What are new media?

Reading: Lister, M. (2009). New media: A critical introduction. Taylor & Francis.
pp. 13-44. Listed on Blackboard. Or link:
http://www.philol.msu.ru/~discours/images/stories/speckurs/New_media.pdf
New media on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media
Definition (on Wikipedia): New media most commonly refers to content available on-demand
through the Internet, accessible on any digital device, usually containing interactive user
feedback and creative participation. Common examples of new media include websites such as
online newspapers, blogs, wikis, video games and social media. A defining characteristic of new
media is dialogue. New Media transmit content through connection and conversation. It enables
people around the world to share, comment on, and discuss a wide variety of topics. Unlike any
of past technologies, New Media is grounded on an interactive community.
But is this definition complete?
Other names in history: computer-mediated communication, electronic media, interactive
media, digital media.
Characteristics of New Media
1. Digital
A. Digital v. Analogue
In a digital media process all input data are converted into numbers or binary codes. In
terms of communication media this data usually takes the form of qualities such as light
or sound coded into signals of written text, graphs and diagrams, photographs, recorded
moving images, etc. Digital signal is quantifiable.
In analogue media, all input data is converted into another physical object. Analogue
refers to the way that the input data and media product stand in an analogous relation to
one another. Analogos was the Greek term which described an equality of ratio or
proportion in mathematics, that mean a comparable arrangement of parts, a similar ratio
or pattern, are available to a reader through a series of transcriptions.

Analogue media involve the creation of a new object that is determined by the laws of
physics and chemistry. Digital media processes are brought into the symbolic realm of
mathematics rather than physics or chemistry.
B. Copies v. Algorithms
Once coded numerically, the input data in a digital media production can immediately be
subjected to the mathematical processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and
division through algorithms contained within software.

The major media of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (prints, photographs,
films and newspapers) were the products not only of analogue processes but also of
technologies of mass production. For this reason, these traditional mass media took the

form of industrially mass-produced physical artefacts which circulated the world as

copies and commodities.
Historically, things in middle between analogue and digital media was electronic media
such as broadcasting. So the principle of conversion from physical artefact to signal was
already in place; that is to say, the principle of conversion from physical artefact to
signal.
C. The effect of digitalization
Data can be compressed into very small spaces.
It can be accessed at very high speeds and in non-linear ways.
It can be manipulated far more easily than analogue forms.

What does digitalization mean for our project?

The software used in class is based on digital technology. Digital editing is like a creative
process. Photographers edit contact strips, music producers edit tapes and written texts of
all kinds are edited. Analogue media tend towards being fixed, where digital media tend
towards a permanent state of flux, because content of an image or text is in digital form it
is available as a mutable string of binary numbers stored in a computers memory.
Storytelling using digital media, therefore, is a never ending process.
The established differences between author and reader, performer and spectator, creator
and interpreter become blurred and give way to a reading writing continuum that extends
from the designers of the technology and networks to the final recipient.
(Lvy 1997: 366)
2. Interactivity

A: Dimensions of interactivity
The concept of interactivity is a complex mixture of many dimensions. Generally, the
term stands for a more powerful sense of user engagement with media texts, a more
independent relation to sources of knowledge, individualized media use, greater user
choice and greater control over content.

Interactive behavior comes in various forms in real life. The idea of interactivity has been
electronically instantiated when the user moves the cursor to the appropriate place
and clicks the mouse, which causes something to happen. Interactivity also refers to the
opportunities that new media texts afford their users to write back.
Games computer games in particular appeal because they offer the chance to
manipulate complex systems within continuous loops of intervention, observation, and
response.

