New Media

            Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media explores what exactly is new media and why.  In the first section of the chapter Manovich explains how we typically define new media by how it is used – for distribution and exhibition, but for some reason, production is left out of this definition.  Specifically Manovich discusses digital video, I assume versus analog, and editing on computer workstations rather than reel-to-reel.  She then went into the four principals of how new media are identified: numerical representation, modularity, automation, and variability.

            They talked about how our new media revolution is so much larger than the previous ones.  So even if defining new media was simple when the term became popular, it is far more complex now, which makes it so much more difficult to define and identify what constitutes “new media.”

            My interest was definitely peaked when they were discussing the different purposes of computers and how what they are used for is sometimes a determining weather or not they are considered new media, specifically when editing on computer workstations was brought up.  The cable station were I work uses Avid editing systems, but people I know who used to volunteer there were there when they were still using reel-to-reel editing, and I always used to hear the “back when I started out….” stories.  That whole transition has a bit of different meaning to me now, because when I started going there, everything was still done on tapes, and now I’m training our volunteers on cameras which all use SD cards.  I can now in a small way understand how much easier I must have had it learning to edit, than my friends even just seven or eight years before me, because I see how much easier SD cards are compared to the tapes with very limited space and glitches in them that we were using when I started out.