Defining New Media Issues in New Media Questions

Defining New Media

Issues in New Media • • Questions Finish Video Blogs Class Discussion Schedule – If you have powerpoints, save them on instructor computer and I will add to outline • News

Communications Media • Communications media - the institutions and organizations in which people work - press, cinema, broadcasting, publishing, online • Forms and genres of these institutions books, newspapers, films, magazines, tapes, discs, Web sites

Defining New Media • “New media” suggests something less settled, known, identified • Changing set of formal and technological experiments • Complex set of interactions between new technologies and established media forms

Change Associated with New Media • Shift from modernity to postmodernity • Intensifying processes of globalization • Replacement of industrial age by postindustrial information age • Decentering of established and centralized geo-political orders • Seen as part of technoculture - a larger landscape of social, technological, and cultural change • On a more practical level, changes associated with social and mobile technologies

Connotations of “New” • New media as “the latest thing” • Connotation of better, cutting edge, avantgarde • Social progress associated with technology • Broad cultural resonance rather than a narrow technical or specialist application • Some prefer digital media (digital binary code, 0’s and 1’s), although that symbolizes a clear break with analog media.

Kinds of New Media • New textual experiences • New ways of representing the world • New relationships between subjects and media technologies • New experiences of the relationship between embodiment, identity, and community • New conceptions of the biological body’s relationship to the technological media • New patterns of organization and production

Characteristics of New Media • • Digitality Interactivity Hypertextuality Dispersal – both as consumer and creator • Virtuality

Tim Berners-Lee • • Invented World Wide Web Wrote Weaving the Web British computer scientist Employer previously at CERN Now at MIT Director W 3 C Knighted 2004

From Pencils to Pixels • Humanists not considered in tech loop • Stages of Literacy Technology – Restricted communication function; small number of initiates – Adapted to familiar functions associated with an older technology – Decreased costs improves spread of new technology; better able to mimic ordinary forms of communication – New literacy; technology creates original forms of communication – Ultimately effects older technologies • Pencil originally used for marking measurements • Earliest forms of writing were to record business transactions, not transcribe speech

From Pencils to Pixels • Trace the stages of literacy technology for the telephone; computer; the Internet. • Do you agree with the author’s contention that “the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies? ” • Media History Timeline

Handling Theory • • Media Determinism Social Construction

New Media: Determining or Determined? • Marshall Mc. Luhan 1911 -1980 Canadian educator technological determinism – Content of any medium is always another medium – Extensions of man – Medium is the message - real message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs. – Considered patron saint of Wired

New Media: Determining or Determined? • Raymond Williams 1921 -1988 Welsh academic Social shaping of technology – Humanist frame – Plural possibilities and uses of a technology – Medium as reification of social processes – Medium as material - specific material with which an artist works – Technology becomes a medium through complex social transformations and transitions, not a given consequence of technology

Vannevar Bush • 1890 -1974 • Director of Federal Office of Scientific Research and Development • “As We May Think” appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1945 • Considered insightful in regard to technology and human thinking processes. • Writing post-WWII, questions role of scientists in the future

As We May Think • Proposal for how scientific effort should be used in a post-war environment • Industrial revolution increased specialization • Increased information; ability to bridge disciplines • Research process is tedious and inefficient • Inability to make use of the knowledge being created • Critical of indexing systems • Recognition that human mind works by association; yet memory is transitory

Memex • Randomly named; concept rather than an actual device • “A device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility • “enlarged intimate supplement to memory” • Desk with screens, keyboard, buttons, and levers • Large store of information; saved on microfilm • Data could be purchased or input directly • Concept of “dry photography”; stylus input device • Access via numeric or mnemonic codes • Several projection positions; view many documents at a time • Process of tying two items together - associative indexing • Predictions of “wholly new forms of encyclopedias” with readymade associations.

Question • Bush talks about trails of association. “There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. ” • What is the significance of the trailblazer metaphor and what are some alternatives?

Douglas Engelbart • Born in 1925 - currently director of his own company, Bootstrap Institute which focuses on Collective. IQ. • Electrical engineer; Radar technician in Navy during WWII • Influenced by “As We May Think” • 1948 worked for NACA Ames Laboratory- precursor to NASA • Professor at Berkeley then researcher at Stanford Research Institute • Invented many defining features of computer interfaces - mouse, window, word processor

Augmenting Human Intellect • • “increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. ” – more-rapid comprehension – better comprehension – the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex – speedier solutions – better solutions – the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble “Extensions” of means used in the past, sensory, mental, motor capability Realized associative linking - trains of thought Using computer to organize thoughts, arguments, moving text, creating relationships.

Question • Would you consider the ideas of Bush and Engelbart to be media deterministic or socially determined?

Nicholas Negroponte • Born 1943 • MIT Media Lab • Early involvement with Wired Magazine • Wrote Being Digital 1996 - ideas from his many Wired columns focused on predictions of the effects of interactive media • Most recently associated with the One Laptop Per Child Program

Being Digital • Difference between bits and atoms • The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable • Mass media will be refined by systems for transmitting and receiving personal information and entertainment (Epic 2015) • We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role • Information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light • Bits and atoms often confused (book publisher in the information business or the book production business? ) • Merits to digitization: data compression, error correction, economy of bits • Bandwidth - the number of bits that can be transmitted per second through a given channel

Being Digital • Better and more efficient delivery • Bits commingle effortlessly - mixing of audio, video, data - multimedia • Bits about other bits - headers • “If moving these bits around is so effortless, what advantage would the large media companies have over me? ” (or you? ) • Potential for new content to originate from a whole new combination of sources

Diffusion Theory • Diffusion of innovation as defined by Everett Rogers is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” • Elements of Diffusion • • Innovation Communication Channels Time A Social System (including opinion leaders and change agents)

Diffusion Theory Characteristics of Innovation Relative Advantage Compatibility Complexity Trialability Observability