Defining “new media” should be simple.  New means not old, and media means a form of mass communication. Simple.  But when put alongside one another, things change, the synergy between the two words, and the context they live in in our modern age, create an entirely new meaning.  New media consists of the objects, be they analog or digital by origin, that are composed of some form of digital code, are conveyed, stored and manipulated by computers, and communicate ideas or emotions in some fashion be it visual or text based.  To break down this definition, objects refers to an item, be it a single image or an entire production of images, that exists within the definition of new media, including analog forms of media such as books or paintings that have been digitized(Manovich 14).   This definition stretches to digital films and modern television programming that is operated and stored on computers in one fashion or another, so that while we may consider going to the movies and older form of media, it can in fact retain its position under this definition (Lister 9).  This then raises the question of what it means to be “new”.  When will computers stop being new, especially when they have after all been around for decades, and computational machines have existed since the nineteenth century(Manovich 22)?  The distinction here lies in the manner in which the the media s experienced and part of this deals with the individual taking in a form of media: “…we have seen a shift from ‘audience’ to ‘users’ and from ‘consumers’ to ‘producers”(Lister 10)  While it is true that it was before possible to interact with older forms of media, the important distinction is between “‘open’ and ‘closed’” interactivity, open being manipulation that allows for greater nuance, while closed restricts a user to certain criteria of involvement(Manovich 56).

Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly.  New Media: A Critical Introduction.  Routledge, 2009.  Print. 

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

“New media”, as defined by L. Manovich, is similar to traditional media in that “it can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: an physically existing object . . .”(Manovich 15), yet it differs mainly in that it is malleable. I would not limit the definition to this, though. “New media” is also the transition where the “translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers”(Manovich 20) occurs. Manovich repeatedly claims that the dawn of “new media” followed the advent of the computer, but not the traditional media processing computer, instead the new computer, “a media synthesizer and manipulator“(Manovich 26). Another key aspect of new media is that any object in it “consists of independent parts, each of which consists of smaller independent parts, and so on”(Manovich 31); this being  conducive to ease of manipulation, deletion and substitution. Manovich additionally introduces the concepts of automation and variability in new media, stating that new media tends to automate both parts of the creative process and, more recently, the access of the media itself. “New media” is variable in that the way programming is organized, the individual receives a unique, custom version of whichever media they are looking at; this also has cultural implications that reflect the time period we live in. This changes the way humans view the world because it allows us to “connect many important characteristics of new media that on first sight may appear unrelated”(Manovich 40) and also because we model the world as containing “variables rather than constants”(Manovich 43). In conclusion, while Manovich does admit that classical art and sculpture also were interactive in their own ways, he insists that “the most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent” is “programmability”(Manovich 47). USC Communications professor, Henry Jenkins, echoes this by stating that “the new media operate with different principles than the broadcast media that dominated American politics for so long: access, participation, reciprocity and peer-to-peer rather than one-to-many communication.” (Jenkins 208)

For all its benefits, however, new media does not come without repercussions. J. Parikka reminds us that “digital culture is completely dependent on Earth’s long duration” and that the “legacy of Silicon Valley will not amount to corporations or branding or creativity or individualism, but its soil: the heavy concentration of toxins that will last much longer than the businesses . . .” For as many climate awareness activist groups there are, many, many more of us forget on a daily basis the quantity of damage we are doing to the Earth to ensure we mine the materials needed for our new iPhones or the underground cables that connect us through the Internet. J. Parikka also jabs at us with the notion that our “new media” will soon be “growing waste piles that are the true leftovers of “dead media””. 

Bibliography:

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press 2006. Print.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. London: The MIT Press, 2007. 10-61. Print.

