What is New Media???

Lev Monavich

Let me first say this, I have never heard of the term "New Media" until I read the book The New Media Reader. Apparently the new media has something to do with internet and society. Well, I am a computer scientist, born with a keyboard in my hand. Anything to do with internet is within my grasp, yet this term has never made it to me. After reading New Media from Borges to HTML by Lev Manovich (one of the author of The New Media Reader), it seem that I have missed something important.

Manovich talks about the new media by listing the following eight propositions:
-  not cyberculture
-  distribution platform
-  digital data
-  mix between culture and software
-  aesthetics that accompanies the early stage of every new modern media and communication technology
-  faster execution of algorithms
-  metamedia
-  parallel articulation of similar ideas of post WWII Art and modern computing

After reading all this, I think to myself, "and?". Sure, Monavich can come up with all this stuff and talk about it for many pages. I just don't see the point of coining the term and go on so long about it. It does not seem to concern me, a  hardcore computer scientist. Maybe I am just pessimistic or tired of reading such a useless long article that holds no new information for me. Maybe it is for Art community as some people mentioned. Maybe there is actually someone who can use this stuff out there. But I for one, do not salvage anything from reading it.

People who kind of agree with me. They know their stuff, yet does not really care:


On an unrelated note: I have also read "From A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They try to describe the Rhizome. What I get out of it is, the idea of something being connected to other things. In the end it is all connected. I guess it is a structure reference. Like the internet per say, one website in connected to other website and those connect to others, and so on.