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.