The Advent of New Media has Changed Our Horizons

"We are in the middle of a New Media revolution. All of our culture is being transferred to computer mediated forms of production, distribution and communication. " - (Manovich, pg 43)

What is New Media compared to "old" Media? The original intent of computers, invented by Babbage and Turing, was to perform mathematical calculations. About the time that computers were being invented, photography and cameras had also been founded. Cinematography and moving pictures soon followed. When Babbage was inventing his first computing machine, called an Analytical Engine, a man named J.M. Jacquard invented a loom which was controlled by punch Cards. The loomed weaved detailed figures and portraits. Images were already being synthesized by a programmable machine even before computers were put to work on mathematical calculations.

Ironically the first digital computer, created by Konrad Zuse was run by a program on a punched tape of a discarded movie film. Half of a century later all existing media such as images became transferable into numerical data making it possible to create digital images, movies, etc and New Media was born.

New Media is modular, meaning it is made up of many different pieces that can put put together to build something. The modularity combined with the numerical calculating can eliminate humans from the computing, making automation possible. Web sites are automatically generated "on the fly" using templates and scripts to assemble and format information from databases. High level automation, or artificial Intelligence has made it possible for users to interact with programs such as computer games.

In Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media he said "The Internet, which can be thought of as one huge distributed media database, also crystallized the basic condition of the new information society: over-abundance of information of all kind." There was so much media created it became hard to sift through it all to find what you wanted. Organizing, categorizing and tagging is an important part of New Media for search-ability.

Other important parts of New Media are variability, the ability to reproduce media in different versions, and Hypermedia - linking media together. Transcoding is another part of New Media. Transcoding is translating something into another format.

New media has revolutionized our culture. Old media such as still photography and printing presses were run by humans. Now we can have computers do many tasks for us without even thinking about them. Our culture is changing and becoming computerized by all the New Media available to us.