In his study Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric, Doug Eyman discusses this idea of “new media.” He says, it “… has been the subject of competing interpretations and definitions. Most approaches consider [it] a description of a particular kind of object (or text, using the expansive definition of that term), although there has also been some attempt to use new media as a self-reflexive term for the study of [it] objects as well.”
If you were to ask me what this idea meant in my eyes, I’d say that it is not about what the media is evolving into. However, I’d say it is defined by how it has evolved into what it is now. It is also important to note that new media does not consist of just text. It involves other mediums such as video, audio, imagery, etc.
The way these ideas have evolved plays a huge role in the way we interpret text. We view these mediums and their relationship with each other, keeping intertextuality in mind. We should be keeping in mind how the mediums of media we’re looking at relate to one another. Not to mention that we should be mindful of why we’re looking at the media. For example, asking ourselves why the author may have incorporated that image on their blog post. The world of English and Writing is constantly changing and introducing new ideas and ways to interpret what we’re reading/viewing. Thus, our learning methods and ways of understanding and processing things change with it. That’s how we grow as writers and readers.
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