Fazia's introduction and definition

Greetings everyone. My name is Fazia and here's a recap of my introduction in class last week:

I'm currently a second year graduate student in Anthropology, studying online culture and communities. I'm doing an ethnography of a small, women-only listserv that's been active since the early 1990's. I'm really interested in the online cultural spaces and communities that are created and enabled by Internet technology and new media.

The Internet has changed the trajectory of my career quite radically. I started on my undergraduate degree in 1987, intending to be a medical technologist. I was introduced to the online world in 1988 through SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) and a university student group dedicated to all things space-exploration at the University of Houston. I had a front row seat to the social impact of this communication technology when the 1991 coup happened in the Soviet Union. Getting daily email messages from the SEDS members in the USSR during such a historical event was mind boggling and since then I've had a deep interest in the social implications of this evolving technology.

I got caught up in the internet boom, doing web design and briefly working for a telecommunications company on the east coast. I eventually returned to Texas, and arrived at Texas State University-San Marcos in 1999 maintaining the university main web site as University Webmaster. I've done everything from web design to teching others how to use technology, user support, documentation and project management. I finished my bachelor's degree in 2004 while working full-time for Instructional Technologies Support (the folks that do TRACS and Blackboard.) Last week was my last day at work. I'm now in graduate school full time and working as a graduate instructional assistant.

Other interesting bits about me? I have a very mixed background - my father is from India/Pakistan and my mother is from Finland, but I was born in the U.S. and have lived most of my life in Texas. I like to do all types of needlework (cross-stitch, needlepoint, crewel, embroidery and petit point) and I spin wool into yarn on my Kromski spinning wheel. I like doing dollhouses and scale models of space ships, both real and fictional. I'm a FoodTV groupie and Alton Brown is my home boy. More about me on my personal blog.

What is my definition of new media? Well, each of the readings gave a different perspective on that definition. Negroponte described it in terms of bits versus atoms, the latter being the same thing as physical and brick-and-mortar and the former being the sort of less tangible movement of information. In his 1999 "user guide" Manovich traces the evolution of both cinema and computers and then states that "media becomes new media" when "all existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer". He "re-defines new media as parallel tendencies in modern art and computing technology after the World War II" in his 2002 essay. The essay that spoke the most to me however was Baron's (Although I loved Manovich's mention of the Jacquard loom. Maybe this is why so many technical women I know also like weaving? It's a sort of analog version of programming?) Baron traces the varies stages of technology as it pertains to writing and concludes that new media is that which is not yet taken for granted by us, "automatic and invisible". A clay tablet at one time was new media. Today it's a blog. Tomorrow?

I confess, I've used the term "new media" a few times before without really considering its definition. (I've more often used the term "new technologies".) I once spoke about "Women in New Media" at a conference, where no one else defined the term either. We talked about what women were doing in email, USENET groups, on web pages, etc. and what the technology was doing for us. It seems as if we had all already accepted that these new and exciting technologies, about which none of us were expert yet, and which seemed to have such promise, were "new media". And perhaps that's my definition for it.