Coming to terms with the fact that, yes, I am falling for new media

Hi everyone. I'm Maira Garcia. I graduated from Texas State this past December with a BA in print journalism and political science. Currently, I am the editor in chief of The University Star, which explains why I post stuff at 3 a.m. I also work with MTV's Choose or Lose campaign creating multimedia on youth and the 2008 elections for think.mtv.com, which is very exciting. Check out my Think profile and see my latest video. It just got featured on the front page.

Anyway, I felt I didn't have enough real-world experience to jump into a career after graduation, so I decided graduate school would be a good thing to pursue because I am interested in research, learning more about mass communication and honing my skills overall so I can be competitive in the job market. Considering all these things, I realized how important it is for mass communicators to understand new media, especially those in the print field. Until recently, I thought print journalism was the avenue I wanted to pursue, but I know the industry is changing and not know what new media and how to use it could hurt my chances of being a successful journalist.

So finally, my definition of new media is simply written media as we know it, digitized and "glammed up" for faster processing and reception. I felt Dennis Baron's examination of writing techonology explained it best. Writing techonologies and attitudes toward them change over time, with each new techonology becoming more acceptable and desired than the previous. The pencil is to the telegraph as the telephone is to the television and the television to the computer. We are trying to accomplish the same purpose with each technology, receiving information. It's just one does it faster and perhaps better than the one before it.

What's most fascinating about new media to me is, as Manovich states, is the variability. Variability also indicates it can be customized to a person's taste, which is what Web 2.0 has afforded us. Not only are we able to receive information when we want it, but how we want it as well.