to what people do with technologies and is, therefore, about the possibilities for, and realisation of, human thinking, feeling and communication in a new medium.
What are new media?
The term "new media" will in general refer to those digital media, which are interactive, incorporate two-way communication and involve some form of computing as opposed to "old media" such as the telephone, radio and TV. These older media, which in their original incarnation did not require computer technology, now in their present configuration make use of computer technology as do so many other technologies, which are not necessarily communication media like refrigerators and motor cars. Many "new media" emerged by combining an older medium with computer chips and a hard drive.

New media vs. old media
An important distinction between "new" and "old" media is that the old media are for the most part mass media, which is not the case with the "new media" with the possible exception of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Although the latter two media may be considered mass media because any one with a computer and a telephone or cable connection can access them, they are nevertheless "experienced on an intimate level, each user working alone with the screen and interface" (Wolf 2003b, p. 11). Another point is that although millions of people access the Net and Web every day, they are each accessing different material given that there are over eight billion pages already extant on the Net. The Web and the Net also differ from mass media like TV and radio because they incorporate two-way communication. It is therefore a safe bet to regard the old media as passive mass media and the "new media" as individually accessed interactive media. This is a bit of an over generalization in that some old media like the spoken word in conversation, the written word in correspondence and telephone conversations are highly interactive, but it is certainly the case that all "new media" are highly interactive.
  • The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However, the two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URIs.

New media vs. digital media
The main problem with the term ‘digital media’ is that it has a tendency to privilege technology itself as the defining aspect of a medium, as if all digital media practice will be first and foremost about, or will reflect, the character of digital technology. In contrast, the term ‘new media’ signals more about the contemporary cultural concepts and contexts of media practices than it does about simply a new set of technologies.
  • Digital media is defined as products and services that come from the media, entertainment and information industry and its subsectors. It includes digital platforms (e.g. websites and applications), digitized content (e.g. text, audio, video and images) and services (e.g. information, entertainment and communication) that can be accessed and consumed through different digital devices.

Professor and new media theorist Lev Manovich describes new media as being native to computers or relying on computers for distribution: websites, human-computer interface, virtual worlds, virtual reality, multimedia, computer games, computer animation, digital video, special effects in cinema and interactive computer installations.

Conceptualizing New Media
Theories can help define and characterize new media. In the book New Media, 1740–1915, media is examined as "a cultural process that involves not only the actual transmission of information but also the ritualized collocation of senders and recipients," according to editors Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree. Thus, new media reflects societal values and societal transformation.
Manovich outlines eight possible concepts about new media in his essay "New Media from Borges to HTML," from the book The New Media Reader. These theoretical considerations build upon new media as digital and cultural expressions.

  1. New media versus cyberculture. Cyberculture is the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities, cellphone usage in various communities and issues of gender and identity in Internet usage. In contrast, new media is concerned with the new possibilities that network communication technologies and all forms of computing present.
  1. New media as using computer technology as a distribution platform. New media uses digital computer technology for distribution. This definition must be revised every few years as computing technology advances.
  1. New media as digital data controlled by software. New media is digital data that can be manipulated by software. This allows automation for media operations to produce multiple versions of the same object. For instance, a picture can be altered or generated automatically by running algorithms like sharpen, blue and colorize.
  1. New media as the mix between existing cultural conventions and the conventions of software. Hollywood films keep computers out of key creative decisions, yet computer games use automation much more thoroughly, such as with 3-D character models and storyline events. New media becomes a combination of old data and new data; old data relies on visual reality and human reality, and new data relies on digital data.
  1. New media as the aesthetics that accompany the early stage of every new modern media and communication technology. Instead of looking at how digital computers function as media creation, media distribution and telecommunication devices, the focus can be on aesthetic techniques that accompany every new media and telecommunication technology. For example, filmmakers in the mid-1990s used small, inexpensive digital cameras for films characterized by a documentary style so that they could focus on the authenticity of the actors’ performances and a more intimate approach.
  1. New media as faster execution of algorithms previously executed manually or through other technologies. Digital computing can be thought of as a way to massively speed up manual techniques that already exist. Modern video games use an algorithm for linear perspective that originated during the Renaissance in Italy; in a first-person shooter video game, digital computers animate views and recalculate views for all objects in the frame many times per second. The modern digital computer can be thought of as a faster calculator.
  1. New media as the encoding of modernist avant-garde; new media as metamedia. The 1920s, or specifically 1915 to 1928, is more relevant to new media than any other time period in history. Artists in this period invented a new set of visual and spatial languages and communication techniques still used today. New media represents the new avant-garde, which is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways; rather, it seeks to access and use previously accumulated media. Thus, new media is post-media or metamedia.
  1. New media as articulation of similar ideas in post-WWII art and modern computing. New media further develops ideas contained in the new art of the 1960s, including active participation of the audience, artwork as a temporal process rather than a fixed object and artwork as an open system. Also, "combinatorics" — creating images and/or objects by altering a single parameter or creating all possible combinations of a small number of elements — in 1960s computer art and minimalist art can be linked conceptually and historically to new media. It illustrates that algorithms, which are an essential part of new media, do not depend on technology but can be performed by humans.


