Old vs. New

As I said in my first post, new media is quickly rising from the ashes of the old. Yet perhaps this trend won’t signify the death of old media in a blaze of glory, but an opportunity for its revival by the new media allegedly setting the flames. In a NYT article entitled “Publisher Rethinks the Daily: It’s Free and Printed and Has Blogs All Over”, Claire Cain Miller writes about The Printed Blog, a Chicago startup that is attempting to revitalize newspapers by printing blogs on paper in a similar format (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/technology/start-ups/22blogpaper.html).

Lev Manovich describes five interesting though abstract criteria that may help distinguish between old and new media. They are as follows:

1.     Numerical Representation: Digital code represents the fundamental building blocks of new media. Whether it is created on a computer or processed from a real-life analog source, new media at its most basic level can be described mathematically and as function of algorithms allowing digital manipulation.

2.     Modularity: In essence, the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. Pixels, polygons, and characters are combined digitally to create something of meaning to the viewer. This allows new media to be manipulated on an unprecedentedly minute level.

3.     Automation: New media may be more easily and conveniently generated thanks to the ability of computers to use algorithms programmed by the media’s creator.

4.     Variability: New media may exist in a virtually infinite number of forms, easily tweaked digitally to serve the creator’s purpose.

5.     Transcoding: While new media is displayed in terms that humans can understand (images, text, etc), there is an underlying file structure that only makes sense to the computer reading it, creating an extra layer of complexity.

Describe New Media

Look at the last 5 people you’ve sent text messages to. Unless one of those contacts is a grandparent or a North Korean immigrant, there’s a good chance they can give you an intuitive answer as to what “New Media” is. Even without a dictionary, they will probably cite websites, CDs, computer games, or iTunes as examples. That is, they have a “gut feeling” about what new media means. Yet the distinction between old and new media may be blurrier than your North Korean friend might have imagined. In Business Week’s 2007 article entitled “Turner’s Secret Web Weapon”, the writer describes how TV executive David Levy is attempting to marry the two realms by having TV content (old media) interact with accompanying digital content (new media) that viewers can access on their laptops (http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-19/turners-secret-web-weapon). Maybe old media isn’t done after all.

In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich points out how difficult it is to draw a line between what constitutes old and new media. After all, computers are often used to process photos or ads, which are then in turn printed back onto paper. Which domain, old or new, can lay claim to such Frankensteined examples of media? Does the definition of new media rely mainly on society’s gut feeling? Trying to distinguish old from new is often enough to make Kim Jong Un’s head spin.

What is New Media?

Lev Manovich describes new media as a meta-medium of the digital computer. Similar to newspapers and news broadcasts on the radio or TV, new media is a modality of communication enabled by all things “Internet”. But CNN.com is not your daddy’s newspaper. Facebook feeds are not another channel you tune your radio dials to. As Laura Holsen points out in her NYT article entitled: “Who Needs a TV? I’m Watching on a Laptop,” cord-cutters across the country are finding new ways to access the media content they want. “Old media” is dying out, and as it burns new media is rising from the ashes. At the center of this is the Internet, which allows us to benefit from instant gratification and commercial-free viewing.

But this is not happening without consequence. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich fears that historians of the future will reflect back on their contemporary counterparts with a critical eye. While historians have always maintained an awareness of how “older cultural forms” of media shape our society, innovations in the areas of user interface and symbols have been allowed to become societal conventions and thereby become invisible to observers who have grown accustomed to seeing these elements in daily life. As this happens, our ability to understand new media itself becomes limited.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, print journalism advertisement revenue is 42% in 2012 as it was in 2003, while online ad revenue has nearly tripled. (http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-still-threatened/newspapers-by-the-numbers/). According to Business Insider, approximately 5 million people have cancelled their cable subscriptions from 2010 to the end of 2013 (http://www.businessinsider.com/cord-cutters-and-the-death-of-tv-2013-11).

Even if Manovich can’t quite figure it out, the numbers don’t lie—old media is quickly sailing off into obsolescence. 

About Me

My name is Alyson Kaufman. I am a fourth-year journalism major planning to graduate at the end of this semester. After graduation, I hope to become a magazine editor in either print or multi-media. I have chosen this course because knowledge of new media is especially pertinent to my field.