New Media

All media were once “new media”. To understand what can be considered as emergent media we have to distinguish new media from traditional media. Most technologies described as “new media” are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, net workable, compressible, interactive and, allegedly, impartial. New media is not television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity, such as graphic tags containing web-links. The main threat to traditional media will be its ability to understand, implement and embrace these new interactive tools. The Internet gives people the opportunity to share their knowledge; blogging, micro blogging, social networks and web streaming are revolutionizing the publishing world.

The abundance of personal choices in communication is slowly draining the traditional mainstream media. Communicating through traditional media, professional journalists gather and report the news they believe is newsworthy, publishing content through large corporations, “new media” alternatively enables the audience to become the media themselves. The emergence of a new medium is always the occasion for the shaping of a new community or set of communities, a new equilibrium. A new medium offers positive and negative possibilities, instances of both risk and potential. Overall “new media” is an evolution of existing practices with the objective to create and distribute content.