New Media Theory

Social Integration Approach (cont.)

Becomes more habitual and take on values that are larger than media use itself.

Permits something that looks like interaction, but is not similar to actual face-to-face presence.

Creates computer simulations of presence.

There is a high level of interaction, but with the computer, not with specific individuals.

This idea is supported by Media-Equation Theory, which suggests that we treat media like people and interact with media as if they were persons.

e.g. This explains why your computer may seem to have a personality, why you talk to your computer, why you appreciate what it does for you, and even get angry at it when it 'misbehaves.'

EXAMPLES AND APPLICATIONS

DIGITALIZATION AND CONVERGENCE

Thank you for listening and may God bless us all.

Digital technologies that take advantage of computers and the Internet have led to products and services that provide information or entertainment. Social media, blogs, video games and online news outlets are typically referred to as “new media.”

• The historicism of a digital age is founded upon the promise of interoperability between all forms of media that rely on digital code. As digital formats for storing and circulating information become a basic standard that ranges across computing, media, and telecommunications, a digital ontology is seen to be the basis for a monomedia world.

Social Integration Approach

MEDIUM THEORY TO THE SECOND MEDIA AGE

• Although many of McLuhan's observations about media globalization (the global village) and convergence (the relationship between mediums) have established some of the grounds for new media research, the media revolution that inspires the contemporary concerns of new media theory can be found in the investigation of a second electronic media age based on interactivity.

Social Integration Approach characterizes media not in terms of information, interaction, or dissemination, but in terms of ritual, or how people use media as a way of creating community.

Broadcast-Oriented Media (Old Media)

• Media such as television and books, produce situations and characteristics with which audiences can identify. Allows little interaction, other than controlling a remote or deciding what to read.

New Media

• Used as a shared ritual that makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

Who is Pierre Levy?

Second Media Age

Ritual Theory

Who is Mark Poster?

The idea of the book began in the 1980s

By the end of the 1990s, the second media age had become something of an orthodoxy that underpinned new media theory and the development of Internet studies and cyberstudies. New media theory turned much of its attention to the ontology of digital media as the defining characteristic that would come to supplant the historicism of a second media age.

Mark Poster was Professor Emeritus of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he also taught in the Critical Theory Emphasis.

The idea of the book began in the 1980s

Pierre Levy is a French philosopher, cultural theorist and media scholar who specializes in the understanding of the cultural and cognitive implications of digital technologies and the phenomenon of human collective intelligence.

2001

- Became famous for his book 'Cyberculture'

He sees the World Wide Web as an open, flexible, and dynamic information environment, which allows human beings to develop a new orientation to knowledge and thereby engage in a more interactive, community-based, democratic world of mutual sharing and empowerment.

A second line of critique of digitalization and convergence as central to new media theory has been cultivated within ritual approaches to communication. The ritual approach offers an explanation as to why television and even newspapers and books have not declined in the face of the above trends.

Pierre Levy

1990

• Published "The Second Media Age" book
• Heralded a new period in which interactive technologies and network communications, particularly the Internet, would transform society.
• The idea of the book began in the 1980s, which introduced important changes in media theory.

Mark Poster

(Jul. 5, 1941 - Oct. 10, 2012)

HENRY JENKINS

First Media Age vs. Second Media Age

For Jenkins, in his book Convergence Culture, the interoperability of new media provides much more active participation in media. He argues that whereas old consumers of media were more isolated, new consumers of convergent media are more socially connected because they can upload their own content and choose from a much wider array of fragmented information, including being able to choose between corporate media and grassroots media.

First Media Age (Dominance of Broadcast)

• Centralized production (one-to-many)
• One-way communication
• State control, for the most part
• Reproduction of social stratification and inequality through the media
• Fragmented mass audiences
• Shaping of social consciousness

The New Media Theory

New media typically has at least one of the following characteristics:

Social Interaction Approach

LEV MANOVICH

The idea of the book began in the 1980s

Second Media Age (Dominance of Networks)

• Decentralized
• Two-way communication
• Beyond State control
• Democratizing
• Promoting individual consciousness
• Individually oriented

That new media studies has earned a place as a branch of communication theory also rests on claims that traditional media environments have been challenged not simply by technological innovations, but at an ecological level, consisting of substantial, qualitative changes rather than incremental developments to media environments.

• Interactivity or "many-to-many" communication
• Any individual with the appropriate technology can now produce his or her online media and include images, text, and sound about whatever he or she chooses.
• Digitization
• Convergence
• Use of network/Internet technology

Social Interaction Approach distinguishes media in terms of how close they come to the model of face-to-face interaction.

Broadcast-Oriented Media (Old Media)

• Emphasized transmission of information, no interaction. Primarily as informational, therefore mediate reality for the consumer.

New Media

• More interactive and creates a sense of personalized communication.

Dr. Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture.

New Media Theory

Here are some of the examples:

What is New Media?

Digital Games

Online Newspapers

Although the practice of theorizing new media has a history as long as communication studies itself, the turn to new media theory has only formalized itself since the 1990s. The accelerated diffusion of digital media from telecommunications and information technology sectors in the 1990s has led media and communication studies to be defined by new objects of investigation. New forms of media demand exploration in their own right at the same time as the remediation of traditional media becomes open to investigation.

Virtual Reality

New media is communication technologies that enable or facilitate user-to-user interactivity and interactivity between user and information.

Social Media

Blogs

All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations. This fact has two key consequences:

1. A new media object can be described formally (mathematically). For instance, an image or a shape can be described using a mathematical function.

2. A new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation. For instance, by applying appropriate algorithms, we can automatically remove “noise” from a photograph, improve its contrast, locate the edges of the shapes, or change its proportions. In short, media becomes programmable.

New Media Theory

Group 7