What is New Media

 

We define "new media" as interactive forms of communication that use the Internet, including podcasts, RSS feeds, social networks, text messaging, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds and more!

New media makes it possible for anyone to create, modify, and share content and share it with others, using relatively simple tools that are often free or inexpensive. New media requires a computer or mobile device with Internet access.

New media tools can help you:

• CONNECT people with information and services.
• COLLABORATE with other people—including those within your organization or community.
• CREATE new content, services, communities, and channels of communication that help you deliver information and services.

Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media does not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity

,the popular understanding of new media identifies it with the use of a computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production.

Arccordingly, texts distributed on a computer (Websites and electronic books) are considered to be new media,wheares text distributed on paper are not. Similarly,photographs that are put on a CD-ROM and require a computer to be viewed are considered new media;the same photographs printed in a book are nor.Shall we accept this definition?if we want to understand the effects of computerization on culture as a whole,I think it is too limiting.There is no reason to privilege the computer as a machine for the exhibition and distribution of media over the computer as  a tool for media production or as a media storage devise.All have the same potential to change existing cultural languages.And all have the same potential to leave culture as it is.

The last scenario is unlikely,however.What is more likely is that just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revoluntionary impact on the development of modern society and culture to computer-mediated form of production,distribution,and communication.This new revolution the shift of all culture to computer forms of production,distribution,and communication,the distribution of media.Similarly,the introduction of photography affected only one type of cultural communication,still images.

In contrast, the computer media revolution affect all stages of communication,including acquisition,manipulation,storage,and distribution;it also affect all type of media,text,still images ,moving images,moving images ,sound,and spatial constructions.How shall we begin to map out the effect of fundamental shift?what are the ways in which the use of computers to record,store,create,and distribute media makes it “new”?

It is now obvious to anyone who uses a computer that intellectual exercise as basic as reading the newspaper or doing research have become fundamentally different activities largely because of the internet.So too have our views of communication in general ;yhe very notion of globalization ,so consuming in today’s world,is predicated on the ponsibilities engendered by a technology barely twnty years old.Such is the nature of “new media”.Computers,and the digital system and product for which they are currently a shorthand ,are what most of us think of when we hear the words new media.And why not ?the world of computer hardware,software,email and ebusiness is for most of us the latest communication and information frontier.