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.