Defining New Media

Hi, my name is Cherie Rivero. I graduated from UT Austin last May with a B.S. in radio-television-film and this is my second semester at Texas State. I have been fascinated with the Internet and new media since I was a thirteen year old girl talking to my little girlfriends on AOL's instant messaging system. Since then I've been fascinated with the web and the social aspect of chatrooms, instant messaging and now the social networking sites. I, like some of my colleagues, also feel that studying new media will give us a leg up in any career that we choose, because it is the future of communications. My definition of new media is the cutting edge technology that is being thought of at this very moment. The definition of new media is constantly changing because there will always be something new in technology and especially in this time of rapidly changing technology, new media is redefined everyday. Lev Manovich says that new media are characterized by variability. New media are the applications used in our digital world today with many choices, tailored to our every need, as opposed to the analog applications made for homogeneous audiences. The concept that I saw in most of the articles was the change from analog to digital, pencils to pixles, atoms to bits. This is the overarching theme of new media and its definition. Today the new medium is the digital world that we are living in.