Intro and New Media

Hi everyone,

I graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor's in Advertising from UT Austin with a concentration in Advanced Media. After working a little bit in a few agencies as a Media Planner, I switched sides from planning advertising placements to evaluating advertising campaigns. It was exciting to not have to hold responsibility for the advertising itself, but instead - I got to tell them if it wasn't all that good, why it wasn't all that good, and I had numbers to prove I was right and they were wrong :)

I was transferred from the Austin office to the New York office where I was one of 5 team members responsible for training all US offices on how to design, execute, and analyze online advertising research. But as I climbed ranks, the corporate lifestyle began to wear on me heavily and I realized that I loved the actual teaching and training more than anything. So, here I am, in grad school and hope to start my PhD shortly after I graduate in order to teach advertising at the college level.

When discussing new media, Manovich focuses on the technology and how the old forms of media morphed to create new forms. Negroponte discusses turning physical materials into digital ones and Baron believes that new media is a natural re-invention of the oldest forms of communication. They all make sense and are logical. Older forms of media, like the telephone and the earliest computers, were about making life easier for those that demanded it. Scientists and mathematicians needed a way to quickly solve complicated calculations while society needed an easier way to send and receive communications quickly. Of course there was hesitation and resistance to these things as people at the time had no idea what to expect and it meant drastic changes in the ways things had commonly been done for decades.

While I do see new media as still finding better and faster ways to create convenience and efficiency for users, I also see it as society's demand to gain control. Media today is all about the consumer, or end user. How can this device or feature or software let you have what you want, when you want it, and how you want it? I also agree with Manovich when he describes that the newer forms of media provide people with the ability to be unique and different from others. If your technology isn't customizable, than the consumer will find the competitor's version that is. Instead of the days of older media where society was at the mercy of whatever was available or provided, new media finds ways of combining old media, making it faster, making it easier to use, and giving the user as much control as possible over what they can do.