What is New Media?

In the present age and time, we hear about expressions like "connected world," "web society," "cyber community," and so on. According to van Dijk these buzz words stand to contradict the notions of "individualization, social fragmentation, independence and freedom" (1). However, on a closer observation it seems that individualization and integration are part of the same reality-- New Media. According to Manovich, new media can be understood as a computer revolution that "affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution"(19). This in turn influence the ways different types of media operate, such as "texts, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions" (19).

Furthering Manovich's notion of new media, we can look at the structure of new media as a process of convergence of three different types of communications-- telecommunications, data communications, and mass communications. This idea of convergence further leads to another characteristic feature of new media: digitization. Manovich refers to this as "numerical representation" defined as a set of discrete data that are sampled and quantified (28).

Based on the attribute of digitization, new media offers a new level of interaction. The interaction in new media is chronoptic, to borrow Bakhtin's term, i.e. situated in time and space. It enables multilateral communication through teleconferencing, VOIP, Internet telephony, and so on. On the other hand tools like e-mail offers the possibility of communicating asynchronously; this is the time dimension of the new media.

These and many other attributes (not discussed here) of new media posit two fundemental questions: Who controls new media? And To what extent we should balance our learning in terms of technology and tools of technology? At the turn of this new millenia when new media is defined in terms of integration, interactivity, and digitization, how can we resolve these issues power and knowledge.