Howdy Issues in New Media

Greetings to everyone, my name is Scott Barrus. I graduated from Texas State in the Fall of 2005 with a degree in Mass Communication (Advertising), with a minor in Business Administration. I began my graduate studies exactly one year ago, spring of 2007. This is my first blog as well, so this is kind of new to me. Ever since I can remember, there has been a Apple computer in my parent’s household. I would always shy away from using the dreaded PC throughout middle and high school. CNET is my homepage, so therefore I am a tech geek, and have too many new gadgets to name (Palm Centro is my newest acquisition, my first smart phone, highly recommend getting one to stay organized). I’m an avid sports fan (SA Spurs, Houston Rockets). I wish to take my knowledge of the media to a major sports team and work in the communications department.

I like Manovich’s explanation of Old Media and New Media in his article “New Media: A User’s Guide”. Old media is manually assembled, whilst new media is stored digitally. To me, new media is an advanced medium for information that is highly customizable, interactive, unique, and engaging. The Internet lends it’s expertise in helping media become much more user friendly and innovative. It is not the “dry” medium like television or the newspaper, it is a medium sparked by the ever-changing Internet. New media sort of reinvents the wheel sort to say, in that it takes much older mediums and combines it with faster growing innovations. I really liked his quote, “What ten years ago was a cultural underground became an established academic and artistic field; what has emerged from on the ground interactions of individual players has solidified, matured, and acquired institutional forms.” This to me sums up what new media is and has become. The parallelism of computing and technology has created a virtual gumbo of possibilities, one of them being new media.