Social Media And Global Computing New Media and New Technologies

New Media For some sixty years the word ‘media’, the plural of ‘medium’, has been used as a singular collective term, as in ‘the media’ When we have studied the media we usually, and fairly safely, have had in mind ‘communication media’ and the specialized and separate institutions and organizations in which people worked: print media and the press, photography, advertising, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television), publishing, and so on. We are seeing the fragmentation of television, the blurring of boundaries (as in the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’); we have seen a shift from ‘audiences’ to ‘users’, and from ‘consumers’ to ‘producers’, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

New Media Does the term ‘audience’ mean the same as it did in the twentieth century? Are media genres and media production skills as distinct as they used to be? Is the photographic (lens based) image any longer distinct from (or usefully contrasted to) digital and computer generated imagery?

New Technology The term ‘media technologies’ emerged to capture a sense that quite rapidly from the late 1980s on, the world of media and communications began to look quite different and this difference was not restricted to any one sector or element of that world, although the actual timing of change may have been different from medium to medium. This was the case from printing, photography, through television, to telecommunications. Of course, such media had continually been in a state of technological, institutional and cultural change or development; they never stood still.

Some Defining Concepts A shift from modernity to post-modernity: a contested, but widely subscribed attempt to characterize deep and structural changes in societies and economies from the 1960s Intensifying processes of globalization: a dissolving of national states and boundaries in terms of trade, corporate organization, customs and cultures, identities and beliefs, in which new media have been seen as a contributory element. A shift from an industrial age of manufacturing by a ‘postindustrial’ information age: a shift in employment, skill, investment and profit, in the production of material goods to service and information ‘industries’ which many uses of new media are seen to epitomize. A decentralizing of established and centralized geopolitical orders: the weakening of mechanisms of power and control from states to dispersed, boundary-transgressing, networks of new communication media, and the tech companies that support them.