Just What Is "New Media," Anyway?

 
"New Media" is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days.  But what exactly do we mean when we refer to "new media"?

Many definitions, each with a different focus, have been offered in recent years, and I'll summarize a few of them below (emphasis in all of the quotes below is mine):

EVERETT E. DENNIS & JAMES ASH
--"When the study was initiated the term was most commonly associated with New Media was 'convergence,' meaning the uniting of all forms of communication into one, as well as the integration of various media industries -- publishing, broadcasting, and telecommunication -- into a single amalgamated enterprise.  Thus New Media's definition was a blurred mix of media functions, content, and business arrangements marked by little agreement" (27).
--"When asked the most accurate way to describe their own New Media business, the executives preferred 'multi-media,' meaning a mix of cable, Internet, and broadcasting, rather than more singular users of the Internet" (28).
--"If anything, there was a reluctance to name specific individuals in a field 'where collaboration and even plagiarism is the rule,' as one respondent put it" (30).
--"Integration of useful content linked to specific audiences with great precision thanks to digitalization is a clear theme in New Media's future" (31).

KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY
--"immediate, direct, and substantive" (739)
--"More generally, however... the medium is suggestive rather than deterministic.  The virtues of the digital outlined here are more potential than realized, but this articulation demonstrates potential for a new identity, one not fully determined by medium, but possible within and through it" (753)

MARY E. HOCKS
--Interactive digital texts can blend words and visuals, talk and text, and authors and audiences in ways that are recognizably postmodern" (630).
--"help audiences take more conscious responsibility for making meaning out of the text.  Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium.  How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience's need for linearity and other familiar forms" (633).
--"In a space where multifaceted identities can be constructed, experienced, and even performed, this experience of hybridity works to the audience's advantage by increasing the experience of pleasure through identification and multiplicity" (643).
--"The beauty of hypertext is…that it propels us from the straightened 'either/or' world that print has come to represent and into a universe where the 'and/and/and' is always possible" (653).

(will all of our desks look like this one day?  maybe so, at the rate New Media is growing.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4braham/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It seems, then, that there are certain values inherent in New Media and its near-ubiquitous presence in our modern lives:

-- blending of separate "traditional" media, thus blurring the lines between them

-- audience segmentation

-- new definitions of authorship and intellectual property

-- immediacy and easy access

-- hybridity and multiplicity

-- a greater awareness of our own identities

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the last one.  I think many people are less self-aware in the New Media age because they use things like the Internet to disassociate and escape from their everyday lives.  There are also reports that people are more narcissistic than they were before the effects of the Internet permeated into many aspects of our existence.

However, I don't think all hope is lost here.  New Media can, as Hocks suggests, help us to become more aware of how we construct our identities, provided that we pay close attention to how and why we choose to use New Media.  Like anything else, New Media is what you make of it.

I look forward to learning more about New Media and its psychological ramifications, both through my own experiences and by reading the theories postulated by others.

As always, feel free to share you thoughts by posting a comment.

Works Cited:

Dennis, Everett E., and James Ash. “Towards a Taxonomy of New Media: Management Views of an Evolving Industry.” International Journal on Media Management 3.1 (2001): 26-32.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Visual Writing Environments.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): 629-656.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 738-761.

When Words Fail You: The Impact of Images

While much of the information we take in during the course of a day is driven by text (and, indeed, schools are placing more emphasis on their writing programs these days), it's important to also analyze how information can be conveyed through images.  Images can take the form of illustrations, photographs, icons, navigational aids/"wayfinders", symbols, charts, and graphs.  Images can be particularly useful from a usability standpoint, since, if presented and created properly, they can quickly communicate ideas and serve as supplement to, or even replace, words.  The power of images to take the place of words will be my focus for this particular blog post.  Specifically, I will give examples of effective uses of illustrations (both photographs and human-created images) and icons to convey ideas.

Illustrations

Illustrations, whether they're photographs or images created "by hand," can be an integral part of providing instruction.  They are often used to clarify or supplement the text-based directions included in the instructions.  Many "how-to" sites exist on the Web, but one that makes particularly effective use of photographic illustrations is Instructables.  According to the "About This Site" page, "Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others."  As the screenshot below suggests, you can find instructions on how to create anything from Halloween costumes to computers.

(Happy Halloween, btw!  What are you going as?)

Here is an example of one of the instructions found on in the site.  It teaches you how to use a brown paper bag as wrapping paper.  Note the use of multiple images for this single step.

(Hooray for saving money!)

Illustrations can also be used in other contexts, and even if they serve as decoration, they can still be informative.  Consider this example, found on the "Customization" page for Mozilla Firefox.

(My computer wishes it could look like that.)

Note how a complete list of Firefox themes and extensions is not offered on this page.  That would probably be an overwhelming amount of information for the casual browser of the page.  Rather, the illustration of the computer give the viewer an idea of the kinds of features can can add to Firefox, while also serving as decoration for this particular page.  For example, the remote control coming out of the computer suggests that you can add multimedia functionality to Firefox, and the bullhorn is meant to convey the idea that you can enhance Firefox so that you can use it to receive important updates and alerts from your favorite sites.

Icons

Icons, like photographs and artistic illustrations, can be powerful communication tools.  Many designers have realized this, and, as a result, icons are found in just about every medium, including catalogs, websites, blogs (like this one!), computer desktops, and mobile phones.  If well designed with a target audience in mind, they can be particularly useful navigation aids.  Because they serve people from various cultural backgrounds, hospitals are one type of location that relies on icons to help patients and visitors make their way through often-confusing building layouts.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sponsored studies that resulted in the publication of a guidebook "designed for health care facilities and graphic designers interested in learning about and using newly developed health care symbols for wayfinding programs," which is also available online.  As mentioned in the document's executive summary, "Universal symbols can be flexible and simple to implement, yet

can be integrated into complex and far reaching sign, print, and internet programs."

Here are some images from the guidebook (page 1:6).  Can you guess what they stand for?

(OK: the last one's probably pretty easy.)

Here are the answers (from left to right):

-- Top Row: Surgery, Billing Department, Intensive Care Unit, Family Practice Clinic, Social Services

-- Second Row: Cardiology, Radiology, OB Clinic, Immunizations, Waiting Room

-- Third Row: Chapel, Ambulance Entrance, Pharmacy, Laboratory, Medical Records

-- Bottom Row: Pediatrics, Emergency

These 17 icons were "found to be 'most meaningful' by at least 88% of the tested multilingual population group"  (RJW 1:7).  During this same testing session, "participants walked one foot per second faster to find
their destination when guided by symbols than when guided by multilingual word signs" (RWJ 1:7).

I would be interested in hearing about any experiences you may have with images, be they positive or negative.  Did a particular image help you in a situation when you need a quick answer?  Or did an image confuse or mislead you at some point?