Defining New Media

For class, this week, I read three pieces that attempt to define "new media." Silly me, I was unaware that the definition was not settled! Last week, had I been asked to define "new media" I would have said "media developed and delivered digitally."

The first piece I read was Anne Wysocki's "Opening New Media to Writing" from Writing New Media. Her definition of "new media" may be the hardest for me to wrap my head around. She argues that

we should call "new media texts" those texts those that have been made by composes who are aware of the range of materialities of texts that and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text-- like its composers and readers-- doesn't function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody (15).

In other words, "new media texts do not have to be digital: instead, any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media" (15).

I understand that, usually, writing is done in such a way as to create transparency. And generally, I find it frustrating when authors erase that transparency. When I took a class in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett a couple of years ago, I found reading those texts to be slow and tedious. We read Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. While the text was dense, and nothing much happened, the really frustrating part, for me at least, was Beckett's choice to not arrange the text into readable chunks. In other words, the sentences were long and dense and he did not use paragraphing as a way to organize the information. I go on about this because to me, Beckett was calling attention to the materiality of the medium by defying our conventions of how texts ought to be arranged.

This does call to mind Marshall McLuhan's declaration that "The Medium is the Message"

The other pieces that I read we presented as "Perspectives on New Media: Two Introductions" in Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort's The New Media Reader. The first, Janet Murray's "Inventing the Medium" seems to define "new media" as "digital." She says:

But the term "new media" is a sign of our current confusion about where these efforts are leading and our breathlessness at the pace of change, particularly in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take bfore we see the gift for what it is-- a single new medium of representation, the digital medium (3).

Lee Manovich, though, in "New Media from Borges to HTML" explodes these definitions. Manovich lists eight definitions of "new media," each addressing different aspects, each with strengths and weaknesses. By the end of that piece, I concluded that "new media" like a lot of academic terms, is a slippery term. It is used in a number of ways. I am not sure that one, singular, "correct" definition exists. However, the usefulness of the term does not seem to be limited by this lack of agreement. This can be see by the number of people who use the term.