New media is an old style of communication through a new form. The meaning of this definition changes as time goes on, but it fundamentally refers to a change in media. Every form of communication, from photography to Twitter to human language started as new media. Manovich outlines how modern new media has changed our relationship with static communication. Things that exist unchanged are becoming less and less relevant to our daily lives. That, however, is not true of all new media, just of a lot of current new media. We have, more than ever, the ability to change our communication with others, but static ebooks and new forms of music distribution are growing as well. While dynamic communication is on the rise, static communication is not dying. Similarly, Parikka talks about new media’s impact on the earth from a geological standpoint, and while he is absolutely right that modern new media has a greater impact on the earth’s wellbeing than ever before, that is an unfair classification for all of new media. New media exists in both high and low tech formats, the recent rise of digital media is not the only place experimentation in form is happening.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

New media can be defined in a multitude of ways, but for the purposes of this assignment I will stick to the general definition of the means through which information (most often digital) is communicated within society. Manovich seems convicted in the idea that with the current state of new media, it is all either derived or stored within a computer or digital device and that physical texts have lost weight in the category of new media (though he doesn’t exactly feel comfortable with this fact). I believe that a lot of the modern developments with new media are shifting the definition more and more towards information that is also uniquely interactive, like any computer program or videogame. In Parikka’s article, he also mentions the trend in which media has grown increasingly immaterial, with most information being stored in a digital stratosphere that’s difficult for humans to imagine without the always evolving visual culture of screens and graphic design that Manovich discusses. In all, the topic of media and new media mainly surrounds the constant technological advancement that allows humans to share and communicate hordes of information more conveniently. Whatever is most convenient, simple, and interactive, while also remaining detailed and informative will continue to be at the forefront of the new media scene.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

“New Media” is any format of sharing and receiving communication, whether it be factual information, storytelling, advertisement, or other communications, that is translated or created through some hardware or device. The “new” aspect comes from the ability of that information to be adapted and customized for the individual. Older media, like books, early photography, and newspapers, were set in stone when they were created. While they could be mass produced, they did not change once they were made. New media, however, shares “objects,” as Manovich calls any piece of media in The Language of New Media, such as a picture, web site, or movie in in a way that is adaptable to the user (14). Examples of new media include web sites, digital photography, blogs, iPhone apps, and other sources of sharing “objects.” New media refers to the combination of the hardware used to share objects as well as the software that adapts to the user. It is not purely the Internet world of wireless clouds and wifi hotspots, it requires a hardware to support it. According to Jussi Parikka’s “The Geology of Media,” “we are more dependent than ever on the geological earth.” Recognizing the significance of the physical devices that create and share new media, like cell phones, televisions, and computers, are essential to defining the term “new media.” So, it requires a physical device and some object to share. However, it is not totally dependent on computers and similar digital devices. In New Media: A Critical Introduction, Martin Lister states that the very general term of new media is similar to what many would call “digital media,” which “is accurate as a formal description, [but] presupposes an absolute break (between analogue and digital) where we will see that none in fact exists.” New media includes all digital media, but does not exclude all analogue media, as Lister argues that much of digital media is based on analogue media (12). For example, digital photography is a new media that is based on film photography, an older media. The photograph is the object to be communicated but the way it is created and shared is through new media. To conclude, new media is a very general term that applies to the way objects are created and communicated, which is composed of the information being shared and the device that communicates it to the user.

Bibliography

Lister, Martin. New Media: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY:     Routledge, 2009. Print.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

