Inside Old and New Medias

This week's blog post is in response to Manovich's article What Is New Media? as well as excerpts from Winston's book Media Technology and Society A History From The Telegraph to the Internet.

I have to say they were very thorough histories of all of our modern technologies and they were fascinating reads but I they seem a little dates to me. They read as if they were written at some point during the mid to late 1990s or early 2000s and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were.

These articles (and Manovich's piece in particular which is my main basis for commentary here) have a particularly interesting point of view regarding technology. For instance, Manovich's piece is meant to determine how we distinguish between "old media" and "new media" but looks at the issue from a very functional and technical perspective. Manovich essentially describes how technology has advanced in a way we interact with the technology itself. However, when most people in early 2013 are asked what distinguishes "old media" and "new media" they think about how we use it as a channel to interact with other people and less about how the technology itself functions in order to do so.

If Manovich had written his article today, his distinction between "old media" and "new media" would no doubt have to be modified to discuss how the flow of information and content is controlled. "Old media" such as print, radio, television and land line telephones were little more than one way conduits of information that we took in very passively and didn't use to contact others. "New media" today such as mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook) and other corners of the internet such as YouTube, message boards and even blogging sites just like this one (basically, for better or worse, anything with a comments section) encourage much more active consumption.

Nowadays, anyone can post pretty much whatever content they may want anywhere on the internet in any medium and anyone else who sees it can post a response or begin some forms of discussion. Thanks to the internet and its increasing accessibility and ease of use over the past few years, media control has been gradually shifting from the big corporations and media conglomerations to average everyday people like you and me. These articles missed out on that as they seem to have been written in a time where it wasn't really happening yet (unless I'm mistaken).