Cheers, my name is Shane Tyree and I am a proud father of a rambunctiously energetic 3 year old. I work full time in the advertising dept. at the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, and go to graduate school because there is nothing on TV Monday and Wednesday nights. Seriously, I started grad school because I felt it would be a catalyst to move up the corporate ladder. Up to this point, the majority of my research has been on how newspapers are converging with the Internet and its impact on the printing press.
Enough about me, lets get to the meat and potatoes.
Symbolically, new media represents change. At times it can be a slow subtle process, at other it can happen over night. In Denis Baron's essay, From Pencils to Pixels, he analyzes the evolution of the pencil to the PC. In this essay he offers a romantic notion of 'old school' and that throughout history there are always people resistant to change. People like the lead pencil club fear the unfamiliar. When the telephone was introduced it was seen as a impractical gadget for communicating long distances. Baron also points out that the original intention of most devices are not what they end up being. (Sounds like that could a universal law). The pencil was not originally intended to be tool for writers but a marking tool for woodworkers. The PC was intended for enormously boring calculations and it is now a totally rad web surfing word processor. Evolution - it is mysterious that way.
Lev Manovich had another interesting perspective on the evolution of new media. He said, "In short, media becomes new media. Here he describes how man has advanced his technological thinking over the centuries. The summation of which is the modern media computer. Manovich also compares the evolution of art and the evolution of technology. He suggest that to due culturally differences between Europeans, Americans, and Asians new media can adapt and be different cross culturally. A great example of this is how the Asian cell market is much more sophisticated than the American cell phone market. So in this rapidly changing technological world what might be new to one person might be out dated to another. He also suggest that all new media brings a certain stigma. A few examples are: new media will bring about a better democracy; it will give us a better access to the "real"; it will contribute to "the erosion of moral values"; it will destroy the natural relationship between humans and the world".
Negroponte seems to imply that new media or being digital allows a person to send and receive a signal free from errors such as static, hiss, snow, and any unwarranted noise in general. This seamless reality sounds sounds like it is not too far in the distant future. I just hope it is cheap to install.
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"He suggest that to due culturally differences between Europeans, Americans, and Asians new media can adapt and be different cross culturally. A great example of this is how the Asian cell market is much more sophisticated than the American cell phone market."
This is the stuff that really grabs me as an anthropologist. :-)
Another great example is how cell phones are used in parts of Africa. They are used as mobile banking by some of the African poor, or as device to help the !Kung track wildlife.
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