What Is New Media?

What is new media? In some ways, the term "new media" is quite enigmatic. The old expression "There is nothing new under the sun" comes to mind. However, this platitude does not ring entirely true. A personal axiom is "There's nothing new under the sun save the shadow it casts over one's moving form." At one time the printing press, the brainchild of Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th Century, was considered a revolutionary new medium. This amazing marvel of engineering utilized movable type elements so diverse and numerous that the type case "is estimated to have contained around 290 separate letter boxes, most of which were required for special characters, ligatures, punctuation marks, etc." (Printing press-Wikipedia, Gutenberg's press Section). By the early 20th Century, new media was characterized first by radio and next by television. These media are now considered relatively old. Now the so-called new media encompasses online resources including social networking venues such as Facebook or MySpace and Twitter, Wikis such as the online internationally user-maintained encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and media-sharing sites such as You Tube, to name but a few. Perhaps in the most basic sense, the term "new media" is best defined in terms of its convergence with the needs addressed by so-called old media. Both old and new media spring from the same basic need—that of providing a conveyance for people's ideas, thoughts and feelings. The new media outlined above converge with the needs addressed by older media such as newspapers, radio and television, giving rise to new forms that differ primarily in their degree of interactivity. Blogs, social networking media and the like provide conveyance of ideas, but also a means of immediate response for those who receive those idas. Older media might well have invited such interactivity, but the means of conveyance for interaction was limited to the means then available, typewriters for letters sent into newspaper editors, for example. Nonetheless, despite the increased pace of interactivity provided by new media, they should not be taken as a replacement for the old, for they were inspired by old media and would not exist without them. One can therefore sum up new media as the convergence of old needs with new means of conveyence, i.e. new forms of technology that act to augment, but not replace existing forms.