New Media

“Today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all of our culture to computer-mediated forms or production, distribution and communication,” wrote Lev Manovich in his book titled “The Language of New Media.” He went on to discuss his two main principles of new media, which are numerical representation and modularity. With new media, we can describe everything digital mathematically and are subject to algorithmic manipulation. Also, with this digitization comes modularity – the ability for larger objects to exist, but also able to be broken down into smaller elements. Because of this, we are able to manipulate a picture or a song in ways that we couldn’t have done before. While Manovich breaks down his principles of new media very clearly, Nancy Baym outlines the effects of new media on humans and society.

One example from the second chapter of Baym’s “Personal Connections in the Digital Age” that I particularly liked was about how our lack of memory and attention span started with the creation of the alphabet. She quoted Socrates who was paraphrasing an Egyptian God saying that the discovery of the alphabet will lead people to forget what they have learned because they will rely on writing it down. Therefore, people are experiencing a false form of intelligence because their knowledge is not committed to memory. With this, I immediately thought of Google's information mine and how we don’t need to write down or remember anything because we always have the answer at our fingertips. I guess it’s fitting that Google’s parent company is Alphabet Inc.

Some may think that communication technologies allow humans a deeper level of connectivity because of their ease, reach, temporal structure, mobility, etc., however Baym examines the other side of this too. She points out that Socrates says writing provides “not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” I think this translates well to the virtual world that new media has created. If it happens online, did it really happen? There is a fine line between virtual and “IRL” (in real life), and as new media becomes more and more mainstream and becomes normal, that line gets harder to see. Baym speaks of how when a new medium is introduced we need to see what is does for us, but also how it works against us. I think the latter question is too often overlooked, and we end up in a world where our fascination of new media results in unexpected and unintended consequences.