New Media - A First Impression

The Run Down

• I graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Journalism/PR and a minor in Marketing in August of 2006.
• I worked as the production planner for a mastectomy and fashion products manufacturer in Waco for a year after graduation. http://nearlyme.org/
• I missed school and a friend had an empty bedroom in Austin, so I decided (spur of the moment...totally unlike me) to go to Texas State for grad school.
• After my first semester (Fall '07), I realized that I really didn't want to get my Master's in Mass Communication.
• I'm currently taking pre-recs for the Early Advantage MBA program at Rollins in Winter Park, FL. http://www.crummer.rollins.edu/eamba/index.shtml
• (No, this class is not a pre-rec, but it sounded like it would be fun. So, yeah.)
• I love watching most sports. My favorite teams are the Indianapolis Colts, the San Antonio Spurs, the Baylor Bears, and the Austin Toros.
• I'm an intern with the Austin Toros. I do game day operations, and I love it! http://austintoros.com/
• I hope to work in sport administration or sport marketing for a collegiate or professional sports team.

Now, new media.

I best understood the concept of new media when I read the following paragraph in the Manovich article from 1999.

"Old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual or audio
elements (or their combination) into a particular sequence. This sequence was stored in some
material, its order determined once and for all. Numerous copies could be run off from the
master, and, in perfect correspondence with the logic of an industrial society, they were all
identical. New media, in contrast, is characterized by variability."

This makes the concept more concrete to me.

I believe that I would have been able to define new media more quickly before the readings because I didn't realize at all what new media is all about. I still don't know what it's all about. But, I can tell you that new media takes ideas far beyond a simple painting, book, song, or other work of art. After reading Manovich's 2002 article I felt like I had been sitting in a math/computer/history/art class for 3 hours. But, I feel like I now understand that new media is more than, "you know, like, things that deal with the internet and stuff." I think that new media builds on the past and tries to establish a way to further spread an idea or concept.

If that makes any sense.

We should have to answer this question at the end of the semester!