I must dive into a term contested within digital writing communities. This time, “new media.” Thus, with reluctance, we’re back to talking about Doug Eyman again.
As it turns out, much discourse relating to digital spaces revolves around definitions. Namely, trying to figure out what the fuck things mean. This is hardly new territory for me, as several of my previous blog posts can prove. Eyman spent time explaining the conflicts over what “new media” entails. Fair enough. Popular and actual meanings for concepts do tend to differ. Going back to my internal link, “digital” really means “discrete values” and not “this one is the computer and this one isn’t.”
Citing Lev Manovich, Eyman lists five tenets that media must meet to become “new.” A couple of them go into a nitty-gritty that probably isn’t so relatable to most. When I think about the late 1990s multimedia explosion, I don’t think, “Oh, yeah, Windows 95 sure did numerically represent the fuck out of people’s MIDI files.” However, modularity and variability are fair tenets, for example. Isn’t it wild how old iPods can hold data much newer than itself? That’s because our current ecosystem of files exhibit a massive capability for swapping in and out.
But that’s not the only list Eyman gives us.
Packer and Jordan made their own. Eyman admits that this list is in relation to “new media” in their form as objects. He even goes onto admit that both lists assume digital housing. That said, the latter list intrigues me personally, so there. When I think about that multimedia explosion, I do think about how neat it is that multiple forms integrate into one another. Web spaces have allowed for simultaneous play of musical and visual forms to create unique emotions and messages. Forms that we have now are interactive, immersive, non-linear, and so on.
It’s surreal that this status quo of digital rhetoric is pretty old. Considering how bodies of authority have challenged it over the years, it still feels like we’re just getting used to it.
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