When thinking about what’s better between ‘new’ and ‘old’ it all really falls down to perspective. Like a movie, for example. Nowadays people are re-making movies or creating a longer story of it (putting a 2 and so on after the title (which, let’s be honest, it didn’t need)), or making a show out of old video games. More often than not, people prefer the older versions. The Star Wars series is one of the best showings of this. Trust that it’s better to stay far away from those arguments. “New media” then becomes a hard definition to track down because there isn’t one clear interpretation. Doug Eyman in his work “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric”, tries to find it by comparing it to Digital Rhetoric. But it begs the question: is there a line that stops media from being ‘new’ or ‘digital’?
I mentioned it before when talking about a continuation of a story, but that can be a form of Digital Literacy. Starting from a solid form. Knowing everything about it to then create a new form of media from it. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are who bring up this idea. New media is created by old media. Which to me, immediately makes me think of film. A book to a movie or a video game to a show. Unfortunately, without a doubt, changes are always made during that process. Now, that doesn’t really sound like Digital Literacy. It sounds like ego–I mean, it sounds like Digital Rhetoric. Out of place yet still somehow just in line with the original story.
Other authors bring up different definitions of what new media could be. Ideas like hypermediacy where new media involves videos and sounds, or that it only relies on computer data. Anne Wysocki however brings up something interesting. New media doesn’t have to be digital. It could simply be emphasizing a medium’s material or physical qualities. It brought the idea of books up to me, or text in general. Book covers emphasize the material that will be in the book by pictures or vague symbols making the reader become more interested to open it and start reading. Or, if we think about it another way, I can bring up braille. Braille was created to help people who are visually impaired read, and that can not be transferred into digital books. The feeling of those dots emphasize a letter that a person can then read.
So, new and old. Story as old as time…mind the pun. The importance of new media is in the name. It’s creating something advanced and well, new. While a lot of people are still on the side of old, the process of adapting, and building on older ideas is just as much about understanding the original as it is about creating something new. Like anything else, though, everyone has their own perspective, which makes defining “new media” feel almost impossible. And if that is what it comes down to, then so be it. I don’t need more of a headache trying to figure out how the process works of people butchering–oops sorry, I mean creating a new version of something old.
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