B. Effect of interactivity
These rich forms of interaction therefore have a number of consequences for producers:

 They create the possibility for traditional media producers to collaborate with audiences
by finding ways to incorporate user-generated content in their corporate projects.
The distinction between sender and receiver of communication became blur. The
audience of media was called viewer, reader or consumer. Now, the role of the producer
of content is redefined as experience designer, creating open media spaces within which
users find their own pathways (e.g. The Sims or Second Life)
3. Hypertextuality
A. Meaning
The prefix hyper is derived from the Greek 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. The other history is derived from the language of the computer
development industry. Here, any verbal, visual or audio data that has, within itself, links to
other data might be referred to as a hypertext.
B. Why it is important? - Association of knowledge
The human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to
the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in association with some intricate
web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. (Bush in Mayer 1999: 33)
But since the Middle Ages human knowledge and culture has been written, recorded and in
some sense produced by the form of the book (see, for example, Ong 2002; Chartier 1994).
This is the knowledge in the textual world. Printed word has established an entire taxonomy
and classification system for the management and production of knowledge (e.g. contents,
indices, reference systems, library systems, citation methods, etc.).
Now, hypertext offered the possibility of non-sequential reading and writing. There is no
single order in which a text must be encountered. Ideas are connected by the association of
thoughts mapped by digital algorithm. Each node of text carries within it variable numbers
of links that take the reader to different successive nodes, and so on. This is the idea of
Google.

1.5 Diagram of an early hypertextual architecture Storyspace Map: earth orbit,

www.eastgate.com

4. Networked
A. Networked v. centralized
In a networked communication environment, whole sectors of the new media industries
are learning to see their role as providing the means and opportunities for users to generate
their own content. Simultaneously, a new media economics is being recognized, one that
does not aim to address large single audiences but instead seeks out the myriad of minority
interests and niche markets that the net is able to support.
The mass media were the products of the communication needs of the first half of the
twentieth century in the industrialized world. They were centralized. Consumption was

characterized by uniformity: cinema audiences all over the world saw the same movie, all
readers read the same text in a national newspaper, we all heard the same radio program.
Twentieth-century mass media were characterized by standardization of content, distribution
and production process.
B. Consequences
In networked communication, New media networks have been able to reconfigure
themselves around this old core to facilitate new kinds of distribution that are not
necessarily centrally controlled and directed but are subject to a radically higher degree of
audience differentiation and discrimination. Many different users can access many different
kinds of media at many different times around the globe using network-based distribution.
Consumers and users are increasingly able to customize their own media use to design
individualized menus that serve their particular and specific needs.
Across a range of media we have seen the development of a market for prosumer
technologies; that is, technologies that are aimed at neither the professional nor the
(amateur) consumer market but both technologies that enable the user to be both consumer
and producer. This overlap between consumption and production is producing a new
networked zone of media

BarzilaiNahon, K. (2008). Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information
control. Journal of the American society for information science and technology, 59(9), 1493-1512.

5. Virtual & Simulated

Virtual reality (or VR) is a computer technology that uses software-generated realistic
images, sounds and other sensations to replicate a real environment or an imaginary setting,
and simulates a user's physical presence in this environment to enable the user to interact
with this space.
The meaning of virtual has changed. Where, in everyday usage, it once meant a state that
was almost or as good as reality, it has now come to mean or be synonymous with
simulated (see 1.2.6). Simulation is a widely used concept as the reproduction of reality.
Simulation v. Representation
Unlike traditional media, video games are not just based on representation but on an
alternative structure known as simulation. Even if simulations and narrative do share some
common elements character, settings, events their mechanics are essentially different.
productive of reality so in Doom, Tomb Raider, or Grand Theft Auto the game is
representational on one level tunnels, city streets, human figures, monsters and vehicles
part of the universe of popular media culture, but the experience of playing the game is
one of interacting with a profoundly different kind of environment. The mimetic elements of
Tetris, Minesweeper and Donkey Kong are residual at best, yet each of these games is a
dynamic simulated world with its own spatial and temporal dimensions.

The virtual world is not just representative of the real world. It is the world that expresses
your idea and desire. Your multimedia storytelling project should be as such.