New media is simply defined as the convergence of both computer and media technologies, allowing for all existing media after that point of convergence to be “translated into numerical data accessible for the computer”(Manovich 25).  Manovich breaks down this definition even further by stating how new media must be “described formally(mathmatically)” along with being “subject to algorithmic manipulation”(Manovich 27).  Through these developments, which allowed for old media to transition to new media, what Manovich coins as “new media objects,” which are objects that utilize mathematical sequences and numerical data in order to function, came into fruition. These new media objects, like a macbook pro for instance, are coined as new media objects because they are hardware structures that compute and analyze new media. A great example of new media is hypermedia—which is a type of new media that allows the “users the ability to create, manipulate, and examine a network of information containing nodes interconnected by relational links”(Halasz and Schwartz 30), a great example of which is the World Wide Web. With this in mind, comparative to old media, which is analog based hardware, new media can be intangible like the World Wide Web. Another good example of new media is “the cloud” which serves as a data server for storage of numerical data, which nowadays consists of essentially everything from photos to music to rar. files. It’s kinda scary to think that the entire world as we know it right now is essentially composed of numerical data, especially as we continue to develop new media more and more. With that said, its not a stretch to conclude that “Earth is a communicative itself,” seeing that it provides the materials and resources that we as humans utilize to construct new media objects(Parikka 2). So maybe, by pulling all this information together, maybe the Earth is new media in the most abstract of senses. To sum it all up, new media serves as a medium for us as humans to communicate to one another via new media objects which we derive from the Earth.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. London: The MIT Press, 2007. 10-61. Print.

Frank Halasz and Mayer Schwartz, “The Dexter Hypertext Reference Model,” Communication of the ACM(New York : ACM, 1994) 30.

“New Media Definition from PC Magazine Encyclopedia.” New Media Definition from PC Magazine Encyclopedia. The Computer Language Company Inc., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

Today, when people hear the words “new media” they think digital objects. However in the 1800s, analog photography was considered new media (Manovich 21). The thing about new media is that it is new and the idea of new doesn’t usually last, therefore new media is constantly evolving. Most recently, new media can be described through numbers. Manovich claims that “all new media objects…are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations (27).” The result of these numerical representations are layers built upon each other. When a photo is put into a document, it is still and individual photo and can be altered on it’s original program. Large parts consist of smaller parts, and those smaller parts consist of even smaller parts to create the new media elements we see on a daily basis. Manovich also touches on variability. This means that new media can exist not only in one version but in infinite versions. This allows us to connect characteristics of new media that we would not usually. New media has also become the primary way of communication. People read, watch, see, and share. In The Geology of Media, it is stated that there is an “immaterial sphere of information where ideas become coded into zeroes and ones, independent of material substrate, transportable on the vague and indeterminate channel of ‘the internet.’” This sphere is dependent of the duration of the Earth and the materials we have available from this enable media technologies to function. In conclusion, though new media is constantly evolving it continues to be used as a platform to distribute other forms of media.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. London: The MIT Press, 2007. 10-61. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media”. TheAtlantic.com. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-geology-of-media/280523/

New media is difficult to describe through physical means. It is not necessarily an object but rather a process by which tasks are carried out. Media that “can be described as a mathematical function” (Manovich, 27) is categorized as being of the newer generation. An image on a computer is more than what it seems. It is a series of code generated to create the visual that we see before us. Similarly, game modders are made possible because of their ability to “build on code and design tools created for commercial games” (Jenkins, 137). New media also has a habit of coming in different layers that Manovich refers to as modularity. Smaller modules are organized in a way to create larger modules. Through modularity, automation is conceived. Automated processes are able to release different content leading to the conclusion that “human intentionality can be removed from the creative process” (Manovich, 32). This is how some computer functions are able to have artificial intelligence and think on their own to a certain degree. Going back to automated processes, I mentioned before how the content released is new. This ability to create different content instead of identical copies is what Manovich calls variability. Anything referred to as new media also must include a level of transcoding in which information is structured and organized by computed processes. This information is highly digitized and can be accessed randomly. As a result, the “mining and dumping of data” (Parikka) becomes a reality. Lastly, it is important to realize how interactive media has become. Users have an unprecedented range to give orders through new media to which it will respond back. New media encompasses a wide range of characteristics that ultimately revolve around the idea of the way new media operates.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. London: The MIT Press, 2007. 10-61. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media”. TheAtlantic.com. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-geology-of-media/280523/

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Print.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RlRVNikT06YC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=new+media&ots=9B2BmF-yPq&sig=4J0jF-SZHXXZp8cpdsenGPrA-1o#v=onepage&q=new%20media&f=false