Assignment 2- Reading
—What is new media?
It means of mass communication using digital technologies such as the Internet. The internet, websites games, live stream, any content observed on the computer called new media. It is interesting that the definition of new media all related to one intermediary tool：computer. So, the development of modern media and the development of computers began around the same time couldn’t surprise us, because there were necessary for modern mass societies. The history of media and computing shows that the computer becomes a media processor rather than just a calculator, communication device.
But to deeply understand new media, we need to the principles of new media. In the reading “The Language of New Media by Manovich, Lev”, from Manovich’s perspective, he looks the principles of new media as five, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and cultural transcoding. One important thing is not every new media follows those principles. As he said, the last three principles are dependent on the first two. Before that, we need to figure out where does new media come from? Some new media object are created on computers, but many new media objects are converted from various forms of old media. Manovich points out the process that put converting continuous(old media) data into a numerical representation (new media) is called digitization, so new media has discrete units rather than continuous units. Discrete units create the language of new media, parts remain parts. Modern media allows the logic of the factory, once a new film, a photograph was introduced, numerous identical media copies from this master. When we produced more and more AI projects, instead it is very hard to let us find the existing work, and this let to the next stage of new media, media database, we can share the sources and recreate them, new media is variability. The data can not only be updated, but also media makers can using different paths to making the same source of media. Instead of ousting the same adoration to audiences, the online media workers can target each individual’s version of a project, to be free to modify by each user.
Base on the reading, and related the reading to my second assignment, I am really interested in the modularity of media, because it allows for several places of online media function together efficiently yet separate as well. We are thinking use Instagram’s story as our main source, by collecting those stories for one day and add them together, I think it can show each element has to have a narrative arch, it can be watched independently, but also as a whole – people’s daily life.
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