New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century.This is the first sentence I found when searching ‘What is new media?’. Like most of us I was faced with a lot of information in one compact sentence. So I decided to break it down and research the terms found in this definition, in hopes of understanding it as a whole.
The first term I wanted to fully understand was media. The word ‘media’ is the plural form of ‘Medium’ which is what we as people use to communicate our ideas or any sort of information. Radios, televisions, newspapers, these are all forms of mass media. Mass media is section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a [province].
Other sorts of media can be, paper, a canvas, a billboard or a stop sign.
Now what are digital, computerized and networked information? Digital representations are discrete, the information represented can be either discrete, such as numbers, letters or icons, or continuous, such as sounds, images, and other measurements of continuous systems.
A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.
A computer network is a group of interconnected computers.
The last term I need to define is communication technologies. According to my sources Information and communication technologies (ICT) is an umbrella term that covers all advanced technologies in manipulating and communicating information.
“Old” media are things such as newspapers and magazines that communicate many things to other people, such as ideas, information and art. New media does the same thing, using a different medium. These media’s include websites, blogs, DVD’s and digital cameras.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_media
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_network
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_technology
7 http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/new_media.html
It is good that you listed your sources but make sure you put quotes inside quotation marks and reference them right in the text itself. It is also good that you attempted a synthesis in your response. I would like to see you think more about the implications of the qualities of new media. Does it really do the same thing as old media in a different way? Or is there something fundamentally different about new media? If so, what is that?