New Media, New Aesthetics

Defining Characteristics of "New Media" and "Information Technology"

• For the purposes of this class, new media . . .
  1. Are created by and/or communicated through a computer and related information technologies
     • I.e., a digital  medium as opposed to older media which are analog
     • Difference between "technology" and "media"
       • Technology is the machinery, the equipment, the wiring (the hardware) and the programs necessary to run it (the software)
       • Media are phenomena that use hardware/software to present information, narrative, propaganda, etc. to a user
  2. Have the potential to alter the position of the spectator (i.e., the reader/viewer/listener or the "subject"). Obviously, not all new media do this.
     • Some new media require subjects who pull information toward them rather than have it pushed toward them.
     • Interactivity: the subject interacts with the medium and alters it according to his/her needs, desires, whims
  3. Have erased the difference between the original and the copy
     • Calls into question the notion of authenticity
       • Permits identical copies of something to exist in more than one place at a time.
     • Threatens the laws of intellectual property (i.e., copyright)
     • How does it change our notion of the text, of, say, an artwork?
  4. Have--through computer networking--revolutionized the distribution of texts.

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Although new media take many forms, we'll use the World Wide Web and computer-mediated communication (CMC) as our test cases.

Contextualizing These New Media

What do they share (in, perhaps, modified form) with older media?

1. Print Media: Books, Periodicals (magazines and newspapers) and Still Photography
   • The use of words to entertain, provide information, convince/propagandize
     • The Web's content is still predominantly communicated through text
   • Periodicals
     • The combination of text and static (not moving) images
     • Page design and layout of new media are heavily indebted to principles of composition from print publications
   • Photography
     • Digital photography incorporates many of the technologies of analog photography (e.g., lenses), but revolutionizes the darkroom process
     • Still, photographic aesthetic principles remain largely the same
   • Books
     • 19th century novel provides one basic structure for narrative
       • Roland Barthes's Hermeneutic code
       • Narrative structure can be traced even further back through long tradition of story-telling
2. The Cinema
   • Moving image
     • Based on succession of still frames and persistence of motion
   • Editing
     • The displacement or juxtaposition of one image by another
     • Achieved, e.g., through hypertext linking--one Web screen replacing another
3. Broadcast Television and Video
   • Computer monitor uses same technology as TV/video monitor
     • Bits of light (pixels) are illuminated by an electron gun
     • Illusion of movement comes from refreshing of still images