New Media✅

The New Media

  • Refers to the screen-based, digital technology involving the integration of images, text and sound, and to the technology used for the distribution and consumption of the new digitised media content which has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

  • These include computers, tablets, smartphones and the internet, electronic e-books, CDs, DVDs and mp3, emails, blogs, interactive video games etc.

  • Digital cable and satellite TV now offer hundreds of channels, and consumers can customise television viewing to their own individual tastes.

  • While the traditional or ‘old’ media involve different devices for different media content - like printed format for books, newspapers and magazines, radios and mp3 players to listen to music etc - the new media technology often involves technological convergence.

  • This is where a single device combines various media technologies.

  • For example, the latest media technology, such as smartphones and tablets, like the iPad, enable users, on a single device, to make phone calls, read books, send texts and emails, take photos, play music, surf the internet, watch films, and hundreds of other applications.

  • Likewise, business and advertisers are able to communicate with millions of people at the same time through a single device.

  • Livingstone and Bovill suggest such converging screen technologies may be contributing to the blurring of boundaries between traditionally distinct activities such as gaining or searching for information, education, working and playing games and other forms of entertainment, as people constantly switch between these different activities, or combine them at the same time.

  • Jenkins argues that the process of technological convergence, bringing together multiple media in the same device, has led to a much more significant process of cultural convergence.

  • Where consumers are encouraged to seek out and share new information and make connections between dispersed contents from a range of media, which the new technology makes much easier than it ever was in the past.

Features of the New Media

The features of the new media discussed below also outline their main differences from the traditional media. Lister et al suggest what distinguishes the ‘new’ from traditional forms of (mass) media are 5 main concepts - digitality, interactivity, hypertextuality, dispersal, and virtuality.

  • Digitality

Essentially means ‘using computers’, where all data (text, sound and pictures) are converted into numbers (binary code), which can then be stored, distributed and picked up via screen-based products, like mobile phones, DVDs, digital TVs and computers.

  • Interactivity

Consumers have an opportunity to engage or interact with a variety of media, and, because of convergence, to do this at the same time, creating their own material, customising media to take their own wishes, with much greater choice compared with the passive consumption and ‘take it or leave it’ features of the traditional media.

Jenkins suggests this interactivity has led to: Participatory culture, where once the media was divided into the two separate roles of editors and journalists who produced media content, and passive audiences who consumed it, producers and consumes now interact with each other.

Collective intelligence, using the new media has become a collective process, with interactivity creating a ‘buzz’ between users. Jenkins points out that ‘none of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills’. He calls this collective intelligence, and suggests this is a new source of media power

  • Hypertextuality

This refers to the links which form a web of connections to other bits of information, which give users a way of searching, interacting with and customising the media for their own use.

  • Dispersal

The way the new media have become less centralised, more adapted to individual choices, with a huge growth of media products of all kinds, which have become a part of everyday life. The routine use of the internet for information, shopping, entertainment, email, laptop, TV, networking etc all show how the media have penetrated into the fabric of everyday life. The production of media content itself is now becoming more generally dispersed throughout the population, rather than restricted to media professionals. For example, people are now making their own views and posting them on the internet.

  • Virtuality

Refers to the various ways people can now immerse themselves in wholly unreal interactive experiences in virtual worlds created by new technology (as in computer games), and also create for themselves imaginary identities in online communication and networking sites, like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.