What Is New Media and Why Should You Care?
As a consumer of content and media, there’s value in knowing the theory behind it.
“What is new media? We may begin answering this question by listing the categories which are commonly discussed under this topic in popular press: Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and DVD, virtual reality. Is this all new media is?” — Lev Manovich
When dipping a toe into the world of media theory, my first realization was that this discipline goes back a lot farther than I expected. I really didn’t imagine that the term “new media” would relate to theorists who started analyzing media as far back as the early 1900s. I’m going to talk about a whole bunch of well-known media theorists and break down their very long academic papers on the subject.
Lev Manovich wrote a book called The Language of New Media. One chapter asks a very simple question; what is new media?
My biggest takeaway from reading his work is that “new media” really isn’t that “new.” He looks as far back as Charles Babbage’s incomplete Analytical Engine in 1833 and Konrad Zuse’s first working digital computer assembled in his parents’ apartment’s living room in 1936 as the birth of new media. These early predecessors to the modern computer are truly quite old.
