New media
New Media is a field of study that has developed around cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution.
New Media studies reflect on the social and ideological impact of the personal computer, computer networks, digital mobile devices, ubiquitous computing and virtual reality. The study includes researchers and propagators of new forms of artistic practices such as interactive installations, net art, software art, the subsets of interaction, interface design and the concepts of interactivity, multimedia and remediation.
New Media, in the plural, often refers to the variety of technologies and formats, (such as computer games, the World Wide Web and Virtual Reality), that have been developed over the past few decades.
"New" in this context means:
- the relative novelty of digital computing
- a belief in the computer as the future
- the unprecedented speed of evolution and mutation of devices and
technologies
- undeveloped, imperfect and experimental environments
- subjective novelty, most of the artists and theoreticians currently
studying digital culture have migrated from different disciplines.
New media are also the common denominator of such disciplines as (new) media art (from Nam June Paik to net.art), (new) media activism, (new) media studies (from Marshall McLuhan to Lev Manovich) and journalistic media criticism (from Neil Postman to Howard Rheingold).
Related books
- Remediation: Understanding New Media by J. David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Jay David Bolter
- The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich
- The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media by Peter Lunenfeld (Editor)
- The New Media Reader by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Editor), Nick Montfort (Editor)
- Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality by Randall Packer (Editor), Ken Jordan (Editor)
- When Old Technologies Were New (link to worldcat) by Carolyn Marvin, 1988
- New Media 1740-1915 (link to worldcat) Gitelman & Pingree (Editors), 2003
Online Articles
- Art, Power, and Communication by Alexei Shulgin (1996)
- Three Threats to the Survival of New Media by Jon Ippolito (2005)de:Neue Medien