For some reason, I found this weeks readings harder to understand than the previous ones. But I think I’ve been able to separate in my head the difference between ‘digital media’, ‘online media’ and ‘new media’.
So it is my understanding from reading Siapera’s book Understanding New Media that ‘digital media’focuses more on the logistical side of media and therefore more on the coding of something, like the words being encoded on a kindle. ‘Online media’ refers to the internet and how they connect with other media such as mobile phones. My understanding is that because ‘digital’ and ‘online media’ both have limitations in their definitions that new media was introduced as the new overarching term and ‘online’ and ‘digital media’ would stem from it. As Elaine said in her lecture by calling it new media it allows for ‘digital’ and ‘online media’ to come together instead of being exclusive terms. ‘New media’ is often online and accessible on demand which is relating to ‘online media’. ‘New media’ is often digital and encoded by binary sequence like a digital image which is referring to ‘digital media’.
Another point that Siapera raised was how ‘new media’ is always evolving. When she was talking about ‘online media’ and the immediate access we have to Youtube and websites, which made me think of how far it is developed. Years ago when it was still relatively new, everything took longer to load. There was no such thing as Netflix because it simply couldn’t handle that advancement yet. We are able to download things on demand whereas before you couldn’t do that. I think that would have driven me crazy, not being able to download or stream something straight away. In terms of digital media USB’s can now hold up to a terabyte of information and are a lot faster when downloading information then they were 10 years ago. That is due to the fact that technology is advancing and ‘new media’ is constantly evolving allowing for ‘digital and online media’ to come under the term ‘new media’ today.
I like that these terms have come together and fall under the category of ‘new media’, even though ‘digital’ and ‘online media’ are seperate they still link together and create the term ‘new media’ that we use today.