Characteristics of new media
Significant attributes of the new media are interactivity, demassification and asynchronization. So it allows for more individualized communication.
‘First rule of journalism is show. Do not tell’. Online medium provides it. Faceless community all over the world consume eagerly the service of this media. New media provide multifaceted facilities, along with certain characteristics.
Immediacy
Speed and immediacy are two greatest virtues of new media. With the help of a mouse click whole world comes before the person. 3G and 4G technologies now turn the entire scenario. Information superhighway is revolutionizing the world.
The challenge facing online journalists is to balance the legitimate desires of the online audience for breaking news reports with the professional’s tradition of fairness, completeness, balance and accuracy.

Interactivity
New media is known for its ability to involve the audience. This is known as interactivity. Hence, we can say that compared to other media forms, new media has the most evolved feedback system in place. Digital media offer us a significant increase in our opportunity to manipulate and intervene in media. These multiple opportunities are often referred to as the interactive potential of new media.
Interactivity is understood as one of the key ‘value added’ characteristics of new media as it offers opportunities for making connections between individuals, within organisations and individuals and organisations. However, when email and chat sites are considered from the point of view of human communication, ideas about the degree of reciprocity between participants in an exchange are brought into play. So, from Communication studies point of view, degrees of interactivity are further broken-down on the basis of the kinds of communication that occur within computer-mediated communication (CMC).
  • Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a process in which human data interaction occurs through one or more networked telecommunication systems. A CMC interaction occurs through various types of networking technology and software, including email, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instant messaging (IM), and mailing list servers.


Universality
Web Journalism is a global media. It is not limited by time and space. New media is a platform which connects the whole world. It provides multifaceted facilities. News about every incident happen anywhere is reachable to any other extent within a few minutes. Internet and World Wide Web point out another era of journalism. Online communication is an opportunity to communicate, learn, share, buy and sell. It is highly user controlled and essentially egalitarian.

Hypertext
The prefix ‘hyper’ is derived from a Greek word which has the meaning of ‘above, beyond, or outside’. Hence hypertext has come to describe a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are ‘outside, above, and beyond’ itself. It can be defined as a work which is made up from discrete units of material in which each one carries a number of pathways to other units.
The work is a web of connection which the user explores using the navigational aids of the interface design. Each discrete ‘node’ in the web has a number of entrances and exits or links.
Common, hypertext media are called non-linear media. Implications are that (a) one need not read documents in a prescribed order; (b) authors, styles and permissible rules of content may vary as one reads linked documents; (c) responsibility and control is diffused - as is ownership of the resulting content; (d) form and structure is easily changed, composed on demand for individuals

Convergence
Online platforms have a greater advantage over other media with its multimedia facilities. Whenever stories are supported by cartoons, moving pictures, sound and music, it is called multimedia. The word Convergence means "come towards each other and meet at a point". So media convergence is, computer and telecommunication technologies used in the multimedia systems for the transfer and exchange of information, data, graphics and sound.
E.g. watch video and films on the computer, read a newspaper on the net

Expansion and Future of New Media
New media has shortened the distance among people all over the world through electronic communication. Now, people can interact with each other anytime and anywhere. "As a result of the evolution of new media technologies, globalization occurs," Terry Flew wrote in his book New Media: An Introduction.
New media will continue to evolve in the information technology age. For instance, content could transform from a passive object that is acted upon by the audience to an intelligent, responsive and reactive item, The Guardian reports. This real-time content could be able to "read" the audience and use real-time feedback to change what is delivered to readers, listeners and viewers. Specific technologies, such as virtual reality, are also expected to shape the future of new media.
Additional reading: 5 Types of New Media