Week 4: New Media
Text: Siapera, E. 2013, Understanding New Media. SAGE Publications, London (Section: pp.1-16).
This week in Networked Media we’ve focused on new media, social media and the web.
New media has possibly been THE most confusing term I’ve encountered this semester (but we’re only in week 4, so there is still time).This maybe because it’s less of a definition and more of a guiding philosophy to analysing the relationship between technological innovations and communication practices.
Nevertheless, we crack on. As i understand, new media is just a better way of understanding media that involves modern technologies – rather than using exclusive implications that surround ‘digital media’ or ‘online media’
Elaine painted us a pretty good picture in the lecture:
New media is a plant growing inside a jar, social media is a root growing off that plant and Instagram is the leaves starting to grow off that root.
How it works:
Social media is a product of new media, and Instagram is a product of social media and all of them are products of the jar and heavily dependent on the size of the jar, which restricts how big each element can get, how much it thrives and the nutrients and water provided.
New media is new in three main ways:
1. Sometimes digital
2. Sometimes online – accessible, consumed faster
3. Always evolving – dependant on new technologies and different devices
A loose definition:
I’m going off cambridge’s definition that new media are products and services that provide information and entertainment using technology (such as computers and internet) and not through traditional methods. In the reading this week Siapera defines new media as the ‘convergence between the computational logic characteristic of computers and the communicative logic characteristic of the media” (2012, p.5). This is what makes new media so unique and why ‘digital’ or ‘online’ media are too exclusive.
In other words, by using the term ‘new media’, we can more accurately focus our attention on how media (both technologically and communicatively) change in relation to each other.
Is social media new media?
New media is a big umbrella term and there is a lot going on under it, but as i understand, social media is an offshoot of new media. I think of social media is a super refined version of web 2.0. Web 2.0 is characterised by internet platforms and changes in software that allowed users to become part of a participatory culture and produce user generated content within different online communities.
But web 2.0 is most easily understood in relation to web 1.0 which was characterised by the use of the internet in ways that were too technically inaccessible for everyday people.
Instagram:
Instagram is a social platform that has been optimised (by continuous updates in software technology) to facilitate maximum communication between users. Elaine noted that ‘Web 2.0 prioritises democratisation of content production’, and Instagram is providing a platform that allows anyone with a smartphone and the app to take photos, edit them, upload them and use hashtags to fall into different streams of user generated content that attract other like minded users (in the same way chat rooms used to do).
But now as social media becomes increasingly more commercially viable for advertisers and marketers, social media is becoming away for data analysts to understand our patterns and uses of the internet and social media before feeding it back to us in the forms of tailored advertising, optimised search content and more. So what may seem like a simple ‘like’ to support your friend who is doing us all a favour and picking up rubbish off the beach during time off, is actually going back to facebook and all the third parties who buy their content to then sell that ‘like’ back to you so that bamboo toothbrush companies can sell them too you.
And don’t get me wrong, with this example it all seems well and good, but this process can stir some serious questions about privacy, as well as facilitate radicalisation of views by feeding people more and more content that agrees with their views and target them through confirmation bias.
And I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, so in 20 or so years I’d love to see what new media can be used to define and what issues around social media have been uncovered.