What's New Media?

Concept of (new)Media

blanket-like description which is usually used as plural to refer to a coherent entity.
Enormously general and hence vague term.
Different or unusual things.
can be used to mark a break with history
Tones from out of nowhere "Rudolf Pfnninger"

1. The media as an Institution

• Communication media
• Institutions and Organization : the press, cinema, broadcasting, publishing, etc.)
• cultural n material products of the institutions : forms, genres of news, movies(material forms)
  We should investigate the wider processes through how its content is distributed, and by whom is consumed and regulated.

--> social institution,

• far less settled, known and identified
  rapidly changing set of formal and technological experiments(try)
  complex set of interactions between new technological possibilities and established media forms
  
  

2. Intensity of change

• Media never stand still.(a state of constant flux): Differences of media and communications, in their appearance and timing of change, are widespread in every sector.
• Experiencing nature of change became an absolute marking off from what went before.
  - Because it is made of current cultural elements..
• Kinds of change with which new media are associated.
  - A shift from modernity to postmordernity (key marker of changes)
  - Intensifying processes of globalisation (element enabling multinationalism)
  - A replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manufacturing by a 'post-industrial' information age
  - A decentring of established and centralised geo-political orders

3. The ideological connotations of the new

• new
  - the most recent
  - better
  - cutting edge
  - avant-garde
  - place for forward-thinking people to be
  
• derived from a modernist belief(social progress delivered by technology)
  modernist belief : existed throughout the twentieth century and have roots in the nineteenth
  
• hope and claims : opening creative, communicative horizons
  
• new = a range of developments <--- powerful ideological movement = narrative about progress in Western society
• ideological neutral : the innocent enthusiasm for the 'latest thing' in whole sections
  

quotes

We live in this very weird time in history where we're passive recipients of a very immature, noninteractive broadcast medium. Misssion number one is to kill TV


Jaron Lanier, quoted in Boddy 1994:116

Photographers will be freed from our perpetual restraint, that of having ... to record the reality of things, freed at last from being the mere recorders of realility, our creativity will be given free rein.

Laye, quioted in Robins 1992: 56

Media could be a representative example that shows a need of integration of every field of study.

Song Eui-Kwon