LISTER -What is new in New Media

Measuring 'newness' : Change and continuity

The most obvious question that needs to be asked is:
'How do we know that something is new or in what way it is new if we have not carefully compared it with what already exists or has gone before?' 

We cannot know with any certainty and detail how new or how large changes are without giving our thinking a historical dimension. We need to establish from what previous states things have changed. 
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However, if asked, this basic question can help us guard against missing at least three possibilities: 

1 Something may appear to be new, in the sense that it looks or feels unfamiliar or because it is aggressively presented as new, but on closer inspection such newness may be revealed as only superficial. It may be that something is new only in the sense that it turns out to be a new version or configuration of something that, substantially, already exists, rather than being a completely new category or kind of thing. Alternatively, how can we know that a medium is new, rather than a hybrid of two or more older media or an old one in a new context which in some ways transforms it? 

2 Conversely, as the newness of new media becomes familiar in everyday use or consumption we may lose our curiosity and vigilance, ceasing to ask questions about exactly what they do and how they are being used to change our worlds in subtle as well as dramatic ways. 

3 A final possibility that this simple question can uncover is that on close inspection and reflection, initial estimates of novelty can turn out not to be as they seem. We find that some kinds and degrees of novelty exist but not in the ways that they were initially thought to. The history of what is meant by the new media buzzword 'interactivity' is a prime example of the way a much-lauded quality of new media has been repeatedly qualified Case and revised through critical examination. 

The overall point is that the 'critical' in the critical study of new media means not taking things for granted.
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Old media in new times?

For instance, it can be argued that 'digital television' is not a new medium but is best understood as a change in the form of delivering the contents of the TV medium, which has a history of some fifty years or more. 

This would be a case of what Mackay and O'Sullivan describe as an 'old' medium 'in new times' as distinct from a 'new medium' (1999: 4-5). On the other hand, immersive virtual reality or massively multi-player online gaming look to be, at least at first sight, mediums of a radically and profoundly new kind. This, however, still leaves us with the problem of defining what is truly new about them. 

Before we accept this 'new/old' axis as a principle for distinguishing between kinds of new media, we have to recognise immediately that the terms can, to some extent, be reversed. 

• For instance, it can be argued that some of the outcomes of producing and transmitting TV digitally have had quite profound effects upon its programming and modes of use and consumption such that the medium of TV has significantly changed. It could also be claimed that the increased image size, high definition, programmes on demand, interactive choice etc., of contemporary television effectively transforms the medium. Whether we would want to go as far as saying that it will be an entirely new medium still seems unlikely, if not impossible.
• On the other hand, the apparently unprecedented experiences offered by the technologies of immersive VR or online, interactive, multimedia can be shown to have histories and antecedents, both of a technological and a cultural kind, upon which they draw and depend (1.2,1.3). Whether, in these cases, however, we would want to go as far as saying that therefore VR is adequately defined by tracing and describing its many practical and ideological antecedents is another matter.

The idea of 'remediation' 
A third possibility is that put forward by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) who, following an insight of Marshall McLuhan, effectively tie new media to old media as a structural condition of all media. 

They propose and argue at some length that the 'new', in turn, in new media is the manner in which the digital technologies that they employ 'refashion older media', and then these older media 'refashion themselves to answer to the challenges of new media'(p. 15). 

It seems to us that there is an unassailable truth in this formulation. This is that new media are not born in a vacuum and, as media, would have no resources to draw upon if they were not in touch and negotiating with the long traditions of process, purpose, and signification that older media possess. Yet, having said this, many questions about the nature and extent of the transformations taking place remain. 


Martin Lister / Jon Dovey / Seth Giddings / lain Grant / Kieran Kelly: New Media: a critical introduction, Routledge, 200